Business Processes Design for Service Customization

This chapter draws on the methodology for e-service customization presented in chapter 5 and presents a modeling approach for realizing the service customization strategies. The described models are a combination of object-oriented business process and task models, and of fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) that represent the interrelationships between business process performance and service customization. The modeling approach breaks down business process(es) and e-services components into customization activities and components respectively, and associates their performance indicators with customization strategic objectives. This chapter describes the concepts and models that are developed in each step in order to capture the strategic factors, service characteristics, process tasks and data entities, which are assumed in the customization process, and outlines the advantages of the modeling approach.

Banking Services Case Study

This chapter is a step by step application of the customization methodology of Chapter 6 to an e-banking scenario. It exemplifies the proposed approach for service customization using a case study of loan management services and focuses on the generation of customized services, the analysis of their impact, and the resulting process redesign initiatives. The case study illustrates the steps of the approach by considering customization, the impact of the customization scenarios on service, business process structure, and data entities levels. This case study highlights the benefits of fuzzy logic in modeling and manipulating qualitative, subjective, and contradicting concepts.

Health Services Case Study

This chapter presents a service customization case study from the health sector that follows the modeling approaches presented in Chapters 5 and 6. The case study analyses the process of a patient’s admittance to a hospital. The chapter describes the factors that reflect all stakeholder views that are related to health care service design and discusses in details how these factors constitute the health service design domain. The chapter continues with the definition of the Service-Process-Data matrix, which represents the interrelationships among all factors that constitute the modeled domain, reflecting the strategic, service, process, and e-service levels of abstraction. Several service customization scenarios are discussed in detail, highlighting the potential for the patient and their impact on the business.

Conclusions

This chapter begins with a comprehensive list of factors that can drive customization, all of which are linked to the elusive concept of customer perceived quality of a service. Mass customization of products has proven to be one of the most important paradigms of the 20th century’s economies. This chapter argues that the powerhouse of the 21st century will be not physical product mass customization but masses of cheaply and easily customizable e-services, and attempts to predict how all service models and customization paradigms and technologies that are just emerging (social and semantic Web, Internet of Things and others) are going to contribute to the trend for e-service customization. Finally, the chapter compiles a list of “dos’ and ‘don’ts” of e-service customization, and argues that e-service customization is not an end-goal but a means to deliver services that meet the consumers’ quality expectations and the providers’ goals and objectives.

Service Customization Strategies

This chapter discusses several frameworks from the literature, which address the complex interactions between IT and business in service design. It then introduces a methodology that advocates the development of a conceptual network that interrelates concepts from the business and IT domains at strategic, business process, and technological level, to achieve strategic alignment between customization strategies, business processes and e-services customization. This methodological framework supports the identification of e-services, opportunities analysis, and strategy formulation. It also engages in its steps managers, employees, and IT experts. This chapter describes the objectives and the steps of the methodology in detail and explains how individual customer views can be accommodated in deriving customized services. It illustrates how strategic customization objectives are assessed in terms of their impact on business and technological factors and how they are translated into service proposals.

E-Service Customization

This chapter investigates the service customization process from a consumer perspective. The consumer perspective of customization can be defined as all the concepts, models, processes, and theories concerned with consumer knowledge, information, behavior, and psychological traits relevant to service customization. E-service customization is difficult to implement because of the difficulty of getting reliable information from the customers. Customization is a complex decision process that is affected by environmental, behavioral, and psychological factors. This chapter discusses techniques such as capturing consumer information in profiles, cognitive processes involved in service customization, etc. It discusses the types of e-service consumers, approaches, and technologies for customer profiling such as fuzzy logic and (Web) data mining. It also refers to psychological and cognitive theories and models that study the e-service consumer behavior such as the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the satisficing principle, and others.

E-Service Customization

This chapter discusses service customization from the perspective of service providers. It explains the role of service quality in customization. This chapter defines service quality and discusses several service quality models such as Servqual, Grönroos’ Model, the e-SQ Model, and others, that provide the foundation for measuring service quality and for specifying the critical factors that should be taken into consideration when seeking opportunities for service customization. This chapter concludes with a discussion of service quality in specific industry sectors, namely e-banking, e-health, e-procurement, and education (e-learning).

E-Service Composition

This chapter discusses Web environments that allow users to compose services in a visual manner, without the need to write programs. This is similar to the concept of visual programming. Visual service composition can potentially make service customization by end users a possibility. By empowering users to create their customized e-services, businesses can save a tremendous amount of resources in customization effort, and, at the same time, improve user satisfaction. This chapter discusses approaches for e-service composition and service discovery, the related concepts of service orchestration and choreography, and the technologies, languages, and tools involved during composition such as semantic service composition and ontologies, mashups, and environments such as Yahoo pipes. It concludes with a systematic overview of the functionality of consumer driven service composition tools and to propose a list of basic requirements for such tools.

Technologies for E-Service Customization

This chapter analyzes the technologies that underpin organizational processes for customization and personalization. It discusses enterprise systems such as customer relationship management systems (CRM) that can assist service customization, as well as components of such systems, such as recommender tools. This chapter also introduces technologies for web adaptation, i.e. approaches that automatically or semi-automatically, that create different versions of the web site for each user, or for each different user group, by customizing web content, navigation, and presentation. Recommender systems are used to help people identifying interesting products or services when the complexity and quantity of the choices is too vast for users to consider all the possibilities. This chapter covers technologies such as content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, fuzzy workflow process Management Systems, eCRM, tracking and clickstream analysis, and others.

Case Studies in Customization of E-Health Services

This chapter discusses existing service customization projects in the health sector. It first defines e-health and compiles a list of personal health management applications that range from those that provide access to electronic health records and health information, to community interaction and social media environments, and finally to decision support tools for disease management. It presents examples of e-health services that have adopted customization/ personalization techniques as the means to provide better service, such as those from the National Health System (NHS) in the UK, and online portals such as Healthspace, DiasNet, and others. This chapter concludes with the presentation of a framework for acceptance of personalized e-health services by patients and citizens.