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The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of a user-centric service map to facilitate the visual exploration and monitoring of user context information for proactive market analysis.

The paper supports a context-based market analysis by developing a user-centric service map which comprehensively visualizes a variety of contexts, users, and services. Empirical data were gathered from service descriptions and reviews of 100 mobile application services in the Apple App Store’s lifestyle and healthcare and fitness categories.

The user-centric service map supports the analysis of the context information from using various mobile app services, and can therefore be effectively applied for market-segment analysis and user-value analysis.

The user-centric service map involves implications in terms of multi-disciplinary proactive market orientation and data-driven strategy development, allowing firms to respond to changing market conditions in the mobile business promptly and even preemptively.

The initiative uncovering of latent needs through examining context of use have been an important focus of prior work, but little attempt has been presented in the way of frameworks for converting abundant context data into strategic information. The paper provides new methods and procedures to establish and interpret service maps using flexible visual features.

This paper aims to discuss large‐scale operational aspects for network service maps and to present technical solutions and evaluation results.

The paper reviews related work on service discovery specifically for wireless networks and services in, introduces network service maps and their operation in detail and describes their implementation and addresses two specific usage scenarios, based upon which it evaluates its approach through measurements and simulations.

The paper finds that, in the presence of today's ever‐increasing WLAN services, better support for service selection and automated service configuration is an urgent need to enable people to access these new services efficiently and thus increase their value and utilisation further. This is clearly reflected in different solutions being developed by service providers, roaming operators and device manufacturers that aim to facilitate WLAN usage.

The ubiquity of WLAN services, ranging from campus networks to commercial hotspots and community WLAN services, requires a new approach for automatically locating and using services. The paper presents a service selection infrastructure that is independent of a user's current network attachment and location in a way that users can obtain information of a specific network (or any other service) without being required to be connected to a particular one. Information about networks and services are distributed in a way that allows for using this information offline, e.g. when still looking for appropriate network access.

This study examines the activities of a specialized service desk and provides guidance on conducting an analysis of the activities. The authors wanted to know what is essential in terms of expertise, staffing, technology, collections and space at a Maps and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Service desk. The purpose of the study was to explore whether the provision of these services require a staffed service desk.

The authors collected data using mixed methods, including observing space use, administering a survey and analyzing desk interactions.

Findings suggest that while this service desk may have relatively little traffic, the interactions are time consuming and require a high degree of subject expertise. The data indicated that this service does not need to be delivered in this specific location; however, retaining the expertise and access to collections is vital. The authors recommend that formal assessment of services and space should be conducted prior to making significant changes in a service model.

This study investigates a specialized service desk which are not well-represented in the literature. Additionally, the variety of approaches used in this study could serve as a model for others for service desk assessment in general.

Chris Barnett, director of global business solutions for Rand McNally, was deliberating how Rand McNally should respond to the emergence of wireless technologies for its traditional business of providing static maps and route-planning services. As maps became electronic, interactive, mobile, and enhanced with value-added features, Rand McNally's mapping business was gravely threatened. The opportunities for Rand McNally weren't obvious, and the pace at which wireless technology would disrupt its traditional business was also unclear. Barnett was considering three opportunities: syndicate Rand McNally's brand and mapping content to popular Web sites, become a provider of value-added services to businesses, or focus on automobile manufacturers and try to forge relationships for providing in-car mapping services.

To discuss organizational design, potential responses to disruptive technologies, and market opportunity analysis in order to identify the kind of technology, organizational, and sales force restructuring required to align Rand McNally's organization with the new environment.

This paper provides an overview of the national child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) mapping exercise, the workforce data reported in the mapping between 2003 and 2006, and how this data relates to current policy. The paper will first outline key issues within current CAMHS workforce policy and provide an introduction to the mapping process itself in order to establish the context in which the findings from the mapping exercises are being presented. The mapping is carried out by Durham University on behalf of the Department of Health. Core trend data is provided on the growth and development of the specialist CAMHS.

Purpose — The purpose of this study is to describe the development of contents, visibility and use of two Library 2.0 services, Häme-Wiki and the Virtual Path map service, launched by Hämeenlinna City Library and based on crowdsourcing, service convergence and the application on Web 2.0 technology.

Design/methodology/approach — The development of the contents of the services were analysed by observing the increase in articles and other items published in them. The interest in these sites and their use were studied by the number of their contributors, users and downloads and by link analysis concerning inbound links. To gather users’ experiences, a Web survey was directed to the registered users by e-mail. A questionnaire for all users was linked to the front page of both services. Qualitative theme interviews were conducted with the staff of Hämeenlinna City Library to elicit their experiences concerning the use of the services and their impact on the work community.

Findings — The reception of the services was evidenced by the daily increasing number of published articles and maps, also indicating crowdsourcing. Their use was clearly described by the increasing download figures and inbound links. Both services offered users information not available elsewhere.

The study is limited by the low number of responses in the Web surveys.

Practical implications — Practical implications originate from the concrete examples of content sharing, crowdsourcing and service convergence which have not been much studied in library context.

Originality/value — The practical implications of the work also contribute to the value of the paper for developers of Web 2.0 services and service convergence.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a process‐modelling method that is based on methods from both operations management (OM) and service operations management (SOM), which complies with the special requirements of servitised manufacturers.

After a comprehensive literature review of organisational change in servitised manufacturers, the requirements for modelling industrial services are established. In addition, existing business process‐modelling methods from OM and SOM are classified and related to these requirements. A modelling method that is adapted to the needs of servitised manufacturers is proposed, and the practical advantages of this methodology are explored in an exemplary case study of a machine tool manufacturer.

This paper suggests that existing instruments that have been developed within OM and SOM need considerable adjustment to comply with the needs of servitised manufacturers.

This paper contributes towards mastering the transition from the production of capital goods to the offering of entire solutions by outlining the special requirements of the process structure in a manufacturing company as it turns into a solution‐provider.

This paper gives a picture of the development of four new roles in mental health over a two‐year period. It draws on data from the national mapping project to provide a unique perspective on the emergence of the roles of support, time and recovery workers, gateway workers, carer support workers and community development workers for black and minority ethnic communities. The tracking of such roles on a national level reveals a number of issues, in particular the need for clarity of terms if there is to be an undisputed understanding of what mental health services are provided and by whom.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model to map the on-premise computing system of the university with cloud computing for achieving an effective and reliable university e-governance (e-gov) system.

The proposed model incorporates the university’s internal e-gov system with cloud computing in order to achieve better reliability, accessibility and availability of e-gov services while keeping the recurring expenditure low. This model has been implemented (and tested on a university e-gov system) in the University of Kashmir (UOK); case study of this implementation has been chosen as the research methodology to discuss and demonstrate the proposed model.

According to the results based on practical implementation, the proposed model is ideal for e-governed systems as it provided adequate cost savings and high availability (HA) with operational ease, apart from continuing to have the necessary security in place to maintain confidential information such as student details, grades, etc.

The implication of this study is to achieve HA and to reduce the cost from using external clouds, mapping internal IT servers of the university with the external cloud computing services.

Because no established mapping model for universities has been provided for effective, low-cost, highly available university e-gov system, the proposed mapping model through this paper closes this gap and provides guidelines to implement a hybrid-mapped e-gov model for universities while keeping the recurring expenditure on cloud computing minimal. The paper provides the perceptions of its adoption at UOK for achieving high reliability, accessibility and uptime of its e-gov applications while keeping the recurring expenditure on cloud computing minimal.