Daniel Beverungen

---

Mission statement

• Coordination: To network with researchers from QUT to further shape the research directions of the NSS project: Currently, the topics investigated in the area of the Networked Service Society are clustered into 5 general topics. During my stay, we will identify more detailed propects for our joint research to keep the work of the NSS project focused.
• Research: During my stay, I will cooperate with researchers from QUT on Service Bundling issues. In the recent years I was involved in the research project ServPay in which we dealt with marketing service/goods offerings. Our team investigated issues of modeling, configuring, pricing, cost calculation, and total cost of ownership of services, all of which are topics that are closely related to service bundling. Since Service Bundling is one of the focal areas of service research at QUT, joining forces in this area seems particularly beneficial.
• Teaching: I accepted the invitation of QUT to participate as an External Panel Member at the Doctoral Consortium to be held by the BPM group at QUT on July 12th. The purpose of the consortium is to advice PhD students on the current progress and future directions of their theses. Besides, it is an ideal setting for exchanging thoughts with the entire team.
• Conference: I will participate in the Pacific Asian Conference of Information Systems (PACIS) which will be held at QUT in Brisbane from July 7th to July 11th. PACIS is the major IS conference in the AIS Region 3.
• Joint research with Australian companies: We have established ties with AFSMI Germany and Australia as well as with Service Managers Asia Pacific in order to perform joint research with the cutting edge of manufacturing-oriented service companies in Australia. I intend to further establish these ties by presenting our research to companies interested in further cooperation.
• Student Exchange programs: I will work towards the mutual acceptance of courses that a student enrols in at WWU and QUT. The idea behind this is to further increase the mobility of our students and PhD students.

---

Research results

With the increasing role of services in the economy and organizations, service offerings gain more and more prominence. A good enough core solution (a physical product, a service, or a combination of goods and services) is necessary to compete in the marketplace, but is not sufficient for a competitive advantage. This requires an enhanced offering consisting of physical product components, service components, information, personal attention and other elements of customer relationships. It is labeled a service offering, even when the core solution is based on a physical product, because all elements of the offering are combined to provide a value-generating service for customers.

Bundling services with other services or with products provides a way to create new service offerings or to enhance exiting service offerings. Generally, a bundle represents a package that contains at least two elements and presents some kind of value-add to potential consumers. The benefits of bundling for business have long been recognised in literature, for example the opportunity to increase competitive advantages for an organisation over rivals in the market or to create entry barriers for potential market penetrators. The advances in information and communication technology, in particular the internet has made service bundling even more prominent. More and more (new) services become electronically available and there are new opportunities to bundle services, for example, via one-stop portals. Moreover, this opportunity is not only recognized by the private companies, also government is looking more and more for new ways of service its citizens in a more effective and efficient way.

While a considerable amount of literature addressing the process of service design or new service development can be found today, much less is known about approaches that facilitate the creation of adequate service bundles. Despite the fact that companies across all industry sectors with increased market pressures are challenged by the issue of service bundling, only little guidance has been provided so far for the identification of potential bundle candidates and for the actual process of bundling, whereas much has been written about strategic objectives and pricing strategies for bundling decisions.

In order to identify and systematise approaches for service bundling, a common understanding is needed about the influencing factors of the scenario, into which the process of service bundling is embedded. In other words, our leading research question can be stated as: What are the contextual factors that influence the act of service bundling? The theoretical contribution of this research is twofold. First, we differentiate bundling scenarios conceptually by presenting a layered model of the service bundling task. Second, we offer a morphological box that contains a set of contextual factors relevant for describing any given service bundling scenario. This morphological box can guide analysts and designers of bundling scenarios in setting up a field description of the environment in which the bundling task takes place. Designers can then use this field description to inform the design processes of IT artefacts to perform or support the bundling task.

Additionally, our future work will be focused on identifying methods that can support the service bundling task in different scenarios in the first place, in order to reason about which methods are applicable contingent on the properties encountered in different service bundling scenarios. For instance, we expect recommendation approaches such as collaborate filtering to be applicable for informing the bundling in government scenarios and in B2C scenarios, whereas these approaches have shortcomings in the B2B areas due to the uniqueness of customer needs, the complexity of the solutions, and a lack of mass transaction data. On the other hand, other techniques that are frequently used in the B2B realm might not be applicable or economically justifiable when having to deal with hundreds or even thousands of services simultaneously in B2C or G2C ecosystems. In our future work we will investigate this issue in more depth by identifying which of the contextual factors contained in the morphological box influence the applicability and selection of methods for service bundling.

Finally, we identify an intriguing prospect for future research in service bundling in moving from the company or dyad level of analysis to the network level. Since no company can own all the resources for satisfying their clients’ needs alone, we expect that companies will increasingly partner with other actors in order to supply their customers with even more comprehensive offerings. This trend has been discussed under the headwords of service ecosystems or service marketplaces. However, IT artefacts for bringing these concepts to life still seem to be in their infancy, which leaves plenty of research opportunities still to be investigated.