- The Value Migration Toward Services
- The Emergence of Service Platforms
- Elements of a Service Platform
- Conclusion
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The Emergence of Service Platforms
The trend toward services delivery via portals is clear in the travel, car rental, and lodging industries, which are digitizing faster than others. Customers are gravitating to companies that are capable of delivering integrated services. Companies such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, hotels.com, and lastminute.com have helped to change the way in which leisure and business travelers plan and book travel. These companies have created service platforms that provide the inventory, booking tools, fulfillment, itinerary change management, and support that customers crave.
The race is on in multiple industries to build service platforms that deliver better user experiences and end-to-end services across multiple channels. But what exactly is the definition of a service platform? A service platform integrates multiple applications from various departments, business units, or partners to deliver a seamless experience for the customer, employee, manager, or supplier. Hiding the back-end complexity and creating a business process management plus an application integration layer that ties the various pieces together is the essence of the service platform. (See Figure 2 for a simplified view of a service platform.)
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2 Integration around customer needs.
It's becoming evident that services digitization is most powerful when it's engineered on integrated service platforms. Services digitization has progressed quickly and dramatically. In five short years, businesses have created a new genre of online processes. These processes evolved from simple task automation such as order entry to large-scale composite processes such as order-to-fulfillment that support strategic digitization focal points.
Companies implementing digitization have switched tactics in recent years and are approaching it from the outside in; that is, "walking in the customer's shoes" or "creating services aligned with what the customer wants," as opposed to working inside out; that is, "what's good for the company is good for customers." This shift is forcing parallel changes from an internal applications mindset to an external services mindset. Evidence of this paradigm shift is mounting, indicated by the rapid diffusion of enterprise portals. Service delivery through enterprise portals is becoming part and parcel of certain industries.