Category Archives: Qualitative Research Diary

Things fall into place

Posted on by
Reply

After spending the last few months investigating Actor-Network Theory, Organisational Justice Theory, Institutional Theory, socio-technical systems, service systems, sensemaking, service science and team change I have FINALLY had an epiphany that has led me to a much more concrete and plausible research topic.

I found a PhD thesis Managing Organizational Change during Institutional Upheaval, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Higher Education in Transition by Dijana Tiplic. After reading through the thesis I realised that where I am working is an organization in upheaval. A new Vice Chancellor will be starting in January and this change at the top is already causing uncertainty throughout the organization.

I felt that the word upheaval seemed a bit loose so decided on turbulence. I have found that this is a good choice as turbulence is actually a technical term relating to large scale organizational change either as an external influence or an internal one. Some external turbulences include the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, the 1929 Stock Market crash, the 2008 financial crisis, changes in legislation affecting businesses such as tax changes, interest rate changes etc.

Internal turbulence can be produced by a change in the Chief Executive Officer, a major IT infrastructure implementation either one that succeeds – look at the introduction of ICT’s into the newspaper industry by News International, or one that fails and almost or completely destroys the company.

I have realized that there is a good link between sensemaking in organizations, institutions, turbulence and change. These concepts are all active where I work and as the organization and it’s institutions are on the verge of a turbulent change (new CEO) this is an opportunity too good to pass up.

I am going to use the situation to investigate how an organization controls change in turbulent times and make the transition from one leader and associated ideas to another. Staff in the organization are concerned and apprehensive about the future and are anticipating significant changes. There is a view that the university will be transformed from a faculty based structure to a schools based one. This view tends to be based on the fact that the new VC’s ex-university is a schools based organization.

Speaking to various people in the organization there is a strong view that the whole place is going to be transformed into a new structure. People I speak to about the new VC tend to speak as though they are justifying their positions. I have noticed that there has been an increase recently in a focus on managing performance. This seems to be related to people / managers in the organization justifying their position or the position of their team. There is also a feeling of uncertainty amongst some staff that this change might be an opportunity to remove them.

The challenge for the organization is to manage the turbulence so that it successfully emerges stronger and better positioned in the market i.e. profitable.

So the title of my thesis is going to be: Making sense of the organization in turbulent times. I’ve Googled this title and it does not seem to exist!

Unified Services Theory

Posted on by
Reply

I have been looking at service systems and service science and have bought the book Service Science by Henry Katzan, Jr. (Available from Amazon)

Service Science

The book explains service science theory as the underpinning concept of service systems as described by IBM as SSME. I have decided that to undertake a piece of research on the development of a customer service team into a service systems team I am going to use Unified Service Theory as my main underlying theory. The theory is summed up in the following diagram:

Unified Service Theory

Unified Service Theory

UST in full: With services, the customer provides significant inputs into the production process. With manufacturing, groups of customers may contribute ideas to the design of the product, however, individual customers’ only part in the actual process is to select and consume the output. Nearly all other managerial themes unique to services are founded in this distinction. (From Understanding Services Businesses)

Defining by Customer Content:

With services, an effective means of understanding, analyzing, and comparing processes is on the basis of customer content. There are three general types of customer inputs into service processes: the customer’s self, the customer’s belongings, and/or the customer’s information. This principle occurs because customer inputs are present in all services, in accordance with the Unified Services Theory.

Identifying the Customer:

With services, “the customer” is sometimes not clearly defined. Generally, the customer is the individual or entity who directly or indirectly decides whether or not the firm shall be compensated for production. The actual paying customer may desire a non-paying “critical audience” to be satisfied with production, qualifying the critical audience as an indirect customer. This principle occurs because companies can have many stakeholders, some providing inputs and some merely consuming outputs. Since the Unified Services Theory is based on the idea of customerinputs, it is necessary to clearly define who the customer is.

Identifying the Production Process:

With services, the company’s Uproduction process is defined as company effort to add value to customer inputs. Company effort in preparation for production is the pre-production process. When the production process concludes, and the customer may use the production outcome to continue to add value. This post-production process is primarily based on customer action. Often, well-designed service outcomes will enable the customer to create value in the post-production process. This principle occurs because the only ways companies can add value is through efforts and through outputs. Efforts can add value directly to customer inputs (given by the Unified Services Theory). Outputs, or outcomes, can allow customers to add value after the company’s production efforts are complete.

The Unit of Analysis:

With services, the unit of analysis is a process segment. A process segment is a sequence of steps of production. When processes are dissected into smaller segments, the presence or absence of service principles becomes more pronounced. This principle occurs because customer inputs are present in some parts of a production process, but not present in others. By the Unified Services Theory, the parts that involve customer inputs identifies the process segment as a service process.

Weighting the Mixture:

With services, different process segments have different degrees of customer input, and some may have none (acting as manufacturing). The weight, or significance, of specific process segments is most often determined by the amount of value in the overall service contributed by specific segments. This can be approximated by contribution to “willingness to pay.” Some other segments are important for accounting, regulatory, or risk-control reasons. This principle occurs because value of a service process or of individual process segments is judged by how well it adds value to customer inputs. The noted exception is process steps that protect the company’s ability to remain in business by meeting regulatory or risk-control requirements, or by keeping an accurate accounting of production, revenues, and costs.

As seen from the diagram the main idea behind UST is that the customer is a key part of the service system. This is the underlying concept for service value co-creation where the service provider and the service client both gain value from the service operation. For the research project (assignment and probably main project) I intend to use UST as the main theory for developing the service (within an Action Research project) Actor-Network Theory for investigating the background and the various human and non-human actors and Sensemaking theory for reflecting on what has happened.