SERVICE TECHNOLOGIES have radically reordered the power relationships, competitive environments, and leverageable opportunities in most industries — whether in services or manufacturing. In the process, they are obliterating long-held precepts about management itself and creating entirely new strategic, organizational, and control system options for achieving competitive advantage. What are some of the more important management insights from our research?
- Contrary to much popular dogma, well-managed service technologies can simultaneously deliver both lowest cost outputs and maximum personalization and customization for customers.
- In accomplishing this, enterprises generally obtain strategic advantage not through traditional economies of scale, but through focusing on the smallest activity or cost units that can be efficiently measured and replicated — and then cloning and mixing these units across as wide a geographical and applications range as possible.
- Instead of the dehumanization often experienced in other realms, well-implemented service automation actually increases the independence and value of lower level jobs. At the same time, such automation empowers contact people to be much more responsive to customer needs.
- Such systems, when well implemented, frequently drive organizations toward entirely new conceptual configurations. These may assume “inverted pyramid,” “infinitely flat,” or “spider’s web” characteristics in order to deliver outputs most effectively and flexibly to a widely distributed customer base.
- In the process, they often disintermediate costly organizational bureaucracies, dramatically lower overhead costs, support rapid execution of strategies, and substantially increase... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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