Services science and human resources

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Services science and human resources
Services Forum, January 6th 2009

• Dr Philip Stiles
• Judge Business School
• University of Cambridge
• p.stiles_at_jbs.cam.ac.uk

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The importance of people in SSME development
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The human dimension is partly about changing
mindset...
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and partly about embracing other disciplines
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Service-Profit Triangle
(Teboul, 2005, p. 33).
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SSME has to consider human, social and
organizational capitals (talent, relationships,
and culture)
The firms strategy The individual business
strategies and how they align with the firms
strategy
Direction
Organisational capital
Social capital
Leadership and people
The Firms values The knowledge flow
structure Routines and artefacts and beliefs
How does talent link up? What are the formal and
informal ties within the firm?
Structure and culture
Relationships
Human capital
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Assumption for human capital is for increased
skill development the T-shaped person

• A New Discipline Services Science to provide
  a framework for understanding and improving
  service delivery..
• High Calibre Personnel who not only have in-depth
  expertise in a key area of service delivery, but
  also a broad general knowledge of the range of
  skills needed to design and deliver new,
  innovative services
• Most current graduate and post-graduate education
  is focussed on producing highly trained experts
  in a relatively narrow field of knowledge
• A key issue for companies is how to train or
  recruit people with the wide general skills
  needed to deliver high-quality services the
  horizontal of the T.

Increasing Economic Significance of Services
Increasing Recognition of need to for new mix of
skills
The T shaped person IBM 200x
The Versatilist Gartner Group 2005
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Key Attributes of people working in Service
Science

• Adaptive Innovator / Versatilist
• managing across a broad set of business and
  technical disciplines
• Consider
• Business objectives
• IT Technology
• People - Cultural and Human system dynamics
• Analyse large and/or complex processes
• across private public sectors
• Demonstrate customer interaction skills
  equivalent to a business consultant
• ideas, recommendations and knowledge among
  individuals from varying backgrounds
• Ability to Articulate, Understand Key Concepts
  make trade-offs across
• engineering, project management, business
  management, marketing, finance, design, computer
  science, systems engineering, information
  management, and the social or behavioural
  sciences
• Working knowledge of Service Concepts
• front-stage, back-stage, service mind-set,
  service innovation, service dominant logic,

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But services are not just about knowledge work,
but often low skill low value work
Internalization
Externalization

• Core HC
• Mode Knowledge work
• - staff based on potential
• - develop (firm-specific)
• - extensive pay benefits
• - autonomy/self-direction
• - mistakes are important

• Idiosyncratic HC
• Mode Partnership
• - select on past experience
• - develop the relationship
• - evolving scope
• - rewards for ideas

Relational
low Uniqueness high

• Compulsory HC
• Mode Traditional job
• - staff based on current skill
• - less development
• - market wage
• - focus on ST performance
• - mistakes above the water line

• Ancillary HC
• Mode Contract work
• - standardize/simple (outsource)
• - focus on rules procedures
• - narrow scope
• - error avoiding
• - hourly pay

Transactional
WARNING These general trends may not be
appropriate for your particular circumstances.
low Strategic Value high
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Key issues for SSME human capital

• High value
• Where will T-shaped people come from?
• What will attract these individuals pay, career
  paths, recognition?
• Low-level services
• How to integrate frontline service personnel?
• How to motivate and integrate individuals on low
  pay and status?

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Organic growth Innovation - combining resources
Organizational innovation is often a process of
creating new social connections between people,
and the ideas and resources they carry, so as to
produce novel combinations Innovation emerges
from the active combination of people, knowledge,
and resources This emphasizes the innovation
process and not the innovator
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New ideas and coordination
Networks with an abundance of structural holes,
by situating people at the confluence of
different social domains, create opportunities
for the novel combination and recombination of
ideas. Structural holes pose an action problem,
however, because the dispersed, unconnected
people found around structural holes are
inherently more difficult to mobilize or
coordinate, especially around novel ideas. Burt
(2004) found that while structural holes led to
good ideas, there was no evidence that those
ideas led to implementation efforts, let alone
implementation success Dense networks, in
contrast, have an opportunity structure conducive
to initial mobilization but one that hinders the
generation of new ideas.
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Social capital and structural holes
Good ideas emerge from selection and synthesis
across the structural holes between groups (Burt
2004)
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Key issues for SSME social capital

• Divide between service innovators and service
  operatives is this desirable?
• Levels of analysis issues both horizontal
  transfer across units but also vertical transfer
  across hierarchical levels

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Conclusions

• The people element of SSME comprises human,
  social and organisational capitals
• For SSME to succeed, T-shaped people are required
• But this underplays the importance of ordinary
  service employees