Service provider

About: Service provider is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 55107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 894381 citations. The topic is also known as: external service provider & internal service provider.

The Physiology of the Grid

Abstract: In both e-business and e-science, we often need to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic “virtual organizations” formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or from external resource sharing and service provider relationships. This integration can be technically challenging because of the need to achieve various qualities of service when running on top of different native platforms. We present an Open Grid Services Architecture that addresses these challenges. Building on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, this architecture defines a uniform exposed service semantics (the Grid service); defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering transient Grid service instances; provides location transparency and multiple protocol bindings for service instances; and supports integration with underlying native platform facilities. The Open Grid Services Architecture also defines, in terms of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and associated conventions, mechanisms required for creating and composing sophisticated distributed systems, including lifetime management, change management, and notification. Service bindings can support reliable invocation, authentication, authorization, and delegation, if required. Our presentation complements an earlier foundational article, “The Anatomy of the Grid,” by describing how Grid mechanisms can implement a service-oriented architecture, explaining how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web services framework, and illustrating how our architecture can be applied within commercial computing as a basis for distributed system integration—within and across organizational domains. This is a DRAFT document and continues to be revised. The latest version can be found at http://www.globus.org/research/papers/ogsa.pdf. Please send comments to foster@mcs.anl.gov, carl@isi.edu, jnick@us.ibm.com, tuecke@mcs.anl.gov Physiology of the Grid 2

Cutting Corners and Working Overtime: Quality Erosion in the Service Industry

Abstract: The erosion of service quality throughout the economy is a frequent concern in the popular press. The American Customer Satisfaction Index for services fell in 2000 to 69.4%, down 5 percentage points from 1994. We hypothesize that the characteristics of services--inseparability, intangibility, and labor intensity--interact with management practices to bias service providers toward reducing the level of service they deliver, often locking entire industries into a vicious cycle of eroding service standards. To explore this proposition we develop a formal model that integrates the structural elements of service delivery. We use econometric estimation, interviews, observations, and archival data to calibrate the model for a consumer-lending service center in a major bank in the United Kingdom. We find that temporary imbalances between service capacity and demand interact with decision rules for effort allocation, capacity management, overtime, and quality aspirations to yield permanent erosion of the service standards and loss of revenue. We explore policies to improve performance and implications for organizational design in the service sector.

Service Failure in Online Retailing A Recovery Opportunity

Abstract: Organized service recovery policies and programs are important tools to firms in their efforts to maintain satisfied, loyal customers. Although service failure and recovery issues have received considerable attention in the literature, these topics have received only limited attention in the context of online retailing. Specifically, we lack an understanding of the types of online service failures occurring, the success with which firms are recovering from these failures, and consumer reactions to the service failure/recovery encounters they are experiencing. Therefore, this research involves two studies employing both qualitative and quantitative methods with samples of online shoppers to provide an initial examination of the service recovery management of online retailers. The results provide a typology of online service failures and demonstrate a number of areas in which online retailers are failing to effectively manage their service recoveries. The discussion includes implications for online retailer...

Consumers’ emotional responses to service encounters

Abstract: Reports on a study looking at dimensions of service provider performance that influence immediate emotional responses to service encounters, based on 914 service encounters. Identifies five service‐provider dimensions that are significant predictors of emotional response to services. Finds that different service‐provider dimensions influence positive as compared with negative emotional responses and that temporal duration and spatial intimacy of the encounter affect both the reported levels and relative importance of these service‐provider dimensions to emotional responses.