Identifying customer expectations is key to evidence based service delivery

As librarians and information professionals we share a common rationale: to deliver enhanced services for our customers. The importance of this is self-evident - if we don’t have customers we don't have a job. We therefore put our services at peril if we don’t put the customer at the heart of what we are trying to do. The now-familiar description of evidence based library and information practice reminds us that we need "to integrate user-reported, practitioner-observed and research-derived evidence as an explicit basis for decision-making" (Booth, 2006). This begs several important questions - Who are our users? How can we best capture reports from these users regarding their expected outcomes? How might we as library practitioners observe (and act upon!) what our users require? In attempting to answer such questions we discover potential value in methodologies with a business orientation; utilising tools from the commercial sector such as Customer Value Discovery research (McKnight, 2007a; McKnight & Berrington, 2008)

Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.

The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto- peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services. The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they support–composed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction design–have provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ theme (grant no. EP/K012304/1)

Putting the ‘digital’ in Digital Intermediaries: the role of technical infrastructure in building business models

Digital Technology Innovation and Financial Business Practices The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This report addresses the mutual shaping of business models and innovations in digital technical infrastructure – both client-facing and administrative back-end – in two retail financial products currently in use in the United Kingdom: peer-to-peer consumer lending and a local digital/paper hybrid currency system. The two products and their issuing firms, Zopa Limited (Zopa) and The Bristol Pound Community Interest Company (the Bristol Pound), respectively, are established leaders in their respective product areas: Zopa was established in 2005 and the Bristol Pound in 2010. Each of these firms seeks to disrupt an established financial market through the application of digital technologies and processes: consumer lending for Zopa and retail payment for the Bristol Pound. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report is comprised of three primary sections: descriptions of the business and technological processes of each of Zopa and the Bristol Pound, and a final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.3DaRoC is funded by the UK’s Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ initiative. It has a substantial research budget of over £320K, with £35K of additional industrial support

Training and Perceived Organizational Support: An Analysis of the Impact of the Organizational Training Support Index and the Survey of Perceived Organizational Support

Both the Survey of Perceived Organizational Support and the Organizational Training Support Index focus on employee perceptions of organizational support. The present research asked three specific questions related to the relationship between these instruments and their respective constructs. A positive, moderate relationship was found between the two items. Additionally, the present research indicates similar reliability coefficients between the two instruments. Finally, neither gender nor education levels were found to mediate differences between the constructs

Applying the Q Sort Method: A Qualitative Classification of Factors Associated with Organizational Training Support Inventory (OTSI)

The Q Sort Method was applied to the Organizational Training Support Inventory (OTSI) in an initial exploratory effort to identify the categories or factors that are measured by the OTSI and included in the general construct of organizational support for training. Subject matter experts (SMEs) used a listing of eight potential categories or factors as a basis for grouping and organizing each of the 25 items which comprise the OTSI. Results of the categorization revealed that seven constructs appear to be measured in the OTSI, which include organizational strategy, finance and budgeting, training evaluation, resource allocation, organizational culture and organizational practices. Further research implications and recommendations are provided

Security Analysis, Agency Costs, and UK Firm Characteristics

This paper assesses the monitoring power of security analysts from the manager-shareholder conflict perspective. Using a sample of UK firms tracked by security analysts, our evidence supports the view that security analysis acts as a monitoring mechanism in reducing agency costs. We also find that security analysts are more effective in reducing agency costs for smaller and more focused firms rather than larger and more diversified firms suggesting that for larger and more complex firms security analysis is less effective. The UK findings suggest that the monitoring role of security analysts is not restricted to the U.S. capital market environment.

Developing Dynamic Capabilities in Environments of Persistent Disturbances

Dynamic capabilities explain how firms adapt to environmental dynamism by modifying their underlying resources and capabilities. However, despite a robust understanding of how dynamic capabilities are influenced by different dimensions of environmental dynamism (eg. velocity), scholars have not explained how dynamic capabilities develop in the presence of different configurations of environmental dynamism. Common configurations of environmental dynamism include environmental shifts, which pertain to discontinuous environmental change, and ongoing environmental change, which depicts hypercompetitive environments. In this thesis, I explore how dynamic capabilities develop in the context of a configuration of environmental dynamism that I call persistent disturbances, defined as repeated temporary events confronting firms. My research investigates how firms build and further develop dynamic capabilities in the presence of persistent disturbances. In my research, I engaged in an inductive historical case study to build new and to elaborate on existing dynamic capability theory. I chose the North American automotive industry for my context, focusing on the time period between 1965 and 2010, during which the industry was confronted with persistent disturbances in the form of labour difficulties, economic cycles, competitive pressures, energy challenges, and government regulations. I focused my analysis on three firms: General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. I created a longitudinal dataset consisting of both qualitative and quantitative data obtained from archival sources including annual reports and the Ward’s Automotive Yearbooks. I analyzed these data in three iterative stages. First, I focused on identifying the persistent disturbances that had impacts on automotive firms. Second, I explored how the firms in my study responded to those persistent disturbances. Third, I built new theory and elaborated existing theory pertaining to how dynamic capabilities develop over time in the presence of persistent disturbances. My analysis yielded important findings. First, I found that, in response to persistent disturbances, dynamic capabilities developed through a process of capability layering. The result was a dynamic capability architecture that comprised layers of capabilities that functioned to facilitate change. Dynamic capability development proceeds from early periods of coping towards increasing technical fitness as firms build new dynamic capability layers by adding and modifying the capabilities that functioned as building blocks supporting the dynamic capability. My research also distinguished persistent disturbances from other configurations of environmental dynamism and offer insights regarding how different configurations of environmental dynamism influence dynamic capability development. Overall, this thesis makes important contributions to dynamic capability theory and to understanding the role of environmental dynamism in strategic management scholarship. My thesis also has important implications for practice