2.3 Effects of IT and ITeS on Service Innovation
IT has been proved to be a useful tool in
service innovation. Previous studies have suggested
various roles for IT in service innovation and
discovered that IT is a critical component of services
in numerous industries (e.g., healthcare, financial
services, engineering, and management consulting).
For example, Shang and Chen [25] conducted a
survey on the retail industry and concluded that, to
leverage IT to gain competitiveness, firms may adopt
any combination of the four possible strategies (i.e.,
predator, inventor, follower, and hedger).
ITeS is one type of innovation relevant to IT.
Based on the results of 10 instances of successful
IT-enabled innovation, Ashurst et al. [1] concluded
the following. First, IT-enabled business innovation is
critical for exploration and exploitation activities. In
addition, agile and benefit-oriented approaches to IT
can contribute to innovation. Third, leadership in
innovation is often separate from IT. Finally, IT
innovation is a new paradigm rather than a new set of
methods and practices. Therefore, ITeS may account
for one third of the IT paradigm, meaning that
investigation of how IT differs from previous
paradigms of technology implementation as well as a
planned approach to benefit realization are necessary.
However, few studies have emphasized the role of
ITeS in service innovation [5].
Froehle and Roth [9] focused on
technology-mediated customer contact, which
comprises five modes (or distinct conceptual
archetypes) of customer contact in relation to
technology, as illustrated in Fig. 2. The first archetype
is technology-free customer contact, which typifies
traditional notions of face-to-face service encounters
and states that technology does not play a direct role
in service provision. The second archetype is
technology-assisted customer contact, in which
service representatives employ technology as an
manner of improving face-to-face contact, but
customers do not access the technology. The third
archetype is technology-facilitated customer contact,
in which both the service representative and the
customer access the same technology during
face-to-face service encounters. Technology-mediated
customer contact is the fourth archetype, in which the
customer and the human service representative are
not in the same physical location, thus creating an
indirect contact service context.
Technology-generated customer contact is the fifth
archetype, in which technology replaces the existing
service provider; self-service technology is the most
representative example. Numerous researchers
believe that the framework proposed by Froehle and
Roth [9] is suitable not only for identifying customer
contacts but also for classifying ITeS (by replacing
customer contact with service innovation)