Technology-based Services Research Articles

Exploring the Role of Service Quality and Knowledge for Mobile Health Services

The use of mobile technology-based services has made healthcare delivery more accessible and affordable in recent times. In fact, mobile health services today act as an effective means of providing healthcare knowledge to users directly from providers. However, the cynical behavior of users regarding this medium of healthcare services often encircles around the quality of such services. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of service quality and knowledge among other underlying factors that can influence future use intentions of m-Health services in the context of Bangladesh. The conceptual model of the study identifies that certain aspects of service qualities like reliability, privacy, responsiveness, empathy and information quality along with facilitating conditions, effort expectancy, performance expectancy and social influence plays an important role in capturing users' overall perceptions of mobile health services. Finally, the study highlights managerial implications, future research directions and limitations from the Bangladesh perspective.

Contrasting risk perceptions of technology-based service innovations in inter-organizational settings

Despite the rapid growth and potential of technology-based services, managers' greatest challenges are gaining customer acceptance and increasing usage of these new innovative services. In the B2C field, studies of self-service technology show that perceived risk is an important factor influencing the use of service technology. Though prior research explores different risk types that emerge in consumer settings, risk perception in the B2B setting lacks a detailed examination of different risk types influencing technology-based service adoption. Data from 49 qualitative interviews with providers and customers in two different B2B industries inform this study. The findings emphasize the importance of functional and financial risks in a B2B context and show that business customers' personal and psychological fears hinder their use of technology-based services. Results highlight differences in risk perception and evaluation between customers and providers.

A visual process model for improved technology-based service design

This paper presents a new method for business process modelling in the services sector that integrates the client focus of service blueprints with the operational analytics of lean value stream mapping. The approach incorporates a simple and innovative use of colour to improve the correctness of the models. The conceptual model is analysed using the guidelines of business process modelling and benefits are demonstrated through an illustrative example. The proposed approach provides a mechanism to facilitate the effective design and implementation of technology-based innovations in service delivery by enabling a diverse set of stakeholders to participate in the modelling. This modelling approach is based on best practices from existing business process modelling notations and was developed to support change management and innovation in services. The approach results in intuitive models that can be used by novice modellers for clear communication and technology-infused service design.

A System to Identify Technological Chances in Technology-Based Services

A System to Identify Technological Chances in Technology-Based Services

Preventing suicide requires more attention on technology-based crisis support services

Preventing suicide requires more attention on technology-based crisis support services

Improving Rehabilitative Efforts for Juvenile Offenders Through the Use of Telemental Healthcare.

The use of videoconferencing technology in the provision of mental health services is expected to increase rapidly over the next several years. Given the high rates of juvenile offenders in need of such services and the new norms of communication among young people in general, technology-based service modalities are a promising approach for increasing the availability and intensity of services, as well as engagement and compliance with treatment recommendations. This article will discuss the current state of the juvenile justice system, the literature on the use of telemental healthcare (TMH) with delinquent youth, how TMH fits within the generally accepted model of correctional rehabilitation, and special considerations for applying TMH to this population and setting. Although there is no evidence to suggest negative outcomes associated with TMH, future research is greatly needed to justify its use.

Consumer-to-store employee and consumer-to-self-service technology (SST) interactions in a retail setting

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the underlying mechanism of how consumer-to-store employee and consumer-to-self-service technology (SST) interaction qualities contribute to consumer retail patronage. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 300 surveys for each type of in-store kiosk were used for the data analysis. The proposed model was analysed using structural equation modelling. Findings – This study suggests a direct link from SST usage frequency to perception of SST service quality. Also, retail patronage intentions were positively influenced by both interpersonal service quality and SST service quality, and SST usage intentions were positively affected by retail patronage intentions. Lastly, three causal links were shown to be dissimilar between the two types of in-store kiosk: interpersonal service quality-retail patronage intentions, SST service quality-retail patronage intentions, and SST service quality-SST usage intentions. The remaining links were similar for both types of in-store kiosks. Originality/value – Previous empirical work on this topic has mostly been limited to investigations of service quality of either a human- or a technology-based service option. In contrast, the current study incorporates both interpersonal service quality and SST service quality as critical factors affecting retail patronage intentions and thus provides an important opportunity to advance the understanding of consumer-to-store employee and consumer-to-SST interaction qualities and their contribution to consumer retail patronage.

TEACHING NETWORK TECHNOLOGIES THAT SUPPORT INDUSTRY 4.0

Industry 4.0 is a combination of many elements, including distributed intelligence, network security, massive data, cloud computing, and analytics, among other things. Such elements are critical to the “Digital Factory”, a term that has been recently introduced by many companies indicating a comprehensive portfolio of seamlessly integrated hardware, software and technology-based services, with the aim to enhance manufacturing productivity and improving efficiency. Typically, industrial networks enable the gathering of extensive data from productionlines and plants, which are increasingly becoming distributed. The gathered data is transmitted to analysis centers where it is transformed into information and used to make better informed decisions. In addition, modern industrial networks allow plant data to be automatically filtered and transmitted to various production controllers. Ultimately, industrial networks enable Industry 4.0 to have the following benefits: improved safety, increase uptime, lower energy costs, and improved maintenance;all of which lead to manufacturing competitiveness in cyber-physical production systems supported by Smart Grid implementations. This paper presents the extent to which industrial networks are taught at the School ofEngineering Technology at McMaster University. Further, the paper covers teaching methods of industrial networks and their related applications within manufacturing plants and electrical grid.

Libraries surviving as entrepreneurial organizations: a creative destruction perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight some traditional functions found in academic libraries and apply various business models as an aid to developing an entrepreneurial culture. Due to a combination of environmental pressures, universities are refining their strategic mission to identify “what they do well” or “where they want to be”. Programs that align with the strategic mission of the university get funded, while other less productive, lower impact programs and services are neglected or eliminated. This is essentially a process based on business or financial decisions. Design/methodology/approach – In an attempt to cope with these changes, academic library administrators are assessing library services to insure that they are aligned with their university’s strategic mission. Findings – To successfully develop and sustain this alignment, academic libraries must become “entrepreneurial organizations” where strategic decisions are based on business models, rather than tradition, or more specifically “the way we have always done things”. As this results-oriented, strategic thinking culture evolves, the actual brick and mortar library will also evolve to become a technology-based information service center that facilitates campus-wide creative activities. Originality/value – This perspective piece will highlight some traditional functions found in academic libraries and apply various business models, including the Schumpeterian model of creative destruction, as an aid to developing the entrepreneurial culture that will be necessary if the academic library is to stay viable and relevant in the twenty-first century.

Service quality, service convenience, price and fairness, customer loyalty, and the mediating role of customer satisfaction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which service quality, perceived price and fairness and service convenience influence customer satisfaction and customer loyalty for Indian retail banking sector. It further explores the role of customer satisfaction as mediating variable between service quality dimensions, perceived price and fairness, service convenience dimensions and customer loyalty. Design/methodology/approach – A cross-sectional research on 445 retail banking customers through questionnaire is conducted. Population of study is valued retail urban customers of banks in Rajasthan, India, who frequently visit bank premises for transactions, have accounts in at least two banks and have availed of at least one information technology-based services. Responses are analyzed using factor analyses and regression analyses. Findings – Results reveal that service quality dimensions, perceived price and fairness and service convenience dimensions have positive impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Moreover, customer satisfaction acts as mediating variable between its antecedents and customer loyalty. Research limitations/implications – This study has taken into account a specific category of retail banking customers. Thus, it limits generalization of results to other banking population. Practical implications – This study explains the importance of customer satisfaction for achieving customer loyalty for Indian retail banking sector. Originality/value – The paper underlines the importance of customer satisfaction for achieving customer loyalty. Impact of SERVCON dimensions on customer loyalty is found rare in literature.

The association between surgical volume, survival and quality of care.

Improving surgical outcomes is important to the thoracic surgical community and operative mortality is often used as a benchmark to gauge the quality of lung resection. In lung cancer surgery, increasing hospital volume is associated with better survival although the categorisation of procedure volume is arbitrary. When US and UK data are scrutinised, the association holds true for increasingly higher volumes up to 150 resection per year and more. The reason may be due to better infrastructure, better-staffed units, more resources and wider specialist and technology-based services in higher volume centers. For individual surgeon volume, reports are not consistent. However, studies suggest that surgeon sub-specialty is an important consideration. The results of general thoracic surgeons and cardiac surgeons are reported to be better than general surgeons for lung resection surgery, and the effects of specialty training was also associated with an increase in the number of patients undergoing lung resection. We conclude that the current evidence strongly supports the association between increasing hospital volume with lower mortality and improved long-term survival following lung resection. Whilst the data presented supports centralization of lung cancer surgery in high volume hospitals, patient choice and the threshold of quality of improvement required to overcome travel and closure of local services need to be considered.

Antecedents of Innovativeness in Technology‐Based Services (TBS): Peering into the Black Box of Entrepreneurial Orientation

ABSTRACTInnovativeness is the organization's capability for developing and introducing innovations. We argue that new combinations and recombinations of prior and new knowledge (by way of creating, assembling, and transforming knowledge) result in innovativeness in an organization. We further assert that a knowledge‐based focus on innovativeness is particularly important for firms that are technology‐based. The majority of studies focusing on innovativeness are in the entrepreneurship arena, and a large number of studies consider innovativeness as one of three dimensions of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct, the other two dimensions being proactiveness and risk‐taking. However, recent research has suggested peering into the black box of EO by disaggregating the EO construct and examining the interrelationships among its three components. Hence, using the knowledge‐based view and drawing from multiple disciplines, our study conceptualizes innovativeness as a criterion variable and investigates the antecedent role of proactiveness and risk‐taking propensity on innovativeness in the context of technology‐based services (TBS). We hypothesize that both proactiveness and risk‐taking propensity exhibit a curvilinear relationship with innovativeness and introduce organizational structure formality as a moderator to further explicate these relationships. Our results show that proactiveness has a curvilinear (inverted U relationship) with innovativeness, and that this relationship is attenuated by organizational structure formality. Additional analysis indicates that in TBS firms, risk‐taking propensity has a positive linear relationship with innovativeness, and this relationship is accentuated by organizational structure formality. Finally, we discuss important conceptual and practical implications of our study and provide suggestions for future research.

Exploring the Degree of Consumer Readiness for Self Service Technologies

Constant developments of technology and increases in labor costs are the two major reasons for the creation and continuous evolvement of technology-based self services. Consumers' technology readiness should be taken into account in predicting the perception and behavior of potential consumers towards Self Service Technologies. An empirical study of consumers' readiness to use technology based self-services was undertaken in Greece. A survey instrument was developed to investigate the relationship between technology readiness, attitude, perceived ease of use, usefulness and consumers readiness towards adoption of Self Service Technologies. The results showed that population's technology readiness, the attitude of potential consumers towards and perceived usefulness of Self Service Technologies, are the factors that mostly affect their final success, since they define the level of readiness towards these services on behalf of potential consumers.

Adoption of technology-based services: the role of customers’ willingness to co-create

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically evaluate an adoption model for technology-based services (TBS) that integrates a customer’s willingness to co-create (WCC) as mediator complementing the well-known individual differences and innovation characteristics in predicting customer adoption of TBS. Design/methodology/approach – The manuscript uses structural equation modeling to analyze survey data from two empirical studies (n=781 and n=181). Findings – The empirical results show that WCC represents a key mediator between established antecedent predictors (innovation characteristics and individual differences) and the likelihood of TBS adoption. Additionally, the analysis reveals that WCC can even better explain and predict adoption intention of TBS than the commonly used individual differences and innovation characteristics. Finally, the results also suggest that a lack of customers’ WCC may help to explain persuasion-decision discrepancies within TBS adoption. Research limitations/implications – As the data of this manuscript pertains to the mobile apps market, future research might test the modified technology adoption model in other TBS contexts as well. While the studies used cross-sectional data, it would be interesting to assess the differential influence of WCC across the stages in the adoption process using longitudinal data. Practical implications – The findings on WCC provide managers with a new set of factors (apart from known antecedent predictors like individual differences and innovation characteristics) to optimize TBS adoption. Originality/value – This manuscript is the first to examine an adoption model for TBS that integrates a customer’s WCC. Furthermore, the findings provide first empirical evidence that WCC can help to explain persuasion-decision discrepancies within TBS adoption.

Determinants of multi-service smartcard success for smart cities development: A study based on citizens’ privacy and security perceptions

Smart cities aim to increase their efficiency and quality-of-life thanks to technology-based services and collective intelligence. In this environment smartcards represent a strategic instrument to link citizens to public administration and local infrastructure to further advance on smart city plans. This research proposes a theoretical model and present privacy and security as key drivers of citizens’ intentions to continue using smartcards. The functional benefits (i.e. usefulness and ease-of-use), the level of personal interaction with local services, and the direct and moderating effects of socio-demographic variables complete our framework. The findings of an empirical study with smartcard users in Zaragoza (Spain) show usefulness and security as the main antecedents of continuance intentions. In turn, the influence of socio-demographic variables is not significant, which suggests that smartcards should focus on a wide-range of users. These results offer interesting implications and recommendations for public managers such as the need to guarantee the security of the transaction system and to expand the number of services and initiatives relaying on the smartcard service in order to gradually develop the smart city transformation.

Identification and Management of opportunities for technology-based services: a patent-based portfolio approach

One of the most crucial activities for the successful development of new technology-based services is opportunity identification. Previous studies have mainly been customer-centred, focusing to specific types of technology-based services with the lack of data and quantitative methodology. This study proposes a technology-centred approach to identify and manage opportunities for technology-based services using business model (BM) patents. Network analysis with citation information is employed to analyse the effect of technology fields on service sectors at the macro-level, after which cross-impact analysis with co-classification information is applied to identify their relationships at the micro-level. A portfolio map is constructed from these macro- and micro-level analyses for identification and continuous management of opportunities. The operation of the proposed approach is provided with a case study of information technology (IT) and mobile services. The proposed approach could help to reduce the uncertainty in the fuzzy front-end stages of the development process of new technology-based services.

Competition, cooperation, and regulation: Understanding the evolution of the mobile payments technology ecosystem

The past twenty years have been a time of many new technological developments, changing business practices, and interesting innovations in the financial information system (IS) and technology landscape. They have led to the increasing use of prior innovations that have supported e-commerce, and that are now being brought into financial services to support different kinds of improvements to core business processes. This research examines recent changes in the payment sector in financial services, specifically related to mobile payments (m-payments) that enable new channels for consumer payments for goods and services purchases, and other forms of economic exchange. We extend recent research on technology ecosystems and paths of influence analysis for how industry-centered technology innovations arise and evolve. We explore the extent to which they can be understood through the lens of several simple building blocks, including technology components, technology-based services, and the technology-supported infrastructures that provide foundations for the related digital businesses. Our extension of the prior research focuses on two key elements: (1) modeling the impacts of competition and cooperation on different forms of innovations in the aforementioned building blocks; and (2) representing the role that regulatory forces play in driving or delaying innovation in the larger scope of our modeling approach. To assess the efficacy of our approach, we use it to retrospectively analyze the past two decades of innovations in the m-payments space. Our results identify the industry-specific patterns of innovation that have occurred, suggest how they have been affected by competition, cooperation and regulation, and point out some more universal patterns of technology innovations that offer insights into the development of e-commerce.

Pioneering customers as change agents for new energy efficiency services—an empirical study in the Finnish electricity markets

Energy companies are in dire need of new business models that bring revenues from energy services rather than from increasing energy use. Smart meters and grids offer new opportunities for such services. However, there is a lack of research on what the market potential of such services could be in end-user markets. Certain innovative consumers are more likely to be the first to test new technology-based services and engage in new service co-creation. However, identification of such innovator or lead user customers is difficult especially for electricity end-use efficiency, an invisible and unexciting service for most consumers. This article identifies pioneering customers for novel energy efficiency services offered by electricity providers in terms of psychological factors from an empirical data collected with a consumer survey in spring 2013. We also analyse the similarities and differences between pioneering customers and the mass market with the principal component analysis. We find that certain characteristics of pioneering customers (expertise, ahead-of-the-market needs) could become more widespread in the market due to rising energy prices and improved billing and metering. However, some other aspects contributing to innovativeness (such as experimentalism) are less likely to develop among average consumers, who are more likely to rely on leading companies and seek recommendations from peers before obtaining new services. These differences among consumers need to be taken into account in order to offer consumers usable and useful products and peer group-relevant marketing.

The moderating role of technology readiness, gender, and sex in consumer acceptance and actual use of Technology-based services

Considering the commercial value of technology, technology-based services can be described as the result of a protracted industrial approach, research and development, and continuously evolving innovation plans and actions. The purpose of this article is to investigate the beliefs that affect the acceptance and actual use of technology-based services, as well as the possible differences in terms of technology readiness, gender, and age, by acting as mediators, based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). A research framework is being proposed which indicates, through data analysis and hypotheses testing, that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions are all significant determinants of intention to use technology-based services. Additionally, the differences imposed by the three mediators to the four beliefs, as well as to the behavioral intention toward actual use, offer critical information about technology-based services acceptance for managers, researchers and developers.

How to Fill the Digital Gap? The (Limited) Role of Regulation

This paper provides evidence on the migration from an “old” technology to a “new” technology, taking into account the impact that regulatory interventions on the old one might have on the incentives to invest and adopt the new one. This analysis has been applied to a sample of EU27 countries using panel data from 2004 to 2014 on the adoption, coverage and take-up rate of ultra-fast broadband infrastructures, whose development is one of the flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 programmes. Results show that a 1% increase in the regulated price to access the old technology increases the adoption and the investment on the new broadband technology by ~0.45% and ~0.47%. These effects are not homogeneous across countries and are weakened in Eastern European countries, where the existing old broadband infrastructures are less developed than in the rest of Europe. It has also been shown that the access price to old networks negatively affects the take-up rate of the new technology-based services, thus calling for the need of more specific and complementary demand side policy incentives to enhance service adoption