Search results

The objective of this chapter is to identify the key characteristics of Global Services businesses that will thrive and achieve success in the future. These factors are integrated into three main pillars, which we refer to as the Triple-Win. The first and most obvious pillar is technology as a tool. The second pillar is the design and sustainability of the business model, without which the previous factor would be merely a cost and not an investment. And last but not the least, there is the purpose which gives meaning to the proposal, focusing on the human being and their environment. The DIDPAGA business model sits at the intersection of these three elements.

The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

The idea of adapting and designing services and products to serve “special” needs either for the public good or for commercial purposes is fundamentally an idea anchored in US history. At root, it is a simple idea, albeit expressed in widely varying vocabularies across disciplines and professions. In the parlance of social work, public education, and public librarianship, for example, the idea has been repeatedly advanced over the years as a well-meaning reaching out to meet the needs of subpopulations not readily addressed by available service designs. In the parlance of the commercial sector, the idea has focused on market segmentation, dividing the population into finer and finer subgroups for the purposes of marketing products and services. One of the most recent labels for these activities has been marketing to audience “niches” in which the audience is identified “… as a certain definable market segment with demographic characteristics that make it attractive to advertisers.” (Fejes and Lennon, 2000, p. 37).

This study uses a microanalysis of interaction approach to study how interactive service workers collaborate with one another in conversations to construct their professional identity in the face of the rapid contextual change. The data consist of (1) a complex written exchange downloaded from an Internet listserv and (2) a mechanically recorded conversation and detailed transcript showing the exact sequence of turns in the conversation, overlapping utterances, laughter, and speech errors. Everyday descriptions in these conversations reveal how knowledge workers produce and reproduce professional identity and a shared culture in the ways they: (1) categorize themselves and other workers, (2) amend or collaborate on each other's characterizations of clients, and (3) negotiate local policies and rules as they intersect with professional values and emotional boundaries. The results demonstrate a need for opportunities to integrate the increasing complexity of interactive service into professional identity as a response to technological and social change.

The aim of this chapter is to develop a performance measurement framework for understanding the relationships among drivers of customer profitability in internet companies.

We recognize an opportunity to improve management control systems for internet companies, where performance measurement systems currently focus on measuring web data, such as number of customers, cost of service, cost of acquisition (CoA), and churn rate. However these indicators, taken separately, do not provide useful information to make decisions.

To fill this gap we developed a framework, which we designate as the Lifetime Value Scorecard, to investigate the relationships between customer data and financial data, providing an early indication as to whether or not the marketing strategies being implemented are successful. We then offer an application of the Lifetime Value Scorecard to the mobile value-added services industry, where content and services are provided to consumer cell phones, mainly using wireless networks.