Analytics of a Service

The good news is that I have recently accepted a faculty position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California!  I will likely be teaching business statistics, so in preparation I have started an additional blog to record some idea to share with my future student along the line of business statistics.  In the meantime, I'll keep posting here too.  In honor of this new blog, I found a great clip from IBM touting the use of analytics in a healthcare setting:

  We had a great discussion in my operations management MBA class yesterday about what I identify as 2 main frameworks that can be applied to practical service operations management.  I call them analytical and behavioral.  Under analytical we discussed queuing, revenue management, optimization, simulation, data modeling, etc, while under the behavioral framework we have to understand motivation, experiences, emotions, needs, etc.  Because customers are often in the service process, ignoring the behavioral aspect can be detrimental.  Additionally, behavioral aspects of a service cannot be delegated to the marketing department alone, instead the discussion of the experience desired for customers has to be a part of the operations management priorities or it won't be executed.   This clip discusses how a hospital in Toronto has been able to record and analyze data from a new born from the instruments that surround it. The difficulty in the behavioral side of service operations management is that measurement is hard and near impossible in real time.  While it is fairly easy to count how many people are in a line at a give time, it is not easy to tell who is upset about it and who is not.