Services and Information
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Wikipedia-Article "Services"
- This article is about a term used in economics. For other uses, see service (disambiguation).
In economics and marketing, a service is the non-material equivalent of a good. Service provision has been defined as an economic activity that does not result in ownership, and this is what differentiates it from providing physical goods. It is claimed to be a process that creates benefits by facilitating either a change in customers, a change in their physical possessions, or a change in their intangible assets.
By supplying some level of skill, ingenuity, and experience, providers of a service participate in an economy without the restrictions of carrying stock (inventory) or the need to concern themselves with bulky raw materials. On the other hand, their investment in expertise does require marketing and upgrading in the face of competition which has equally few physical restrictions.
Providers of services make up the Tertiary sector of industry.
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Key attributes
Services can be described in terms of their main attributes.
- Intangibility - They cannot be seen, handled, smelled, etc. There is no need for storage. Because services are difficult to conceptualize, marketing them requires creative visualization to effectively evoke a concrete image in the customer's mind. From the customer's point of view, this attribute makes it difficult to evaluate or compare services prior to experiencing the service.
- Perishability - Unsold service time is "lost", that is, it cannot be regained. It is a lost economic opportunity. For example a doctor that is booked for only two hours a day cannot later work those hours— she has lost her economic opportunity. Other service examples are airplane seats (once the plane departs, those empty seats cannot be sold), and theatre seats (sales end at a certain point).
- Lack of transportability - Services must be consumed at the point of "production".
- Lack of homogeneity - Services are typically modified for each client or each new situation (customised). Mass production of services is very difficult. This can be seen as a problem of inconsistent quality. Both inputs and outputs to the processes involved providing services are highly variable, as are the relationships between these processes, making it difficult to maintain consistent quality.
- Labour intensity - Services usually involve considerable human activity, rather than precisely determined process. Human resource management is important. The human factor is often the key success factor in service industries. It is difficult to achieve economies of scale or gain dominant market share.
- Demand fluctuations - It is very difficult to estimate demand. Demand can vary by season, time of day, business cycle, etc.
- Buyer involvement - Most service provision requires a high degree of interaction between client and service provider.
Service delivery
The delivery of a service typically involves five factors:
- The service providers (e.g. the people)
- Equipment used to provide the service (e.g. vehicles, cash registers)
- The physical facilities (e.g. buildings, parking, waiting rooms)
- The client
- Other customers at the service delivery location
The service encounter is defined as all activities involved in the service delivery process. Some service managers use the term "moment of truth" to indicate that defining point in a specific service encounter where interactions are most intense.
Many business theorists view service provision as a performance or act (sometimes humorously referred to as dramalurgy, perhaps in reference to dramaturgy). The location of the service delivery is referred to as the stage and the objects that facilitate the service process are called props. A script is a sequence of behaviours followed by all those involved, including the client(s). Some service dramas are tightly scripted, others are more ad lib. Role congruence occurs when each actor follows a script that harmonizes with the roles played by the other actors.
In some service industries, especially health care, dispute resolution, and social services, a popular concept is the idea of the caseload, which refers to the total number of patients, clients, litigants, or claimants that a given employee is presently responsible for. On a daily basis, in all those fields, employees must balance the needs of any individual case against the needs of all other current cases as well as their own personal needs.
Service-Goods continuum
The service-goods continuum
The dichotomy between physical goods and intangible services should not be given too much credence. These are not discrete categories. Most business theorists see a continuum with pure service on one terminal point and pure commodity good on the other terminal point. Most products fall between these two extremes. For example, a restaurant provides a physical good (the food), but also provides services in the form of ambience, the setting and clearing of the table, etc. And although some utilities actually deliver physical goods — like water utilities which actually deliver water — utilities are usually treated as services.
In a narrower sense, service refers to quality of customer service: the measured appropriateness of assistance and support provided to a customer. This particular usage occurs frequently in retailing.
List of economic services
The following is an incomplete list of service industries, grouped into rough sectors. Parenthetical notations indicate how specific occupations and organizations can be regarded as service industries to the extent they provide an intangible service, as opposed to a tangible good.
- business functions (that apply to all organizations in general)
- consulting
- customer service
- human resources administrators (providing services like ensuring that employees are paid accurately)
- child care
- cleaning, repair and maintenance services
- construction
- carpentry
- electricians (offering the service of making wiring work properly)
- plumbing
- death care
- coroners (who provide the service of identifying corpses and determining time and cause of death)
- funeral homes (who prepare corpses for public display, cremation or burial)
- dispute resolution and prevention services
- arbitration
- courts of law (who perform the service of dispute resolution backed by the power of the state)
- diplomacy
- incarceration (provides the service of keeping criminals out of society)
- law enforcement (provides the service of identifying and apprehending criminals)
- lawyers (who perform the services of advocacy and decisionmaking in many dispute resolution and prevention processes)
- mediation
- military (performs the service of protecting states in disputes with other states)
- negotiation (not really a service unless someone is negotiating on behalf of another)
- education (institutions offering the services of teaching and access to information)
- entertainment (when provided live or within a highly specialized facility)
- gambling
- movie theatres (providing the service of showing a movie on a big screen)
- performing arts productions
- sexual services (where legal)
- sports
- television
- fabric care
- dry cleaning
- laundromat (offering the service of automated fabric cleaning)
- financial services
- accounting
- banks and building societies (offering lending services and safekeeping of money and valuables)
- real estate
- stock brokerages
- tax return preparation
- foodservice industry
- hairdressing
- health care (all health care professions provide services)
- information services
- risk management
- social services
- transport
- utilities
See also
- marketing
- product
- tertiary sector of industry
- services marketing
- experience economy
- customer service
- ecosystem services
- Vendor-independent solutions provider
- Software_as_a_Service
- Application service provider
- On-demand
Finding related topics
- list of marketing topics
- list of management topics
- list of economics topics
- list of finance topics
- list of human resource management topics
- list of accounting topics
- list of information technology management topics
- list of business law topics
- list of production topics
- list of business ethics, political economy, and philosophy of business topics
- list of business theorists
- list of economists
- list of corporate leaders
- list of companies
Wikipedia-Article "Information"
Information is a word which has many different meanings in everyday usage and in specialized contexts, but as a rule, the concept is closely related to others such as data, instruction, knowledge, meaning, communication, representation, and mental stimulus.
Information is a message, something to be communicated from the sender to the receiver. If information is viewed merely as a message, it does not have to be accurate. It may be a truth or a lie, or just a sound of a kiss. Strangely it may even be a disruptive noise used to inhibit the flow of communication and create misunderstanding. This model assumes a sender and a receiver, and does not attach any significance to the idea that information is something that can be extracted from an environment, e.g., through observation or measurement. Information in this sense is simply any message the sender chooses to create.
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Measuring information
The view of information as a message came into prominence with the publication in 1948 of an influential paper by Claude Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." This paper provides the foundations of information theory and endows the word information not only with a technical meaning but also a measure. If the sending device is equally likely to send any one of a set of N messages, then the preferred measure of "the information produced when one message is chosen from the set" is the base two logarithm of N (This measure is called self-information). In this paper, Shannon continues:
- The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey. A device with two stable positions, such as a relay or a flip-flop circuit, can store one bit of information. N such devices can store N bits ... [The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, p. 379, (July 1948).]
A complementary way of measuring information is provided by Algorithmic information theory. In brief, this measures the information content of a list of symbols based on how predictable they are, or more specifically how easy it is to generate the list. The sequence below would have a very low algorithmic information measurement since it is a very predictable pattern, and as the pattern continues the measurement would not change. Shannon information would give the same information measurement for each symbol, since they are statistically random, and each new symbol would increase the measurement.
- 123456789101112131415161718192021
Also see: lexicographic information cost
Information as a pattern
Information is any represented pattern. This view assumes neither accuracy nor directly communicating parties, but instead assumes a separation between an object and its representation, as well as the involvement of someone capable of understanding this relationship. This view seems therefore to require a conscious mind. Consider the following example: economic statistics represent an economy, however inaccurately. What are commonly referred to as data in computing, statistics, and other fields, are forms of information in this sense. The electro-magnetic patterns in a computer network and connected devices are related to something other than the pattern itself, such as text to be displayed and keyboard input. Signals, signs, and symbols are also in this category. On the other hand, according to semiotics, data is symbols with certain syntax and information is data with a certain semantic. Painting and drawing contain information to the extent that they represent something such as an assortment of objects on a table, a profile, or a landscape. In other words, when a pattern of something is transposed to a pattern of something else, the latter is information. This type of information still assumes some involvement of conscious mind, of either the entity constructing the representation, or the entity interpreting it.
When one constructs a representation of an object, one can selectively extract from the object (sampling) or use a system of signs to replace (encoding), or both. The sampling and encoding result in representation. An example of the former is a "sample" of a product; an example of the latter is "verbal description" of a product. Both contain information of the product, however inaccurate. When one interprets representation, one can predict a broader pattern from a limited number of observations (inference) or understand the relation between patterns of two different things (decoding). One example of the former is to sip a soup to know if it is spoiled; an example of the latter is examining footprints to determine the animal and its condition. In both cases, information sources are not constructed or presented by some "sender" of information. To repeat, information in this sense does not assume direct communication, but it assumes involvement of some conscious mind.
Regardless, information is dependent upon, but usually unrelated to and separate from, the medium or media used to express it. In other words, the position of a theoretical series of bits, or even the output once interpreted by a computer or similar device, is unimportant, except when someone or something is present to interpret the information. Therefore, a quantity of information is totally distinct from its medium.
Information as sensory input
Often information is viewed as a type of input to an organism or designed device. Inputs are of two kinds. Some inputs are important to the function of the organism (for example, food) or device (energy) by themselves. In his book Sensory Ecology, Dusenbery called these causal inputs. Other inputs (information) are important only because they are associated with causal inputs and can be used to predict the occurrence of a causal input at a later time (and perhaps another place). Some information is important because of association with other information but eventually there must be a connection to a causal input. In practice, information is usually carried by weak stimuli that must be detected by specialized sensory systems and amplified by energy inputs before they can be functional to the organism or device. For example, light is often a causal input to plants but provides information to animals. The colored light reflected from a flower is too weak to do much photosynthetic work but the visual system of the bee detects it and the bee's nervous system uses the information to guide the bee to the flower, where the bee often finds nectar or pollen, which are causal inputs, serving a nutritional function.
Information is any type of sensory input. When an organism with a nervous system receives an input, it transforms the input into an electrical signal. This is regarded information by some. The idea of representation is still relevant, but in a slightly different manner. That is, while abstract painting does not represent anything concretely, when the viewer sees the painting, it is nevertheless transformed into electrical signals that create a representation of the painting. Defined this way, information does not have to be related to truth, communication, or representation of an object. Entertainment in general is not intended to be informative. Music, the performing arts, amusement parks, works of fiction and so on are thus forms of information in this sense, but they are not forms of information according to the previous definitions above. Consider another example: food supplies both nutrition and taste for those who eat it. If information is equated to sensory input, then nutrition is not information but taste is.
Information as an influence which leads to a transformation
Information is any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of other patterns. In this sense, there is no need for a conscious mind to perceive, much less appreciate, the pattern. Consider, for example, DNA. The sequence of nucleotides is a pattern that influences the formation and development of an organism without any need for a conscious mind. Systems theory at times seems to refer to information in this sense, assuming information does not necessarily involve any conscious mind, and patterns circulating (due to feedback) in the system can be called information. In other words, it can be said that information in this sense is something potentially perceived as representation, though not created or presented for that purpose.
When Marshall McLuhan speaks of media and their effects on human cultures, he refers to the structure of artifacts that in turn shape our behaviors and mindsets. Also, pheromones are often said to be "information" in this sense.
In 2003, J. D. Bekenstein claimed there is a growing trend in physics to define the physical world as being made of information itself (and thus information is defined in this way).
See the section below on information as a property in physics. (Also see Gregory Bateson.)
Information as a property in physics
Main article: Physical information
Information has a well defined meaning in physics. Examples of this include the phenomenon of quantum entanglement where particles can interact without reference to their separation or the speed of light. Information itself cannot travel faster than light even if the information is transmitted indirectly. This could lead to the fact that all attempts at physically observing a particle with an "entangled" relationship to another are slowed down, even though the particles are not connected in any other way other than by the information they carry.
Another link is demonstrated by the Maxwell's demon thought experiment. In this experiment, a direct relationship between information and another physical property, entropy, is demonstrated. A consequence is that it is impossible to destroy information without increasing the entropy of a system; in practical terms this often means generating heat. Thus, in the study of logic gates, the theoretical lower bound of thermal energy released by an AND gate is more than for the NOT gate (because information is destroyed in an AND gate and simply converted in an NOT gate). Physical information is of particular importance in the theory of quantum computers.
Etymology
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest historical meaning of the word information in English was the act of informing, or giving form or shape to the mind, as in education, instruction, or training. A quote from 1387: "Five books come down from heaven for information of mankind." It was also used for an item of training, e.g. a particular instruction. "Melibee had heard the great skills and reasons of Dame Prudence, and her wise informations and techniques." (1386)
The English word was apparently derived by adding the common "noun of action" ending "-ation" (descended through French from Latin "-tio") to the earlier verb to inform, in the sense of to give form to the mind, to discipline, instruct, teach: "Men so wise should go and inform their kings." (1330) Inform itself comes (via French) from the Latin verb informare, to give form to, to form an idea of. Furthermore, Latin itself already even contained the word informatio meaning concept or idea, but the extent to which this may have influenced the development of the word information in English is unclear.
As a final note, the ancient Greek word for form was eidos, and this word was famously used in a technical philosophical sense by Plato (and later Aristotle) to denote the ideal identity or essence of something (see The Forms).
References
- Bekenstein, Jacob D. (2003, August). Information in the holographic universe. Scientific American. Retrieved from http://www.referencenter.com
See also
- Algorithmic information theory
- Classified information
- Fisher information
- Freedom of information
- Information entropy
- Propaganda model
- Free Information Infrastructure
- Information theory
- Information overload
- Information processing
- Information processor
- Information mapping
- Information technology
- Library and Information Science
- Medium
- Observation
- Physical information
- Prediction
- Receiver operating characteristic
- Systems theory and cybernetics
- Satisficing
- The Information highway - A nickname of the Internet, dubbed the greatest source of information.