Search results for "Service delivery"

Transformations in Lifelong Guidance Provision

2012

In this chapter, the transformations taking place at the different levels of guidance provision are analyzed. The aim was to provide a tool to examine the interface between multisectoral guidance practice and policy development. On the basis of earlier research on regional guidance networks, a model is introduced in which schools, social, health, and public employment services can jointly design, implement, and evaluate guidance services. The model for Networked Guidance Service Provision (NEGSEP) focuses separately on the developmental needs of guidance services visible to clients, both with regard to service delivery and strategic dimensions. Along this line, a framework for networked gui…

A System Dynamics Approach to Enhance Tourism Service Delivery Performance through Value Co-Creation

2013

Improvement of a Service Level Negotiation Protocol using Formal Verification

2013

International audience; The goal of the pervasive connectivity is to enable mobile users to be permanently connected to the Internet. Mobile users are often connected to wireless networks and consuming services that require quality of service guarantees. Accessing services using wireless technologies may make the service delivery vulnerable to security attacks because of the open medium of these technologies. In this context, we need to guarantee both quality of service and security for mobile users communications. In this paper, we present a protocol for service level negotiation which covers both quality of service and security and assigns a profile to each user in order to optimize and a…

Absorptive capacity and its impact on innovation and performance: findings from SEM and fsQCA

2018

Innovation can provide sustainable competitive advantages to service companies that consider the absorption of external knowledge a key strategic issue. Using the four dimensions of absorptive capacity, this study examined the impact of absorptive capacity on innovation in service delivery processes and explored how this innovation influences business performance. Structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) were applied to a sample of 134 companies drawn from the Colombian tourism sector. The results of the SEM indicate that innovation in service delivery processes is positively influenced by two of the four dimensions of absorptive capacity…

Doing gendered and (dis)embodied work. Care work in the context of medico-managerial welfare state

2013

Whether and how technology-driven managerial reforms affect the field of human service work is a timely question for social sciences. In an increasingly technology-assisted working-life, material conditions such as one’s age and gender may be losing their significance as signifiers of professional identity. Welfare service work is traditionally understood as feminine work that comprises of embodied, situational and social practices of care work. Over the past few decades, public management reforms have called for reassessment of welfare service workers’ occupational skills through practices of medico-managerial service management and occupational accountability. As a result, workers technic…

Does cooperation affect service delivery costs? Evidence from fire services in Norway

2017

The objective of this study is to develop our understanding of how cooperation between local governments affects service delivery costs. The current study provides three contributions to the existing literature: (1) we assess the relation between inter-municipal cooperation and service delivery costs for fire services; (2) we evaluate whether different forms of cooperation affect costs differently; and (3) we analyse how the number of cooperation partners affects the cooperation–cost relation. Theoretically, it is argued that cooperation promotes scale economies, but that increasing transaction costs from additional cooperation partners may outweigh these potential benefits. The data show t…

Semantic Web Services for Smart Devices in a “Global Understanding Environment”

2003

Various Web resources and services are usually assumed to be used and accessed by human users (current Web) or by software agents on behalf of human users (emerging Semantic Web). However industry emerges also a new group of “users”, which are smart industrial devices, robots or any other objects, which can be adapted to the (Semantic) Web environment. They would need special services for e.g. online condition monitoring, information provisioning, remote diagnostics, maintenance support, etc. The goal of this paper is to specify main requirements to Web services that automatically follow up and predict the performance and maintenance needs of field devices. Semantic Web enabled services for…

Building a Medical Research Cloud in the EASI-CLOUDS Project

2014

The demand for IT resources is constantly growing in the scientific area. The ability to store and process increasing amounts of data has transformed many research disciplines, like the life-sciences, which now rely on complex data processing and data analytics. Cloud environments are able to integrate and encapsulate possibly distributed resources and allow convenient and on-demand access to the corresponding services, tools, and complete work environments. The European research project EASI-CLOUDS (http://www. easi-clouds.eu) develops a platform for a convenient service delivery with special regard to service integration, monitoring, management, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiati…

Practitioners’ Experiences of Social Media in Career Services

2015

A growing number of career practitioners and career centers are reaching out to individuals and community members in new ways by integrating various social media tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, into their professional practices (e.g., Dyson, 2012; Osborn & LoFrisco, 2012). To many, social media are simply online tools to share information and to communicate and socialize with one another. In the broader sense, social media is defined as a process whereby individuals and groups build a common understanding and meaning with contents, communities, and Web 2.0 technology (e.g., Ahlqvist, Back, Heinonen, & Halonen, 2010; Kangas, Toivonen, & Back, 2007).An extensive body of litera…

How perceived value drives the use of mobile financial services apps

2019

Mobile information services have revolutionized business models and service delivery methods by facilitating consumer access to information and order placement via mobile apps. In developed markets, mobile banking (m-banking) and mobile payment (m-payment) applications have replaced text-based mobile services. However, extant research has not addressed these mobile financial services apps (MFSAs) adequately from the perspective of consumer behavior. Thus, the present study developed and tested a series of hypotheses related to the antecedents of perceived value of MFSA use; it also examined how such use affects the development of customers’ overall relationships with banks. Our hypotheses w…