Abstract
Forecasting is never an exact science, but the exercise of trying to anticipate emergent trends is important for policy makers. This chapter opens our discussion of service productivity by looking at how services have changed over the past 25 years and particularly how that process has been affected by the increasing use of information technologies—IT. It draws on a major programme of research originally commissioned by the UK government through its National Economic Development Office and describes a Delphi survey involving experts from a wide range of backgrounds who were trying to forecast the future with information technology. The chapter is written by the original researchers, Ian Miles, Howard Rush, and John Bessant, who use the opportunity to look back and reflect on what has been changing and how some key secular trends remain and could be used to provide guidance to practitioners and policy-makers involved with issues of service productivity improvement.
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Or 2-D Horizons, when dealing with the extraordinarily thin new materials, like graphene, that are now under development.
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Thatcher’s successors in the Conservative Party are now promoting industrial rebalancing—away from overreliance on financial services in particular—but that is another story!
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The industrialisation of services is, of course, one aspect of this relevant to the present chapter.
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We were well aware of such phenomena, having encountered them personally in the course of the first introduction of PCs into our own offices.
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Unfortunately, degrading them may be rather less time-consuming—it would only take a major solar storm to wipe out most of our communications infrastructure and electronics, and many large systems are dangerously vulnerable to accidents or attacks on their key nodes. Dealing with these fragilities is surely another grand challenge we need to confront urgently.
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More serious issues are raised by online pornography and stalking, cyber-surveillance and fraud, problems which may well lead to some restrictions on the ways in which new IT is used. But this is far from rolling back on this use.
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How do we assess the value of the succession of services within such sectors as legal, medical, consultancy, design services, for example?
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Gadrey cites indicators such as the volume of goods sold in retailing, the number of people admitted to hospitals, tons of goods carried so many kilometres in air transport, premiums or losses in insurance, amongst others.
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For example, use of IT and standardisation of products—sometimes through IT use.
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Through an emphasis on intangible elements of the product, customisation of products, closer contact with customers, again enhanced by IT use.
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Consider the major classes of business services: computer services, R&D and testing services, professional and operational services. All are commonplace activities conducted within firms in practically every economic sector.
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Miles, I., Rush, H., Bessant, J. (2014). Services Transformation Through New Information Technology: Information Horizons Revisited. In: Bessant, J., Lehmann, C., Moeslein, K. (eds) Driving Service Productivity. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05975-4_2
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