Hospitality and Service

By Harry Katzan Jr.

This book is a continuation of the study of service for beginning students of the subject and for persons that just want to know what it is. It is easy reading, suitable for a travel read or a beach read. It could serve as a source book for a person writing a bachelor’s thesis. It could be useful for a manager whose service employees are not performing up to par.
Millions of dollars are wasted every year by businesses, even though, they are first rate, their hospitality people act like unruly rascals. How do you start a service business? I wouldn’t like to start one or bring one back after the misery of the pandemic world we have experienced in the past few years. What about the next few years?
Politicians are constantly under fire, because they are perceived to be concerned with their own well being, instead of their constituency. What kind of service is the media providing, when they produce fiction rather than fact? Look at advertising and professional sports. Do you believe any of that stuff they produce in the way of news.
This book is for the youngster who asks what his mother or father does all day. Do they just push people around, or do they help people achieve their true worth to the business or organization they represent.
What about the car dealer that is constantly scrambling around for new business? What about some of the new stuff in business technology? Do we even know what we don’t know?
This book is for all of the above. I sincerely hope the book is a service to you.

The Author
December 17, 2020

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663215789

Harry Katzan Jr.

Harry Katzan, Jr. is a professor who has written books and papers on computer science and service science, in addition to few novels. He has been an AI consultant and has developed systems in LISP, Prolog, and Mathematica. He and his wife have lived in Switzerland where he was a banking consultant and a visiting professor of artificial intelligence. He holds bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees.

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Copyright © 2021 Harry Katzan Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-1577-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-1579-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-1578-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020925767

iUniverse rev. date:   12/23/2020

To Margaret

CONTENTS

Introduction

Preface

1

A BRIEF LOOK AT HOSPITALITY

Well, What is Hospitality?

What does a hospitality person do?

Hospitality at Home

Hospitality in Business

With Employees and Superiors

Hospitality Precedes Service

Hospitality is Structural (that is, it is Teamwork)

Teamwork Problem Solving

Team Processes

Quick Summary

Key Terms

Selected Reading

2

A BRIEF LOOK AT SERVICE

Service and Employment

Service Characteristics

Service and Organizations

Business Service

Differences between Products and Services

Classification of Services

People Processing Services

Possession Processing Services

Information Processing Services

Characteristics of Services

Quick Summary

Key Terms

Selected Reading

3

SERVICE SYSTEMS

Service Facilities

The Service Factory

The Service Shop

The Service Portal

Mobile Service Facilities

Client Facilities

Service Implementation

Business Service Systems

Globalization

Information and Communications Technology

Collaborative Services

Outsourcing

Offshoring

Outsourcing and Offshoring

Transformational Outsourcing

Mass Production

Sharing

Composite Services

Service Process Organization

An Organization Example – Retailing and Services

Service, Service Providers, and Service Process

Transitional Service Organization Model

Quick Summary

Key Terms

Selected Reading

4

INFORMATION SERVICE

Information Service Concepts

A Personal Dimension

Data versus Information

Ordinary Mail

Is Software a Service?

Enterprise Information Services

Business Information

Transaction Services

Information Processing

Client and Provider Input to an Information Service

Interaction Services

Service Bus

Collaboration

Information Service Applications

Pull versus Push

Enterprise Service Constituents

Information Service Model

Scope of Electronic Information Services

Electronic Commerce

Electronic Business

Electronic Marketplace

Electronic Government

Personal Information Services

Chat Rooms

Instant Messaging

Front and Back Stages

Internet Telephone

Web Auctions

User Generated Media

Social Networking

Newsgroups

Quick Summary

Key Terms

Selected Reading

5

THE MANAGEMENT OF SERVICE

Service Management Concepts

Information Technology

Domain of Service Management

Service as a Business

Service Componentization

IT Services Sourcing

IT Services Management

Elements in the Service Lifecycle

Service Strategy

Service Design

Service Transition

Service Operation

Continuous Improvement

Constraint Management

Bottlenecks

Virtual Workforce

Value Nets

The Pull Model for Service Agility

Service Quality

Client’s View of Service Quality

Process View of Service Quality

Enterprise View of Quality

Utility Computing

Quick Summary

Key Terms

Selected Reading

6

THE BUSINESS OF SERVICE

Service Business Concepts

Business Model

Strategy and Mission

Service Ecosystem

Strategic Assets

Service Context

Service Perspective

Service Systems Thinking

Service Factors

Provider-Side View of Service Provisioning

Client-Side View of Service Provisioning

Business Value Creation

Availability, Capacity, Continuity, Security, and Risk

Service Assets

Service Portfolio

Service-Level Management

Availability Management

Capacity Management

Service-Desk Management

Incident Management

Problem Management

Change Management

Directory-Services Management

Governance

Quick Summary

Selected Reading

INTRODUCTION

Providing service is an important subject that most people should know about, because most of us provide services and use services in our daily lives. This book mainly covers what a service is and what it should be. Many persons are service providers, but refer to themselves with a professional a title, such as a doctor, dentist, or accountant. Of course, they are in fact service providers. Auto repair people are service providers. When we work for a company, we are providing service to it, while the company is providing an employment service to its employees. So, where does it start and where does it end?

The service that provides the assistance to people that is actually as service, per se, is hospitality, one of the most outwardly focused activities in the world today. A hotel is a hospitality business that actually calls itself a hospitality business.

Another consideration is what is achieved by the methods that enhance the process of providing hospitality by considering only how people work with guests and other forms of customers.

Here is how the book is organized. It starts with a chapter on hospitality, followed by several on service.

So let’s get started. The emphasis of the book is service, a new subject created as service science by IBM and accepted by more than 50 universities. Here is a short story to get the ball rolling

Recognizing that more than 80% of the country’s GNP results from services and also that more than 80% of the workforce is employed in services, Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM, initiated a corporate-wide program in Service Science that has transformed IBM and many other organizations. The cornerstone of the program is the fact that even though most of us are engaged in services, we really know very little about the subject. At the time, there was no academic subject called service science, no principles of service science, no theorems, and most importantly, there was no set of best practices. Palmisano has changed all of that. An important aspect of the IBM initiative is that it has enabled academic participation in the development of the subject matter through the establishment of a field called Service Science in a similar manner to the way IBM assisted in the development of academic programs in Computer Science, three or four decades ago. Responding to this situation, the IBM Corporation initiated a project in the years 2004-2007 to develop a science of services. The project has resulted in a tidal wave of activity within the business and university communities to study the subject and develop academic programs. With Service Science, we are interested in the underlying principles that define the subject matter and demonstrate its relationship to other disciplines.

PREFACE

In ordinary everyday language, a service is an activity that one entity provides for another entity, such as auto repair or dental work. The entity performing the service is called the service provider and the entity receiving the service is called the service consumer, even though different names usually apply. Services are important to people in business, government, education, health care and management, religion, military, scientific research, engineering, and other endeavors that are too numerous to mention. The subject is important to providers and consumers of services, alike. In fact, most service providers – be they individuals, businesses, governments, and so forth – are also consumers of services during the course of everyday life. A sage has said that in reality, everything is a service, because a consumer – when receiving an activity of some sort - is actually providing a service to the provider. Think about it. Even a person with an MD degree is actually not a service provider unless he or she has patients. This is a subject for another chapter or even another book.

Today, most of us are employed in performing a service of some kind. Typical examples are doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, entertainers, news people, dry cleaners, and maintenance workers. Actually, this should not be a surprise, since much of what we do in everyday life involves using a service. A service activity is characterized by the fact that the result is usually intangible, meaning, in this instance, that an artifact of some sort is not produced as a result of the service experience, as in the manufacture of a product. Most people never think about the many aspects of a service engagement. Therefore, basic concepts and some service definitions are definitely in order.

A service is a client/provider interaction that creates and captures value for both participants, and a service system is a system of people and technology that adapts to the changing value of knowledge in the system. The study of service is actually the study of service systems.

To be more specific, a service system is a socially constructed collection of service events in which participants exchange beneficial actions through a knowledge-based strategy that captures value from a provider-client relationship. The inherent service strategy is a dynamic process that orchestrates or coordinates components, employees, partners, and clients in the co-production of value. Based on a theoretical framework for creating economies of coordination, research on service incorporates a microanalysis of various and diverse service events, so as to develop a view of the services landscape.

The study of service is an