Blended human-technology service realities in healthcare

PurposeThe healthcare sector is experiencing a major paradigm shift toward a people-centered approach. The key issue with transitioning to a people-centered approach is a lack of understanding of the ever-increasing role of technology in blended human-technology healthcare interactions and the impacts on healthcare actors' well-being. The purpose of the paper is to identify the key mechanisms and influencing factors through which blended service realities affect engaged actors' well-being in a healthcare context.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper takes a human-centric perspective and a value co-creation lens and uses theory synthesis and adaptation to investigate blended human-technology service realities in healthcare services.FindingsThe authors conceptualize three blended human-technology service realities – human-dominant, balanced and technology-dominant – and identify two key mechanisms – shared control and emotional-social and cognitive complexity – and three influencing factors – meaningful human-technology experiences, agency and DART (dialogue, access, risk, transparency) – that affect the well-being outcome of engaged actors in these blended human-technology service realities.Practical implicationsManagerially, the framework provides a useful tool for the design and management of blended human-technology realities. The paper explains how healthcare services should pay attention to management and interventions of different services realities and their impact on engaged actors. Blended human-technology reality examples – telehealth, virtual reality (VR) and service robots in healthcare – are used to support and contextualize the study’s conceptual work. A future research agenda is provided.Originality/valueThis study contributes to service literature by developing a new conceptual framework that underpins the mechanisms and factors that influence the relationships between blended human-technology service realities and engaged actors' well-being.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the Self-Reliant and Localized Economy

Innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) are two closely related words that go hand in hand in this era. Innovation is about applying creativity for different engineering/technology/service problems and producing unique solutions, while entrepreneurship is about applying the same to bring ideas to life by making them feasible to work. It is also about doing the business work. In this chapter, the authors review how innovation and entrepreneurship help create a self-reliant and localized economy. The chapter also looks at the importance of introducing entrepreneurship and innovation to an academic curriculum. By this approach, universities can reduce the gap of introducing the I&E concepts and use their synergies with the engineering technology course contents to create an innovative mindset, thereby creating a self-reliant and localized economy.

Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Embedding for Joint Crowd Flow and Transition Predictions

Crowd mobility prediction, in particular, forecasting flows at and transitions across different locations, is essential for crowd analytics and management in spacious environments featured with large gathering. We propose GAEFT, a novel crowd mobility analytics system based on the multi-task graph attention neural network to forecast crowd flows (inflows/outflows) and transitions. Specifically, we leverage the collective and sanitized campus Wi-Fi association data provided by our university information technology service and conduct a relatable case study. Our comprehensive data analysis reveals the important challenges of sparsity and skewness, as well as the complex spatio-temporal variations within the crowd mobility data. Therefore, we design a novel spatio-temporal clustering method to group Wi-Fi access points (APs) with similar transition features, and obtain more regular mobility features for model inputs. We then propose an attention-based graph embedding design to capture the correlations among the crowd flows and transitions, and jointly predict the AP-level flows as well as transitions across buildings and clusters through a multi-task formulation. Extensive experimental studies using more than 28 million association records collected during 2020-2021 academic year validate the excellent accuracy of GAEFT in forecasting dynamic and complex crowd mobility.

Commentary: the unintended consequences of digital service technologies

Purpose This commentary puts forth a conceptual framework, referred to as the consumer, organization, government framework of unintended digital technology service failures, that specifies consumer, organizational and governmental shortcomings that result in digital technologies failing in terms of negatively affecting consumer, communal, national and/or global welfare. Design/methodology/approach The authors conceptualize an original framework by engaging in a literature review regarding marketplace failures associated with digital service technologies. Findings The framework shows that three drivers explain why commercial digital technologies often fail. The first driver highlights misuse or criminal intent from individuals. The second involves organizations failing to prevent or to address technology failures. The third pertains to failures that stem from governmental institutions. Research limitations/implications The authors encourage researchers to build on their framework by putting forth research questions. To prevent or lessen opportunities for digital technologies to result in service failures, the authors also offer practitioners a “digital technology service failure audit.” This audit shows how digital technology creators and managers can anticipate and address consumer, organizational and governmental factors that often cause digital service technologies failures. Social implications Despite the absence of industry-specific regulations and the existence of some regulatory immunities, digital technology providers have an ethical duty, and may be obligated under applicable tort law principles, to take steps to prevent unintended harm to consumers before launching their service technologies. Originality/value This work reveals that digital technologies represent new and different threats to vulnerable consumers, who often rely on, but do not fully understand, these technologies in their everyday living. The framework helps consumers, organizations and government agencies to identify and remedy current and potential instances of harmful digital technologies.

Linking Customization Capability with CRM Technology Adoption and Strategic Alignment

Building on contingency theory and the input–process–output model, this paper investigates the relationships between customer relationship management (CRM) technology adoption, customization capability, CRM effectiveness, and strategic alignment. By surveying senior managers of customized service projects from 288 information technology service firms in Taiwan, we find that CRM technology adoption has a positive relationship with customization capacity, which is, in turn, positively correlated with CRM effectiveness with the correlation being moderated by strategic alignment. This study suggests that CRM marketing and operational technologies can enhance CRM effectiveness via customization capability. This study also uncovers approaches to achieving enhancement.

An Assessment of the Risk of Service Supplier Bankruptcies as a Cybersecurity Threat

Behind technology service suppliers lie companies that are subject to the risk of business failure due to market conditions and trading risks. Such failures could suddenly stop customers accessing services or content, with potentially devastating business and personal impacts, given the rising importance of digital economies. The risk can be illustrated by reference to cloud computing insolvencies but similar issues may affect other service providers. The insolvency of a cloud service provider would be likely to present problems of access to infrastructure, platforms, services and data and insolvency laws are not always designed to enable a managed closedown of a business, which would be needed to enable replacement services to be sourced and data recovered. This cybersecurity risk has barely been touched upon in literature, since it lies at the intersection between law and computer science, both areas requiring high levels of specialist understanding, and this chapter is part of initial attempts to identify the threats presented.

Research on Service Value Chain Model Based on Technology Service Platform

For the technology service platform, serving users with science and technology resources is the purpose of platform construction, and the quality of the service value chain affects the operation of the technology service platform. Aiming at the immature status of the research on the service value chain model of the technology service platform, this paper proposes a set of construction ideas based on the service value chain model of the technology service platform. The model takes the technology service platform as the central node, and at the same time integrates users, third-party technology service platforms, service resource providers in various fields and other participant nodes, and links the interests of all parties through a dynamic chain with value flow as the core. Each participant node cooperates with each other to form a complex, cross-domain service value chain model. In order to ensure the service quality of the platform, a feedback mechanism that reflects the attitude of users using scientific and technological service resources is introduced into the service value chain model. By taking the manufacturing of vertical elevators as an example, the operation of the service value chain is simulated, and the usability of the service value chain model is verified.