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The aim of this paper is to investigate how the distinction between contact and non‐contact activities influences the design of service delivery systems and to identify key design decisions for structuring front office and back office work.

Building on current literature, the paper identifies three design decisions and associated performance trade‐offs. The design decisions regard the degree of customer contact in the process, the decoupling of activities and the grouping of employees. The design decisions and the trade‐offs are empirically validated in five case studies of 15 service delivery systems in the financial services sector.

Distinguishing between the three design decisions is more suitable for describing today's practices than traditional front office – back office thinking. For each design decision a trade‐off was observed consisting of several design considerations. However, the trade‐offs do not involve the weighing of one set of performance objectives against another, as the design choices contribute to the same objectives, yet in different ways.

This study concentrated on a limited number of cases in the financial services sector. The contents of the trade‐offs should be tested on a larger scale and in different industries. In order to develop design guidelines, future research should also examine the impact of contingency factors, such as the service being delivered and strategic priorities.

The three design decisions and the trade‐offs improve understanding of the impact of customer contact on a service organisation and provide support for designing service delivery systems in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how back-office service staff cope with the intricacies of administrative work.

The paper applies the research approach of “at-home ethnography” in a university back-office. The primary method of data collection was participant listening in the field, either in formal interviews or casual conversations. Photography helped the authors to zoom the conversation in to specific artefacts in administrative offices.

The study identifies both forward- and backward-looking recipes as essential administrative tools that back-office staff develop and use to handle intricacies that emerge in their daily work. Forward-looking recipes are based on anticipatory cognitive representations, whereas backward-looking recipes are based on experiential wisdom. The study elaborates on the different kinds of modelling practices that back-office service staff engage in while building and applying these two different kinds of recipes.

The recipes support administrators in knowledge replication and thus help avoid interruptions, reduce uncertainty, and produce consistency in administrative processes.

In contrast to existing studies of formal bureaucracies, the study provides a unique empirical account to show how back-office service staff cope with the multiple intricacies existing in current office environments. The study shows how recipes as models contribute to stabilizing or even routinizing work processes in complex administrative situations.

Today we are in an “information society”. Live information is strategic both for the customer and the portfolio manager. This means that the best way to fight against risk is to act and react very quickly. This way of thinking leads to short‐term planning process. This paper presents the place of portfolio management in the short‐term planning process in France. Today, portfolio management is greatly influenced by institutional organisation and new technologies. New competences are needed, new competitors and new strategies appear (for bankers) and generate a new organisation of this industry as a whole.

Mass customization (MC) is a well-established strategy for providing high levels of customization while achieving the scale economies of high volume production. The purpose of this paper is to explore a new service design configuration, the “mid office,” as a service interface which may support front office customization capabilities while protecting the back office from disruption. The authors posit that it may facilitate MC by enabling product/service and organizational modularity.

The research is based on a single case study of a large European bank’s payment services, traditionally high volume, low variety operations. The bank adopted a MC strategy which involved the creation of a mid office. The analysis spans product/service and organizational design.

When combined with menu-driven customization and reuse modularization, the mid office appears to support partial rather than full MC. It facilitates postponement of customization to the assembly stage through service coproduction, organizational decoupling, and the streamlining of employee adaptive behaviors.

The study bears the limitations typical of case study research; however this was appropriate given the exploratory nature of the research into a nascent concept.

The paper identifies a series of design decisions to enable practitioners to choose between full and partial service MC, ensuring design coherence through a mirror effect of service modularity and organizational modularity.

It is argued that the mid office is a service interface which facilitates partial MC by enabling service and organizational modularity. The paper reinterprets the archetypes of full and partial MC in service terms, and proposes a contingent approach to service MC implementation based on service value.

Tests the effectiveness of three different types of service company employees as advertising spokespersons in an experiment involving print advertisements for a bank and a hotel. Reveals that front‐office employees functioned best as print advertising spokespersons and that CEOs were adequate and back‐office employees were least effective.

The purpose of the paper is to describe ambidextrous learning in organizations within the customer order-based context (COBC), here based on a dynamic view of work processes. The study focuses on how organizations can learn while working with customer orders, considering learning in organizations as both a process and an outcome.

This conceptual article focuses on learning in the COBC, where the individual customer requirements represent a key input into the organization’s work processes, thus limiting the possibilities to plan and standardize. The COBC brings about challenges and potentials for learning in organizations where task variety and complexity are high and in which the contradictory interplay between efficiency and responsiveness is apparent not only at a strategic level but also at an operative level in the customer order fulfillment processes. Depending on the variations in tasks and parallel complex work processes between different units in the organization, the ambidextrous learning dynamic can appear in the COBC.

Five propositions were made from the analysis: Proposition 1: Learning in the COBC can occur both in real-time but also in retrospect and with sporadic and recurrent interventions. Proposition 2: Learning in the COBC can occur for, as well as from, customer order processes. Proposition 3: Learning in the COBC varies and will depend on the delivery strategy. Proposition 4: Learning can be stimulated by the variation in priorities among customer orders in the COBC because the work characteristics for the back office and front office differ between customer order fulfillment processes. Proposition 5: Learning in the COBC can occur both within the back office and front office but also between these organizational units. The paper discusses the importance of building learning infrastructure in COBC and how that can be supported by a suggested learning office.

The present study demonstrates the importance of functions being able to act both as back office and front office in relation to delivery strategy. It also shows the ambidextrous learning process for the sake of improving both the internal efficiency and external effectiveness across the organization.

Statistical process control (SPC) can be applied to service processes, but the framework and methods may deviate from applications in industry. This was investigated in several pilot projects covering a range of service processes. Three main issues emerged. First, in addition to the traditional distinction in back office and front office processes, the customer process is leading in achieving control and improvement of service quality. Second, process diagnosis of service processes from back office to customer may reveal quality problems. Finally, measurements in front office and customer processes are needed to control these processes. From current practice and literature, it is not evident which types of measurements are adequate to provide prompt feedback to front office personnel. Introduces a framework for measurements, which suggests the type of measurement depending on the type of service process, whether it is the front office or customer process, and the type of quality characteristic in Kano’s model (must be, the more the better or delighting). Uses practical examples from the pilot projects to illustrate the issues.

The purpose of this paper is to present a visualization method developed as a result of an observed need to capture the organizational arrangements of a complex engineering service enterprise. The focal case study is between a public sector client and private sector provider where multiple organizations contribute resource to create value. This visualization can assist client and provider stakeholders to take a holistic perspective of the purpose and management of their enterprise, highlighting the complexity of value co‐creation in service enterprises and the interdependencies between organizational units.

Development of the Enterprise Image has drawn on research within the service, organizational and individual cognition literatures. Data were obtained from an in‐depth Defence sector case study representing diverse interactions within client and provider communities. The case focused on a fast‐jet aircraft availability contract, where the public sector client outsourced through‐life support activities to a set of private sector providers. Preliminary testing of the validity and utility of the image was conducted by presentations to single and mixed communities of clients and providers involved in value co‐creation.

The paper proposes a method of pictorially representing a complex alliance, called an “Enterprise Image”. The work provides empirically based insight into the management processes of a complex, multi‐organizational service enterprise, where little or no enterprise level management had been in evidence. The Enterprise Image appeared to have the effect of raising questions and conversations about how the overall enterprise might be managed and how ongoing service improvement might be achieved.

In this research the Enterprise Image was drawn by researchers – ongoing research aims to design a method that helps clients and providers co‐create their own Enterprise Image. From current findings the implication of this research will be to encourage enterprise management of ongoing improvement in multi‐organisational service enterprises.

Models and representations for understanding the delivery of value are mostly provider and product focused, despite the recognition in a servitised environment of the complex interactions with client organizations. This paper presents a methodology for visually representing value co‐creation in complex service enterprises where the service includes significant client resource involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how information and communication technology (ICT) is affecting and driving changes in the service processes and customer interfaces of capital goods manufacturers.

The research is focused on intra‐ and inter‐organizational relationships, i.e. between front office and back office and between provider and customer. Two market‐leading, international manufacturing firms were selected for in‐depth case studies.

By means of ICT systems and applications, it is becoming increasingly possible to replace tasks through an integration of processes between organizational units, either between front office and back office or between front office and customer. Closer technical integration between provider and customer can be a basis for more advanced and extensive offerings. In bundled offerings, not only one but a number of service production process interfaces become important.

As the local service organizations in three Western European countries have been studied, the general applicability of the findings may be limited.

The results of this study stress the importance of developing capabilities to manage several process interfaces simultaneously. Furthermore, an important message is that firms must balance the interplay between process automation and personal interactions when delivering industrial services.

ICT systems are becoming more critical for the provision of industrial services. This paper provides an insight into how technology enables new service processes.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the origins of today's new office concepts, focusing on the emergence of mobile and flexible working practices in the 1960s and 1970s. Thereby it intends to add a sense of historical awareness to the ongoing debate about the work environment.

The historical description is based on literature study, looking at research reports, design handbooks and depictions of office life in popular culture such as movies and advertisements.

The paper demonstrates that today's “new ways of working” are by no means new. It shows that the concepts of mobile offices, paperless offices, videoconferencing and flexible workplaces all originate from the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. It also shows that these concepts were far from mainstream, standing in stark contrast to the rigidity and conservatism of everyday office life at the time.

This paper is the first result of a larger historical analysis of the recent history of the work environment. Further historical research will add to the presented insight in the evolution of office concepts.

The paper's insight into the historical development of office concepts can help workplace strategists to make better, more careful forecasts of future workplace trends.

Whereas most literature on the office concept tends to look at novel ideas and future developments, this paper looks back at the recent past. It discusses early workplace experiments that have been largely ignored, or remained unidentified, in much of the discourse on new ways of working.