For IT services companies, delivering high quality IT services is of eminent importance. IT service quality drives customer satisfaction, which in its turn drives firm performance. It is this link that is addressed in this paper: How can the performance of customer service delivery teams be improved, when looked upon from the perspective of firm performance? Based on the literature on excellent performing organizations, we apply the concepts that, according to Collins (2001), drove the development of 'good' companies to 'great' companies to a case study of an under performing service delivery team that developed into an excellent performing service delivery team. The lessons from this study were that most of the drivers behind the performance improvement of this team were in fact 'soft' factors that concerned the human side of the team more than the organizational, procedural or structural measures.
This doctoral thesis describes three case studies of service engineers participating in organizational change, interacting with managers and consultants. The study investigates the role of differences in professional discourse and culture when these three professional groups interact in organizational change, and how this affects the change result. We bring together two scientific fields, first change management and second, linguistics. The intersection represents the overlapping field of professional discourse and culture. The research design was an explorative multiple case study using qualitative linguistic analyses. The study found that successful organizational change is the result of interaction between professional culture, the organizational culture and the organization/change context. The differences between the professional cultures and discourses can hamper the change process. The practical contribution of this study might be the increased awareness among professionals about their own professional, and often implicit, assumptions. Managers, consultants and service engineers have to be aware of the group dynamics and the specific role of their own typical professional discourse and culture in a change project setting.
In the fall of 1999, an international integrated product development pilot project based on collaborative engineering was started with team members in two international teams from the United States, The Netherlands and Germany. Team members interacted using various Internet capabilities, including, but not limited to, ICQ (means: I SEEK YOU, an internet feature which immediately detects when somebody comes "on line"), web phones, file servers, chat rooms and Email along with video conferencing. For this study a control group with all members located in the USA only also worked on the same project.
