National University of Singapore

Service Systems Innovation

The Service Systems Innovation Research group focuses on the interplay of people, technology, and organizational practices to deliver enhanced services. The motivation for this theme of research arises from the realization that services account for an increasing proportion of the world economy and are becoming the dominant engine of growth for businesses, governments, and society. This holds true for Singapore and the Asia Pacific region as well, where services constitute greater than 60% of GDP in the more developed countries. The group’s research is centered on the study of service systems, which are dynamic value co-creation configurations of resources. The objectives are to develop models and frameworks that improve understanding and provide indications to practitioners on how to manage and engineer service systems to solve problems, exploit opportunities, and create service innovations. Key themes include:

• IT-enabled Service Innovation (e.g., eGovernment, eLearning)
• Service Evaluation and Maturity
• Service Value Networks
• Sourcing Business & IT services

IT-Enabled Service Innovation 
With the emergence of service economies worldwide and the increasing "servitization" of production firms, the need for research on service innovation (the process through which services are designed, produced or enhanced) grows. Yet, with the existing discourse on service innovation dominated by the discipline of marketing, there is a paucity of research on the role of Information Technology (IT) in service innovation even as IT underpins the most significant innovations in service organizations today. Using case studies and surveys of successful Singapore organizations (with success in service innovation), we aim to examine the facilitating role of IT in the various phases of the process of service transformation and innovation. In doing so, it is hoped that the outcome of this project can complement the existing marketing perspective on service innovation, contributing to a more complete view, and provide indications to practitioners on the use of IT to enhance the way new and existing services are developed or enhanced.

Service Evaluation and Maturity  
As companies compete on an expanded global playing field in areas such as hospitality and tourism, logistics and transportation, wholesale and retail, education, and healthcare, their success will stem from the ability to produce innovative and highly valued services. The challenges for companies will be in raising their service level capabilities, becoming more systematic in achieving service innovation, and extending their global reach in order to export service excellence. Therefore, it is critical for organizations to assess their service performance and know their strengths and weaknesses in either worldwide or local competition. With the above motivation, this study aims to develop models of service adoption and performance. The performance assessment consists of a collection of dimensions that describe the development of services in an organization. This provides a way to measure how well organizations can improve their service processes, how well they can  innovate and scale services up, and thus aim to enhance revenue and profit margins.  

Service Value Networks  
Organizations today are increasingly moving from traditional supply chains to value networks. Organizational performance is often determined by these value networks, at the same time managing these networks of relationships is far more complicated than managing a hierarchical supply chain. Coordinating activities among the member firms is an important aspect of managing value networks. Coordination in the value network calls for access to timely and relevant information. In other words, it is important to achieve information visibility or transparency in the value network. Our research focuses on identifying ways of achieving value network transparency, more specifically on how to effectively use IS to achieve transparency in the value network and the consequences of value network transparency.

Sourcing Business and IT Services  

Fostered by the spread of the Internet and the globalization, organizations now regularly source business and information technology (IT) services such as software development/maintenance, systems upgrade, and customer relationship management from service providers located in countries such as India, Philippines, China, and Eastern Europe. Global sourcing of service requires a tremendous amount of management of business, political, legal, workforce, cultural, logistical, and infrastructure risks. Our research will study the role of contract design in managing outsourcing relationships, the assessment of outsourcing risks, and the intellectual asset protection and sharing in outsourcing. Further topics include the data privacy and information security issues, the organizations’ risk mitigating strategies, and IT policy and legal compliance competence of service providers in global sourcing.

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