IT-Enabled Services - IT Enabled Services - page 2

impact on society are presented, thus serving as the background on the relationship
between digitization and services.
Third, this chapter presents a discussion of the relationship between ITeS and the
production process. Why is ITeS so important? It enables the visualization of
processes and consequently helps improve the quality of products. Digitization
enables visualization of all kinds of processes. For consumer goods, visualization of
production and sales process, such as Electronic Customer Relationship Manage-
ment (eCRM) and Internet marketing, have already been developed and deployed.
Through the evolution of these process visualizations, services are found to be the
source of quality and competitiveness of products.
Finally, notable cases of ITeS today and their future prospects are presented. It
can be safely assumed that ITeS serves as the source of improvement in products.
As digitization processes and communication capacities are advanced and
enhanced, respectively, the value created through ITeS increases. The potential
impact of service provision in various industries, such as education, medical
practice, banking, community, government, agriculture and production in general,
is also presented.
1.2 Related Works
Previous works are reviewed in this section, including the stage theories of system
development proposed by Nolan ( 1973 , 1979 , 1982 ), Shimada and Takahara
( 1993 ), and Miyakawa ( 1994 ). The studies of Reponen et al. ( 2003a ), who are the
first to focus on IT-enabled services, are also reviewed.
1.2.1 Stage Theories
Nolan developed a theory to explain the development of information systems. His
first paper, which presented the concept that would later be known as stage theory,
was published nearly 40 years ago. There are some sequels to the stage theory he
developed along with other scholars. In the following sections, Nolan's theory is
reviewed, followed by a review of the Japanese scholar's work. After reviewing the
development of stage theory and its application, this chapter presents an application
of the theory to the current context featuring bi-directional communication with
broadband networks.
1.2.1.1 Stage Theory of Nolan
Nolan published his four-stage theory in his work entitled, “Managing the computer
resource: a stage hypothesis,” in Communications of ACM in 1973 . He identified