Three Factors to Sustainable Service System Excellence: A Case Study of Service Systems

Prior service science work defines a service system as dynamic configuration of people, technology, organizations, and shared information from both service providers and clients that co-creates value [1]. Although such an abstraction is important, it does not directly address core issues we face in today's service industry, such as sustainable service excellence. This paper expands such prior service science work by analyzing how service systems evolve over time and what factors are critical to sustain service excellence. The paper identified and analyzed three factors attributing to the service system health throughout its lifecycle phases: the instilling of the value co-creation concept in the service system, the balancing of innovation and commoditization dynamics, and the configuration of core resources in the service system, i.e., people, technology, organization, and shared information. The analysis is derived from many real-world case studies in the information analytics service area. Key recommendations and lessons learned are presented as well.