Gopikrishna Vasista Tatapudi and Mohammed Ahmed Turki AlSudairi
goals. There are two e‐service goals that are closely associated with each other:( i) to develop e‐services that are usable and( ii) to develop e‐services that are relevant to the user( Karlsson 2012).
Management of new service design and development has become an important competitive concern in many service industries. Technology is changing the way services are designed and delivered in the process of establishing customer‐supplier relationship, which is the basis for service supply chains( Menor, Tatikonda and Sampson, 2002). Customer service is a key component of a firm’ s value proposition and a fundamental driver of differentiation and competitive advantage in every industry( Brohman et. al., 2009). Further, Brohman et. al.( 2009) have proposed a new design theory for service systems that goes beyond the limitations of traditional CRM approaches and thus forms a basis to provide a solution to gap. It is a design theory that moves the Network based Customer Service Systems design and development beyond firm‐centricity enabling organisations to define customer value holistically.‘ ET3’ attribute of Plomp and Pals( 1989)’ s definition of intervention of technology, supports this view at the upper abstraction level( Luppicini 2005). New design theory relies on Service‐Dominant Logic. The importance of the notion of process completeness is emphasized to describe the degree to which a firm’ s service delivery workflow can match to full range of needs specified by customers( p. 411). It is a capability of the firm that is able to orchestrate the fulfillment of global expectations cutting across service boundaries to achieve process completeness based on one or combinations of four strategies viz., transaction, process, alliance and agility. Their proposed architectural design reflects the adoption of Service Oriented Architecture consisting of service‐provider, service requester and service facilitator components. Their naming convention called‘ Broker’( p. 417) is what can be called as‘ Service Facilitator’ component. A broker is a common mechanism for handling the match of appropriate resources to fulfill a client’ s requirements( p. 420). Lovelock( 1983) has given a service classification scheme in which no differentiation is made between customer contact during service specification and customer contact during service fulfillment( de Vries 2003, p. 57). Service specification process in front office forms the link between service marketing and service production. Hence their integration is seen as a strategic activity( de Vries, 2003 p. 58). Recent computer science literature recognizes that, in order for computer applications to become more customer‐driven, there is a need to examine the translation of specifications from business domain to service domain under system’ s perspective( Brohman et. al. 2009) with interaction facility.
Dynamic bundling concept reflects this strategy as a form of design strategy by dynamically packaging services based on matching customer service specifications in terms of pricing and other personal specifications mentioned during interactions( Luppicini 2005). Dynamic packaging encompasses the automated recombination of complementary depending on marketing mix rules and general business rules( Brohman et. al. 2009). Our service facilitator is a component in the service holistic system that executes agility strategy by performing the search and evaluation systems in terms of identification of suitable offers to be bundled to match customer specifications. For this purpose design and development of broker interface, adoption of SOA architecture and Business Process Management( BPM), data warehouses and data mining or business intelligence( BI) techniques( Brohman et. al. 2009) service delivery orchestrator( SDO), semantic capability( semantic web services / SWS) and cloud computing( CC) environment is what can be suggested. Complexities associated with government work procedures have always been barriers to easy access of government services for citizens and other stakeholders. However government portals envelop the size and intricacies of government department dependencies, representing government‐on‐line in many ways. They allow for all kinds of self‐services, from searching for information to services involving complex transactions like e‐filing of income tax. The same portal can also serve as a convenient platform for providing new business permits, uploading or downloading tenders, bidding for government auctions or promoting businesses to government( B2G) transactions. Precisely government portals offer an opportunity to reorient services around the needs of the citizens while consolidating back office responsibilities( Bhattacharya, Gulla and Gupta, 2012).
7. Conclusions
Lovelock et al.( 1998) service quality gap model seems to have potential to adopt as an e‐governance service quality model for deriving benchmarking factors to assess and measure government performance. This is because the model is covering the management aspects, the service quality aspects, the citizen or customer perceptions, their expectations and experiences towards service delivery. Dealing with these aspects has a match with the basic understanding of the derived e‐governance concept( Vasista 2012). Lovelock Model is mentioned because it focuses on customer contacts during service fulfillment and do not differentiate it against customer contact for service specification( de Vries, 2003 p. 56 & 57, UvA‐DARE) Rigorous research
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