Mining User-Generated Repair Instructions from Automotive Web Communities

The objective of this research was to automatically extract user-generated repair instructions from large amounts of web data. An artifact has been created that classifies a web post as containing a repair instruction or not. Methods from Natural Language Processing are used to transform the unstructured textual information from a web post into a set of numerical features that can be further processed by different Machine Learning Algorithms. The main contribution of this research lies in the design and prototypical implementation of these features. The evaluation shows that the created artifact can accurately distinguish posts containing repair instructions from other posts e.g. containing problem reports. With such a solution, a company can save a lot of time and money that was previously necessary to perform this classification task manually

ADAPTING IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT FOR SUCCESSFUL MULTI-SOURCING SERVICE INTEGRATION

Over the last years, IT outsourcing customers have shifted their focus to multi-sourcing. To cope with the ever-increasing complexity of their multi-provider portfolios, companies aim to develop and hone their service integration capabilities. They adapt their IT organizations to enable more efficient and effective service management for their broad service landscapes. Nowadays, most IT service management implementations build on best practice of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL, however, does neither reflect multi-tenant sourcing models nor end-to-end service integration. IT service management needs to evolve to meet the new requirements of service integration. So far, however, there is a lack of guidance on how to adequately adapt IT service management for integration of multiple sourcing arrangements. Our research contributes to both theory and practice by developing a ranking of IT service management processes according to their importance for service integration success. For three important processes, we then reveal adequate implementations and process designs derived from real-life scenarios. Our results are developed during an multi-stage research study, incorporating insights from expert interviews, a quantitative questionnaire study, and case study research. The insights gained should enable multi-sourcing customers to build more successful service integration solutions, as well as academics to shape future research in this area

Towards a Technician Marketplace using Capacity-Based Pricing

Today, industrial maintenance is organized as an on-call business: Upon a customer’ s service request, the maintenance provider schedules a service technician to perform the demanded service at a suitable time. In this work, we address two drawbacks of this scheduling approach: First, the provider typically prioritizes service demand based on a subjective perception of urgency. Second, the pricing of technician services is inefficient, since services are priced on a time and material basis without accounting for additional service quality (e.g. shorter response time). We propose the implementation of a technician marketplace that allows customers to book technician capacity for fixed time slots. The price per time slot depends on the remaining capacity and therefore incentivizes customers to claim slots that match their objective task urgency. The approach is evaluated using a simulation study. Results show the capabilities of capacity-based pricing mechanisms to prioritize service demand according to customers’ opportunity costs

Retained Organizations in IT Outsourcing - Linking Organization Design to Outsourcing Management Problems

IT outsourcing is a strategic option which enables companies to focus on their core competencies. Over time however, many outsourcing arrangements suffer from severe problems. While the design of retained organizations is generally seen as a critical element, there is hardly any empirical evidence on how the choice of the organizational setup is linked to the occurrence of outsourcing management problems later on. In this work, a quantitative study across various outsourcing arrangements is used to identify the key outsourcing management problems and their interdependency with organizational attributes of retained organizations. It is shown that the key problems differ by outsourcing degree, and critical organizational attributes for each of these problems are unveiled. The paper’s objective is to enhance the design of retained organizations to enable more mature and successful outsourcing solutions as well as to provide foundations for future IS research

Does free-floating carsharing reduce private vehicle ownership? The case of SHARE NOW in European cities

During the last decade, the use of free-floating carsharing systems has grown rapidly in urban areas. However, little is known on the effects free-floating carsharing offerings have on car ownership in general. Also the main drivers why free-floating users sell their cars are still rarely analysed. To shed some light on these issues, we carried out an online survey among free-floating carsharing users in 11 European cities and based our analysis on a sample of more than 10,000 survey participants. Our results show that one carsharing car replaces several private cars – in optimistic scenarios up to 20 cars. In Copenhagen (followed by Rome, Hamburg, and London) one carsharing car replaces about two times more private cars than in Madrid, the city with the lowest number. The main non-city specific influencing factor of shedding a private car due to the availability of the free-floating carsharing services seems to be the usage frequency of the service. The more kilometres users drive with these cars, the more likely it becomes that they sell a private car (or they sell their car and, therefore, use this service more often). Further memberships of bikesharing and other carsharing services, users that live in larger buildings as well as users that own several cars are more likely to reduce their number of cars, too. Finally, our findings are highly valuable for carsharing operators and (transport) policy makers when introducing free-floating carsharing systems in further cities. According to our results, all 11 cities show a reduced private car fleet due to members’ access to free-floating carsharing

Building Dynamic Service Analytics Capabilities for the Digital Marketplace

Service firms are now interacting with customers through a multitude of channels or touchpoints. This progression into the digital realm is leading to an explosion of data, and warranting advanced analytic methods to manage service systems. Known as big data analytics, these methods harness insights to deliver, serve, and enhance the customer experience in the digital marketplace. Although global economies are becoming service-oriented, little attention is paid to the role of analytics in service systems. As such, drawing on a systematic literature review and thematic analysis of 30 in-depth interviews, this study aims to understand the nature of service analytics to identify its capability dimensions. Integrating the diverse areas of research on service systems, big data and dynamic capability theories, we propose a dynamic service analytics capabilities (DSAC) framework consisting of management, technology, talent, data governance, model development, and service innovation capability. We also propose a future research agenda to advance DSAC research for the emerging service systems in the digital marketplace