Distributed Service Delivery Research Articles

Performance of the Cue COVID-19 point-of-care molecular test: insights from a multi-site clinic service model.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for rapid and accurate molecular diagnostic testing. The Cue COVID-19 Point-of-Care Test (Cue POCT) is a nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT), authorized by Health Canada and FDA as a POCT for SARS-CoV-2 detection. Cue POCT was deployed at a network of clinics in Ontario, Canada with n = 13,848 patrons tested between 17 July 2021 and 31 January 2022. The clinical performance and operational experience with Cue POCT were examined for this testing population composed mostly of asymptomatic individuals (93.7%). A head-to-head prospective clinical verification was performed between 17 July and 4 October for all POCT service clients (n = 3,037) with paired COVID-19 testing by Cue and RT-PCR. Prospective verification demonstrated a clinical sensitivity of 100% and clinical specificity of 99.4% for Cue COVID-19 POCT. The lack of false negatives and low false positive rate (0.64%), underscores the high accuracy (99.4%) of Cue POCT to provide rapid PCR quality results. Low error rates (cancellation rate of 0% and invalid rate of 0.63%) with the current software version were additionally noted. Taken together, these findings highlight the value of accurate molecular COVID-19 POCT in a distributed service delivery model to rapidly detect cases in the community with the potential to curb transmission in high-exposure settings (i.e., in-flight, congregate workplace, and social events). The insights gleaned from this operational implementation are readily transferable to future POCT diagnostic services. IMPORTANCE This manuscript reports on the findings of a large asymptomatic population who underwent surveillance COVID testing on the Cue COVID-19 Point-of-Care Test (POCT). Review of test performance of this rapid molecular POCT, as compared to gold standard RT-PCR, is valuable to many audiences, including public health, emergency testing services, employers, and the general population of consumers who are seeking a user-friendly, accurate, cost-effective, and sustainable testing model for COVID screening. The findings from this operational experience also inform future models of POCT services beyond COVID.

“You are not my boss!”: Managing inter-organizational collaboration in German ground handling operations

While inter-organizational coordination among firms in networks has become a widespread phenomenon and the governance of inter-organizational networks has garnered considerable attention in the management literature, the repercussions of the network form for managing and organizing work remain a considerable gap in the literature. Building on Gittell’s concept of relational coordination, we explore the inter-organizational work collaboration in four German airports’ ground handling operations. By zooming-in on ramp agents’ boundary spanning work role, our comparative study illustrates whether and how a collaboration in inter-organizational work processes is brought about in practice. Our findings reveal the various practices ramp agents deploy in order to handle the tensions emerging from divergent organizational jurisdictions and the requirements for collaboration. We also illuminate how the field-level context influences inter-organizational collaboration by setting conditions such as workload and time restrictions in distributed service delivery.

A Model of Sustainable Distributed Service Delivery in Organizations With Compassion-Based Missions

This article examines the potential for offering sustainable compassion-based service. Organizations with compassion-based service missions face difficult challenges in addressing acute client needs with limited resources. We posit that distributed service delivery (i.e., clients serving themselves and one another) can result in more long-term compassion-based service when supported by shared and self-leadership. A model of sustainable distributed service delivery is presented and propositions are provided to help guide future research.

Addressing the needs of diverse distributed students

Two interrelated studies were undertaken to assist Alberta post-secondary institutions with meeting challenges associated with providing services to diverse distributed students that are of similar quality to services provided to traditional classroom students. The first study identified and assessed best practices in distributed learning; the second refined the focus to students who were identified as members of diverse sub-groups. Research activities for the studies included: a comprehensive literature review of best practice in distributed service delivery; an online survey for students enrolled in distributed learning through eight colleges and technical institutes; staff and student focus groups; and interviews with students, front-line staff, senior post-secondary administrators, and representatives from provincial government and community organizations. Findings highlight impressions and experiences in relation to best practice criteria for service delivery in distributed learning, along with “best practices behind the best practices” that facilitate the adoption and improvement of distributed service delivery.

An Autonomic Service Delivery Platform for Service-Oriented Network Environments

In this paper, we propose a novel autonomic service delivery platform for service-oriented network environments. The platform enables a self-optimizing infrastructure that balances the goals of maximizing the business value derived from processing service requests and the optimal utilization of IT resources. We believe that our proposal is the first of its kind to integrate several well-established theoretical and practical techniques from networking, microeconomics, and service-oriented computing to form a fully distributed service delivery platform. The principal component of the platform is a utility-based cooperative service routing protocol that disseminates congestion-based prices among intermediaries to enable the dynamic routing of service requests from consumers to providers. We provide the motivation for such a platform and formally present our proposed architecture. We discuss the underlying analytical framework for the service routing protocol, as well as key methodologies which together provide a robust framework for our service delivery platform that is applicable to the next-generation of middleware and telecommunications architectures. We discuss issues regarding the fairness of service rate allocations, as well as the use of nonconcave utility functions in the service routing protocol. We also provide numerical results that demonstrate the ability of the platform to provide optimal routing of service requests.

Federation solutions for inter- and intradomain security in next-generation mobile service platforms

A federation approach for security in future distributed service delivery platforms for mobile users offers some key advantages over an integrated solution relying on a common choice of a standardized authentication technology. By agreeing on an exchange protocol for security assertions rather than on the detailed security mechanisms, Service Aggregators and Access Network Operators will be able to federate their customer offerings flexibly and jointly offer services. The consumer will find formerly separate offerings combined, and Service Operators will enjoy open interfaces towards the network's service delivery platform. Through the use of Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), standardized assertion statements can be made not only for the user's identity, but also on attributes and authorizations associated with it. This will allow a seamless personalized service experience offering single sign-on across separate operational domains. An example from automobile telematics is used to illustrate the concepts.

A study on managing the performance requirements of a distributed service delivery software system

Like other non-functional requirements (NFR), performance requirements can have global impact on a system. This article presents a preliminary study on the management of performance requirements of a distributed service delivery (DSD) system using the ‘Performance Requirement Framework (PeRF)’ developed by Nixon [B.A. Nixon, Management of performance requirements for information systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 20 (12), (2000)]. Various steps in the framework are explained in the context of the DSD system, and the effects of some design decisions on the performance have been evaluated. PeRF was originally developed for information systems. The article shows how the framework can be adapted to a distributed system. However, additional studies on a number of distributed systems need to be carried out in order to develop a full framework for performance requirements for distributed systems, or perhaps for different categories of such systems.