The Viability of Alternative Call Center Production Models

[Excerpt] The central question of this paper is whether a mass customization strategy coupled with high involvement work practices is an economically viable model for service and sales call centers. If so, under what conditions and why? To answer these questions, in the next section, we describe alternative models of call center management. In section III, we present a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between management practices, workers reactions to those practices, and performance outcomes. We then review empirical evidence on these relationships, focusing primarily on studies of call centers or related service workplaces. In section IV, we draw on evidence from two recent quantitative studies of call centers to examine the performance outcomes of high involvement practices in this context. We close with a discussion and critique of existing evidence and suggestions for future research

HR Shared Services (HRSS): Model and Trends

[Excerpt] The findings of this research project are based on interviews with 44 Human Resources (HR) leaders across 39 national and international companies within 15 industries ranging from manufacturing to consulting services. The interviews ranged from 45 minutes to one hour, and sought to understand models, best practices, and trends. The interview included questions about employee experience, technology, and the integration between HR Shared Services (HRSS) and the overall HR Organization. To provide background information and data, the HR leaders answered a short survey, giving details about the structure of their HRSS, locations, areas of HR that had work performed in the shared services organization, systems, and technology capabilities

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

RACE pulls for shared control

Maintaining and supporting an aircraft fleet, in a climate of reduced manpower and financial resources, dictates effective utilization of robotics and automation technologies. To help develop a winning robotics and automation program the Air Force Logistics Command created the Robotics and Automation Center of Excellence (RACE). RACE is a command wide focal point. Race is an organic source of expertise to assist the Air Logistic Center (ALC) product directorates in improving process productivity through the judicious insertion of robotics and automation technologies. RACE is a champion for pulling emerging technologies into the aircraft logistic centers. One of those technology pulls is shared control. Small batch sizes, feature uncertainty, and varying work load conspire to make classic industrial robotic solutions impractical. One can view ALC process problems in the context of space robotics without the time delay. The ALC's will benefit greatly from the implementation of a common architecture that supports a range of control actions from fully autonomous to teleoperated. Working with national laboratories and private industry, we hope to transition shared control technology to the depot floor. This paper provides an overview of the RACE internal initiatives and customer support, with particular emphasis on production processes that will benefit from shared control technology

The New Technology and Competencies for "The Most Typical of the Activities of Libraries": Technical Services

At a library conference in 1940, William M. Randall called technical services the "most typical of the activities of libraries" "they are..." he said, "the things which librarians do that no one else does the secrets of the craft." 1 In those intervening forty-three years much has been written and uttered in defense and derision of these "secrets of the craft." These most typical of library activities have changed the name Randall used, technical processes, to technical services. They have moved from being sneeringly derided as "backroom," "basement" or other dreary location activities to being enthusiastically hailed today as "where the action is." They are, fortunately, no longer the "secrets" that they were in Randall's day. They have been moved into, moved around within and even moved out of the organizational charts. Regardless of all these attitudes and activities, the functions of acquiring, organizing and preserving library materials persist and the competencies necessary to carry out these three functions will be the focus of this paper. In the paper, reference will frequently be made to the "technical services librarian" meaning any librarian who works in that aspect of librarianship. The emphasis is on no particular type of library. The term library will be used as meaning also information center.published or submitted for publicatio

City of Ideas: Reinventing Boston's Innovation Economy: The Boston Indicators Report 2012

Analyzes indicators of the city's economic, social, and technological progress; potential for creating innovative solutions to global and national challenges; and complexities, disparities, and weaknesses in the indicators and innovation economy paradigm

Distributed, cooperating knowledge-based systems

Some current research in the development and application of distributed, cooperating knowledge-based systems technology is addressed. The focus of the current research is the spacecraft ground operations environment. The underlying hypothesis is that, because of the increasing size, complexity, and cost of planned systems, conventional procedural approaches to the architecture of automated systems will give way to a more comprehensive knowledge-based approach. A hallmark of these future systems will be the integration of multiple knowledge-based agents which understand the operational goals of the system and cooperate with each other and the humans in the loop to attain the goals. The current work includes the development of a reference model for knowledge-base management, the development of a formal model of cooperating knowledge-based agents, the use of testbed for prototyping and evaluating various knowledge-based concepts, and beginning work on the establishment of an object-oriented model of an intelligent end-to-end (spacecraft to user) system. An introductory discussion of these activities is presented, the major concepts and principles being investigated are highlighted, and their potential use in other application domains is indicated