Connectivity in and around Organizations:Waves, tensions and trade-offs

Connectivity has become the foundation for organizing as it increasingly underpins and defines the way we live and work. Notwithstanding all the advances in connectivity within organizations, there are even more pervasive changes between and around organizations. In a digital world, more and more of us are working anytime, anyplace, and companies deliver value by better connecting with customers and external partners within digital ecosystems. In this introduction to the Special Issue, we summarize four waves of connectivity – globalization, socialization, personalization and datafication – that combine to create opportunities and challenges for contemporary organizations. We then introduce the papers in the special issue and discuss their contributions to theory and practice. Finally, we draw upon currently emerging challenges to suggest enduring tensions and trade-offs for connectivity research in the future

Service Science

Service science, or service science, management, and engineering (SSME), is an emerging interdisciplinary academic discipline that aims at understanding service and service systems. Initially spearheaded by IBM Corporation, the discipline has matured in recent years. The state of service science to date has reached a point where universities around the world offer degree programs, while academics and practitioners alike advance the field through a variety of specialized journals and conferences

Connectivity in distributed service systems: The providers' perspective

`Connectivity', an emerging metaphor for interactions in and around organizations originating from organizational studies, is known to positively influence the performance of distributed or `virtual' teams. We posed the question of whether there can be too little or too much connectivity between organizational actors, and whether social or technical aspects of connectivity matter most. In this paper, we report on the analysis of the data from our survey gathered from 101 individuals within 75 Indian IT service providers. We explore the relationship between organizational performance (as represented by communication effectiveness and efficiency) and the nature of connectivity among individuals within these service systems. The results show that while having a robust technical infrastructure is important, optimizing the social dimension of connectivity is perhaps more important in the long run, to increase that system's ability to co-create value