Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Services for'

The notion of service design as a design field has emerged during the last 10-15 years and seems to be growing more and more; a 2007 textbook on interaction design states: “The new frontier of interaction design is services” (Saffer, 2007, p. 174). Since the field is so young, there still are areas which hardly have been explored. One of these is cultural effects on service expectations. This thesis aims to help to fill in the knowledge gap by applying a model of cultural differences. The model used is the one developed by Geert Hofstede, which has been proved to be valid within a large number of varyingfields. This was done through the research question “Is Hofstede’s model applicable to service design in general, and individualization of services in particular?”.

The question was explored through two parallel research processes; a quantitative questionnaire distributed via the web and a qualitative evaluation of 47 different service web sites. The qualitative evaluation was done through a new method called Cultural Walkthrough. Four key countries were chosen; the questionnaire was aimed at natives of these countries and the web sites all came from these countries. The countries in question were Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the USA.

The results indicate that Hofstede’s model can’t be applied to service design straight off. Neither can they be used as a basis to deem the want for the possibility to individualize services, which seems to be dependent on the individual. The results indicate a large number of interesting questions for further research.

The objective of this thesis was to explore the topic of scalable web development, and it answered the question, “How do you scale a website to handle more traffic at peak times without wasting resources?” This is important research to any web company that has issues with rising costs as demand for their website increases. It would be wise for every online business to be prepared for more web traffic, before it occurs, without spending the budget of a multi-million user web company in low traffic periods. The last thing you want is an error as your customer base starts to arrive, giving them a bad experience for their first impressions, which would result in lost revenue.

Scalable software development architectures, including microservices, big data, and Kubernetes were studied, in addition to similar web service companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Match.com. A scalable architecture was designed for a social media web service, MeAndYou, using the big data configuration with a shared Aurora database, which was configured using an auto-scaling group attached to a load balancer in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was tested using a custom threaded Selenium-based Python script that applied simulated user load to the servers. As the load was applied, AWS added more Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running a virtual disk image of the web server. After the load was removed, the instances were terminated automatically by AWS to save costs.

Countless steps were taken to make the web service bigger and more scalable than it originally was, before testing, including adding more fields to user profiles, adding more search types, and separating the layers of code into different Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) files in the front-end. A version control system was configured on the servers using GitHub and rsync. The systems architecture designed suggests the Match Engine should use a stream processing message queue, which would allow the system to factor searches one at a time as they are created, with horizontal scaling capabilities, rather than grabbing the entire database and storing it in memory. The backend Match Engine was also tested for accuracy using Structured Query Language (SQL) injection, which determined how the match algorithm should be improved in the future.

Today’s competitive business environment forces companies to introduce new product and process innovations at an increasing pace. Almost every aspect of the modern business is supported by information technology systems which, consequently, must evolve at the same pace as the business. A company’s strategic view on IT reflects the strategic importance of IT in the organization, both in terms of the opportunities IT is expected to create and the commitment to IT the business organization is willing to make.

SOA is an emerging concept which aims to structure IT in a more flexible manner. The basic idea is to encapsulate distinct units of business logic in reusable services, which can be combined to support business processes. The term service granularity refers to the amount of logic contained in a service. Even though there is immense hype around SOA today, the concept of service granularity is still relatively unexplored. The service should be coarse grained enough to be reusable, but at the same time specific enough to fit the process. Most SOA literature avoids the subject as being too implementation specific and seldom makes any attempt to concretize the rather abstract term.

The research was conducted at Handelsbanken, which for years has worked with service-oriented principles. The researchers have been given the opportunity to closely analyze the bank’s service initiative. In order to gain an understanding beyond merely technical aspects a rich case study was built, based on interviews with professionals at all levels of the organization.

The research objective was divided in three parts. The first part was to factorize the notion of service granularity, or in other words to find a number of factors which together precisely describe the granularity of a service. The second part was to explicate how the factors are interrelated, i.e. how changing one factor will affect the others. The final part of the objective was to explain how an organization’s strategic view on IT affects the optimal service granularity.

It was found that an organization’s strategic view on IT affects the amount of complexity the organization is able to handle, limiting the optimal SOA granularity, which can be precisely described using three factors: reach, range and realm. Reach defines the locations and people the service is capable of connecting, range defines how much functionality the service offers, and realm defines what kind of functionality the service offers.

The standardization forum 3GPP has specified a Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) standard including an MMS Center (MMSC) that allows users to send and receive messages including e.g. text, images, audio and video. The 3GPP forum has however not standardized any MMSC provided supplementary services in relation to MMS.

The goal of the thesis is to create a Front End (FE) prototype which is capable of supporting a given set of MMSC supplementary messaging services for MMS and to develop and test an MMSC. The set of supplementary messaging services to be supported are auto-reply to an MMS message, auto-forwarding, convert an email to a MMS message, and cloning a MMS message.

The final results for the project are mixed. The prototype was not implemented entirely mainly due to lack of available software and not having access to an operators MMSC, which would be needed to push the supplementary services to mobile phones. However substantial progress was achieved. All of the supplementary messaging services were implemented and made compatible with Mobile Arts existing system. A testing system was also designed capable of processing simulated incoming MMS messages.

Denna uppsats beskriver fenomenet shared services, varför företag satsar på shared service centers (SSC) och hur de går tillväga när de designar dem. Studien har genomförts med hjälp av en litteraturöversikt och en fallstudie av TeliaSoneras nu pågående implementering av ett shared service center, FSS. Fallstudien består av fyra intervjuer och en genomgång av TeliaSoneras egna informationsmaterial och medarbetarenkäter. Litteraturöversikten visar att shared services utlovar väsentliga förbättringar av ekonomifunktionen och besparingar, att det finns en stor tilltro till dessa löften men att det saknas underbyggda bevis för hur stora besparingarna egentligen är. Designen på TeliaSonera FSS visar sig följa litteraturen relativt noga, förutom vad gäller placering. Vi identifierar även ett par riskfaktorer inom kommunikation, övergången till ett nytt affärssystem och hur ledningen prioriterar olika delar av förändringsarbetet.

Detta examensarbete behandlar Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) och dess implementeringar Jini och Web services. SOA beskriver hur applikationsintegration mellan olika plattformar skall ske och innebär att applikationer designas som tjänster för att enkelt integreras med andra applikationer. Dynamisk lokalisering av tjänster via en registertjänst används för att applikationer skall finna andra applikationer. Vi designar och implementerar en mekanism i Web services som gör det möjligt att byta en tjänst under exekvering. Ett sådant byte kan vara intressant av två skäl, tjänster kan registreras utan att vara tillgängliga, eller att det uppstår ett fel under exekvering som gör att tjänsten blir otillgänglig.

This degree project is about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and its implementations Jini and Web services. SOA is a description of how application integration between different platforms can be carried out by designing applications as services, which implies an easier integration with other applications. Dynamic location of services is carried out by consultation with a register service so that applications can find other applications. We design and implement a mechanism in Web services that makes it possible to change service during execution. A change of service can be interesting for two reasons, the service might be registered but not available or there might be some sort of fault during execution that makes the service unavailable.

Den traditionella marknadsföringen med sin marknadsmix har länge varit den dominerande marknadsstrategin där fokus har vilat på att placera produkten på bästa plats och till ett så förmånligt pris som möjligt. När det rör sig om tjänster finns inte samma möjligheter; företagen måste ta till sig nya markandföringsmetoder för att på bästa sätt marknadsföra sina tjänster. Är tjänsterna dessutom ”osynliga”, måste konsulten skapa ett löfte och kunden måste känna förtroende. Ömsesidiga relationer blir då av högsta vikt, och fokus läggs istället på kundens behov snarare än på företagets egenintressen.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att undersöka hur managementkonsulter effektivast marknadsför och säljer sina tjänster. Vidare var syftet att se hur stora konsultbolag skiljer sig mot små. Teorier inom traditionell- respektive relationsmarknadsföring användes för att få en djupare inblick kring ämnet. Inledningsvis intervjuades 4 konsulter för att kunna konstruera en enkät som senare skickades ut till 25 olika konsultbolag. Resultaten analyserades sedan för att få fram vilka marknadsföringsmetoder som var de mest frekvent använda och vilka faktorer som påverkade valet av metod. Likaså studerades och analyserades likheter och skillnader mellan stora och små företag.

Forskningsnivån inom ämnet är inte markant utbrett, och tanken var därför att testa teorierna och eventuellt bekräfta eller opponera dem. Resultaten från studien visade sig stämma hyfsat bra med teorierna. Slutsatserna är att ju mindre produktifierade tjänsterna är desto mer relationsbaserad marknadsföring bör tillämpas. De företag som endast arbetade med lösningsbaserade konsulttjänster tenderade att lägga mycket tid på att involvera kunden i processen. Dessa konsultbolag ansåg att rekommendationer och referenser var det mest effektiva sätten att nå nya kunder samt fortsätta med nuvarande. Traditionella marknadsföringsaktiviteter användes till en mycket mindre grad, och ansågs vara tidskrävande och ineffektivt. Skillnaderna mellan stora och små konsultbolag var färre än likheterna. Ett svar på detta kan vara att konsultbolag konkurrerar på ett annorlunda men mer jämlikt sätt än företag som säljer produkter. Det är inte det största, och det mesta kända konsultbolaget som blir starkaste konkurrenten, utan det är de som skapar bäst förtroende hos kunden. På så sätt spelar företagets storlek mindre roll, och valet av marknadsstrategi påverkas ej.

The traditional marketing with its marketing mix have for long been the dominating marketing strategy, where focus have been on placing the product at the best place with the best possible price. When it comes to services, the possibilities are not the same; the firms must adapt new marketing methods in order to sell and market their services effectively. If the services are “invisible” as well, the consultant must create a promise and the client must feel secure. Mutual relations then become important, and focus is instead put on the client’s needs rather than the firm’s own interests.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine how management consultants most effectively sell and market their services. Further the purpose was to discover how big consultancy firms differ from small. Theories within the traditional - respectively relationship-based marketing were used in order to get a deeper insight in the subject. By way of introduction four consultants were interviewed to facilitate the construct of a questionnaire, which was later sent out to 25 different consultancy firms. The results were analyzed with the objectives of finding out which marketing methods that were most often used and which factors affected the choice of method. In addition, similarities and dissimilarities between big and small firms were studied.

The state of the art within this subject is not very broad, and the thought was therefore to test the emerging theories and thereby support or oppose them. The results from the study showed to support the theories to a high extent. The conclusions are that the less productified the services are, the bigger effort is needed on relationship-based marketing. Those firms who only sell solution-based consulting tend to put much time on involving the client in the project process. These firms considered recommendations and references to be the most effective ways of reaching new clients and continue with existing ones. Traditional marketing activities were used to a much smaller extent, and were considered to be time-demanding and ineffective. The differences between big and small firms were less than the similarities. An answer to this might be that within the consultancy business the effectiveness is not made through the market share or the numbers of clients, i.e. how big the firm is; instead it is the special expertise and unique knowledge that every consultant keeps that makes them compete equally on the market no matter the firm size.

Video on Demand (VoD) is an Internet service with a growing appeal to the mass market, and is of increasing importance to Internet service providers' revenue. This master's thesis presents a subjective assessment on the user-perceived quality of service of an imaginary VoD service. By implementing the SAMVIQ methodology of subjective video quality assessment, the state of the art video codec H.264/MPEG-4's resilience to packet loss is examined. Through the recreation of several residential usage scenarios, different amounts of packet loss is added to H.264/MPEG-4 content encoded at diversified bitrates. The results suggest that random packet loss rates above 0,1% deteriorates the perceived quality to such an extent that it is not acceptable to the end-user. High-bitrate encoded content is relatively more affected than low-bitrate content, and bursty packet loss is preferred to loss categorized as non-bursty.