Socially intense environments

Services will be services but are all services services? Services as research area and as an area for practitioners are extensive and have taken steps forward over the past 40-50 years. The definitions of services have been developed and especially so in the area called service management. Leading researchers such as Grönroos have produced great value through their research in the work of describing the distinctive features of services but also by pointing out similarities between service operations and industrial production.

Practitioners have usually taken a different path for the development of services, but over all it can be argued with good reason that service management as a school has provided the foundations for more efficient services providing and service operations have over time been able to deliver faster and at a lower unit cost. The societal benefits so far are therefore significant. Society enjoys services to an extent like never before and often at very reasonable costs.

The service management school has fundamentally adopted the view of process orientation as the leading mantra for efficiency and customer approach. Today, there is probably no service company with self-respect that does not allow process-oriented operations improvement programs in the name of efficiency. And for good reason, since services seen from the service management school are relatively simple services, that are often successfully married to modern IT solutions to enable customers to interact with the chosen service provider over the internet.

Service factories have been set up in remote parts of the world with low wage levels to further affect unit costs. Services seen from the service management school are in many ways a cost-effective support business that is the glue between the customer and the business where the business internally, however, seeks more value-adding elements that can lift the entire business away from an often-bloody price / performance situation.

The service management school has over time come to provide a second perspective where service management is launched as a general way of describing any business’ value creation. In doing so, Grönroos et al raise the question of whether all businesses are to be regarded as service operations.

Much to be regarded as a reaction to the strong focus on process orientation of services, the idea emerged in the 1990s that the efforts of all employees participating in the service operations could not easily be subject to process-orientation. The foundation for this idea was not novel but related to what had already in the 1950s come to be called “the knowledge worker”.

The logics was simply that some employees were in a situation that was characterized by a high degree of knowledge transfer and knowledge refinement. Most actors realized that these services could not be easily, or perhaps not at all, described by a strict process metaphor.

The countervailing answer was launched during the 1990s and was labeled "knowledge management". The idea was to give knowledge-intense, individuals and teams, in a given business a context and support for continued development. An important part of the development was the reuse of produced knowledge, i.e., structural capital would have to be created to a much higher extent than previously.

Knowledge management as a concept was quickly adopted by IT consultants that saw business opportunities in creating efficient databases for knowledge refinement, for sharing (primarily internally) and for building structural capital. With the IT sector's rapid action and adoption of the concept, the concept fell as an instrument in the business as a whole and became synonymous with IT solutions. Truth be told, the IT sector made a very significant effort in this regard, which should in no way be diminished, but the downside of it all was that knowledge management fell into oblivion. In the light of this, the thread was lost in the daily work regarding the parts of the service business that was not perceived to be easily process-oriented.

Our answer to the title's question is that services occur in different forms and that the answer to how these parts of the service business should be handled needs to be nuanced depending on the scope and nature of the knowledge content.

We conclude this section by noting that in part has the growth of service production fueled the effort to identify, to label, what kind the contemporary society is. A variety of headings of society have arisen. The headings proposals have been many, but some of the most prominent can be said to be "the information society", "the knowledge society" and "the individual society". All three labels describe how viewers have seen and described society from an overarching perspective and in doing so captured an important aspect each. However, none of these concepts provide an answer to how businesses should be built, managed, and organized.

On the other hand, if we take the first parts out of each concept, we are left with three keywords: information, knowledge and individual, all which are of interest in the contemporary perspective, the socially intense environment.