Intelligent service machine

• Authors: Wei-Fung Tung;Soe-Tsyr Yuan
• Venue: Communications of the ACM
• Year: 2010

Introduction The service sector is becoming increasingly important to the economies of many countries, especially developed countries. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently released its report Promoting Innovation in Services, which noted that government policy in developed countries has not been attuned to the service sector. For better satisfying the needs of customers, providers now attempt to add or create value through services. To unravel the changing worldview of marketing, a new dominant logic is service-centered model of exchange (such as intangibles, competences, dynamics, exchange processes and relationships, and operant resources) in 21st century. In many leading companies, services are more than half of the company's revenue, and usually the fastest growing part, for example, IBM, GE, Xerox, and GM. Whereas the two paradoxes dominate the future of competition in services---customers face choices that yield less satisfaction, while managers face more strategic options that yield less value. They argue that the traditional system of company centered value creation needs to be re-examined. Meanwhile, a service can be regarded as a service system (composed of subsystems/components) and service innovation is to co-create the service productivity and satisfaction. Spohrer indicated that service systems are complex adaptive systems made up of people and people are complex and adaptive themselves, which are dynamic and open rather than simple and optimized. Therefore, facilitating the development of service systems for value co-operation is crucial to the fulfillment of service innovation. A traditional service industry generally adopts the physical medium in co-producing service systems, while the emerging service industry is increasingly exerting the electronic medium4 so as to raise service productivity. As a consequence, the competitive position of a service company now depends much on its ability to use technologies to co-create the service productivity and satisfaction through innovative electronic delivery channels. In this paper, we suggest the notion of intelligent service machine to provide service companies with a systematic and quantitative capability on designing service systems aiming for both service productivity and satisfaction (in analogy to the machine metaphor in the manufacturing era). Furthermore, we propose a construct model of intelligent service machine, followed by a machine-aware service-system design framework (named iDesign) and an ex-emplifier of intelligent service machine (named mDesignStorming).