Digital services for consumers

Abstract

This issue includes four papers that tackle important issues in the context of our special issue “Digital Services for Consumers”. As we highlighted in our call for papers, mobile computing, high speed communication, internet of things, and a plethora of services available through several devices change the way we live. This is a huge potential but also a challenge for consumers as well as enterprises. We observe that this digitization of our everyday life has already led to a change in the preferences of the customers and this change will continue (Dellarocas 2013; Rechert et al. 2014; Reichhart et al. 2013). Successful services are often personalized, context adaptive, real-time, available anywhere, connected, and fun to use. The digital user has become powerful, since the competitor is just one click away. Thus, only perceivable usefulness, ease of use, and individual user-centricity of the service will bind the user to an offering. These innovative services have emerged first in the consumer world, making consumer markets for the first time the pacemakers of IT transformation. Furthermore, these consumer IT innovations change user expectations fundamentally, not only with respect to IT services, but to products and services in general. Everything as a service when, how, and where each user wants it – becomes a paradigm for many successful new offerings. In this new Digital World, companies have much more problems understanding and anticipating customer demands since user behavior and preferences have changed dramatically. Most of the traditional approaches for designing and delivering products and services in this digital world seem outdated and incapable to address this fast changing environment of digital users (Leimeister et al. 2014). Consequently, we need to answer a vast amount of new questions: What services are useful, best adapted to each and every user?Which are fun to use? How to handle complexity of different offerings? What types of services havewhich benefit, when, how, and for whom? What services around product offerings are most beneficial for which purpose?Which services work best for digital natives and digital immigrants? What are underlying mechanisms for explaining successful design, use, and effects of digital services for consumers? Service innovations, new ways of service creation, orchestration, and consumption, using and creating vast amounts of openly available or user-generated data, offer great potential for improving everyday life of large parts of our society. Examples range from healthcare (with e.g., offerings such as patientslikeme.com) to new business models and ways of value creation and value capturing become critical, as a big opportunity, but also as a challenge for enterprises and other organizations. Electronic web services emerge for all areas of life, e.g., entertainment, communication, shopping, household, health, mobility, work, and finance. These questions and opportunities are the outcomes of a transformation of our society towards a digital society. Historically, the advent of information technology (IT) in businesses led to a transformation from the industrial society into the information society, putting much emphasis on scalability of businesses through automization and standardization. Process orientation was the paradigm for efficiency gains, especially in back office environments. Today, the increasing ubiquity of IT and its penetration of our everyday life transforms the information society into the digital society, J. M. Leimeister (*) Resarch Center for IS Design (ITeG), Chair for Information Systems, University of Kassel, Pfannkuchstrasse 1, 34121 Kassel, Germany e-mail: JanMarco.Leimeister@unisg.ch