Digital services for consumers
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PREFACE
Digital services for consumers Jan Marco Leimeister & Hubert Österle & Steven Alter
Published online: 19 November 2014 # Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen 2014
This issue includes four papers that tackle important issues in the context of our special issue “Digital Services for Consumers”. As we highlighted in our call for papers, mobile computing, high speed communication, internet of things, and a plethora of services available through several devices change the way we live. This is a huge potential but also a challenge for consumers as well as enterprises. We observe that this digitization of our everyday life has already led to a change in the preferences of the customers and this change will continue (Dellarocas 2013; Rechert et al. 2014; Reichhart et al. 2013). Successful services are often personalized, context adaptive, real-time, available anywhere, connected, and fun to use. The digital user has become powerful, since the competitor is just one click away. Thus, only perceivable usefulness, ease of use, and individual user-centricity of the service will bind the user to an offering. These innovative services have emerged first in the consumer world, making consumer markets for the first time the pacemakers of IT transformation. Furthermore, these consumer IT innovations change user expectations fundamentally, not only with respect to IT services, but to products and services in general. Everything as a service - when, how, and where each user wants it – becomes a paradigm for many successful new J. M. Leimeister (*) Resarch Center for IS Design (ITeG), Chair for Information Systems, University of Kassel, Pfannkuchstrasse 1, 34121 Kassel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. M. Leimeister : H. Österle Institute of Information Management (IWI HSG), University of St. Gallen, Müller-Friedberg-Strasse 8, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland H. Österle e-mail: [email protected] S. Alter School of Management, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, 94117 San Francisco, CA, USA
offerings. In this new Digital World, companies have much more problems understanding and anticipating customer demands since user behavior and preferences have changed dramatically. Most of the traditional approaches for designing and delivering products and services in this digital world seem outdated and incapable to address this fast changing environment of digital users (Leimeister et al. 2014). Consequently, we need to answer a vast amount of new questions: What services are useful, best adapted to each and every user? Which are fun to use? How to handle complexity of different offerings? What types of services have which benefit, when, how, and for whom? What services around product offerings are most beneficial for which purpose? Which services work best for digital natives and digital immigrants? What are underlying mechanisms for explaining successful design, use, and effects of digital services for consumers? Service innovations, new ways of service creation, orchestration
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