Self-service is the practice of serving oneself, usually when making purchases. [1] Aside from Automated Teller Machines, which are not limited to banks, and customer-operated supermarket check-out, [2] labor-saving which has been described as self-sourcing, there is the latter's subset, selfsourcing and a related pair: End-user development and End-user computing.
Note has been made how paid labor has been replaced with unpaid labor, [3] [2] and how reduced professionalism and distractions from primary duties have reduced value obtained from employees' time. [4]
For decades, laws have been passed both facilitating and preventing self-pumping of gas [5] and other self-service.
Self-service is the practice of serving oneself, usually when purchasing items. Common examples include many gas stations, where the customer pumps their own gas rather than have an attendant do it (full service is required by law in New Jersey, urban parts of Oregon, most of Mexico, and Richmond, British Columbia, but is the exception rather than the rule elsewhere [6] ). Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) in the banking world have also revolutionized how people withdraw and deposit funds; most stores in the Western world, where the customer uses a shopping cart in the store, placing the items they want to buy into the cart and then proceeding to the checkout counter/aisles; or at buffet-style restaurants, where the customer serves their own plate of food from a large, central selection.
In 1917, the US Patent Office awarded Clarence Saunders a patent for a "self-serving store." Saunders invited his customers to collect the goods they wanted to buy from the store and present them to a cashier, rather than having the store employee consult a list presented by the customer, and collect the goods. Saunders licensed the business method to independent grocery stores; these operated under the name "Piggly Wiggly." [7]
Self-service is over the phone, web, and email to facilitate customer service interactions using automation. Self-service software and self-service apps (for example online banking apps, web portals with shops, self-service check-in at the airport) become increasingly common. [8]
Self-sourcing is a term describing informal and often unpaid labor that benefits the owner of the facility where it is done by replacing paid labor with unpaid labor. [3]
Selfsourcing (without a dash) is a subset thereof, and refers to developing computer software intended for use by the person doing the development. [9]
Both situations have aspects of Self-service, and where permitted involve benefits to the person doing the work, such as job & personal satisfaction, even though tradeoffs are frequently involved, [3] including long term losses to the company. [4]
When a loan officer is asked to "self-source" [10] they're taking on a responsibility that's not one of the top seven "Loan Officer Job Duties" listed by a major job placement service. [11] [12]
A situation where no payment is made is self-service, such as airport check-in kiosks and checkout machines. [3] International borders have also experimented with traveler-assisted fingerprint verification. [13]
Another situation is where a company's Human resources department is partially bypassed by departments that "source talent themselves." [14]
An early use of the term is a 2005 HRO Today article [15] titled "Insourcing, Outsourcing? How about Self-sourcing?" that mined Wikipedia's history of a pair of banks that merged decades ago as Standard Chartered and, after September 11, rebuilt its personnel department in an innovative way.
The concept is similar to self-service, and one USA example is pumping gas: New Jersey banned customers from doing this in 1949; [5] now NJ is the only state "where drivers are not allowed to pump their own gasoline." [5]
In 1994 it was considered a radical change to propose permitting self-service at the gas pumps, in Japan, and the New York Times reported that "the push .. (came) from Japanese big business ... trying to cut costs." [1]
Automatic Teller Machines are another example, and their expansion beyond banks have led to signs saying Access To Money, which refers to a company with that name; [16] [17] the technology began over half-a-century ago. [18]
Selfsourcing is the internal development and support of IT systems by knowledge workers with minimal contribution from IT specialists, and has been described as essentially outsourcing development effort to the end user. [19] At times they use in-house Data warehouse systems, which often run on mainframes. [20]
Various terms have been used to describe end user self service, when someone who is not a professional programmer programs, codes, scripts, writes macros, and in other ways uses a computer in a user-directed data processing accomplishment, such as End user computing and End user development. In the 1990s, Windows versions of mainframe packages were already available. [21]
When desktop personal computers became nearly as widely distributed as having a work phone, in companies having a data processing department, the PC was often unlinked to the corporate mainframe, and data was keyed in from printouts. Software was for do-it-yourself/selfsourcing, including spreadsheets, programs written in DOS-BASIC or, somewhat later, dBASE. Use of spreadsheets, the most popular End-user development tool, [22] [23] was estimated in 2005 to done by 13 million American employees. [22]
Some data became siloed [24] Once terminal emulation arrived, more data was available, and it was more current. Techniques such as Screen scraping and FTP reduced rekeying. Mainframe products such as FOCUS were ported to the PC, and Business Intelligence (BI) software became more widespread.
Companies large enough to have mainframes and use BI, having departments with analysts and other specialists, have people doing this work full-time. Selfsourcing, in such situations, [10] is taking people away from their main job (such as designing ads, creating surveys, planning advertising campaigns); pairs of people, one from an analysis group and another from a "user" group, is the way the company wants to operate. Selfsourcing is not viewed as an improvement.
Data warehouse was an earlier term in this space. [25]
It is crucial for the system's purposes and goals to be aligned with that of the organizational goals. [26] Developing a system that contradicts organizational goals will most likely lead to a reduction in sales and customer retention. As well, due to the large amount of time it may take for development, it is important allocate your time efficiently as time is valuable.
Knowledge workers must also determine what kind of external support they will require. In-house IT specialists can be a valuable commodity and are often included in the planning process.
It is important to document how the system works, to ensure that if the developing knowledge workers move on others can use it and even attempt to make needed updates. [27]
Knowledge workers are often strongly aware of their immediate needs, and can avoid formalizations and time needed for "project cost/benefit analysis" [28] and delays due to chargebacks. [29]
Additional benefits are:
Many knowledge workers involved in selfsourcing do not have experience or expertise with IT tools, resulting in: Pride of ownership has been found to be a major cause of overlooking errors. [31] : p.30 A 1992 study showed that because Excel "tends to produce output even in the presence of errors" there is "user over-confidence in program correctness."
Although departmental computing has decades of history, [21] one-person-show situations either suffer from inability to interact with a helpdesk [34] or fail to benefit from wheels already invented. [4]
Although self-service tools [35] are also used by professionals, among the basic members of various categories from a more detailed list of self-service tools are:
Human resource departments have enabled Employee self-service, including providing employees with tools for skill building and career planning. [47]
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.
In computing, a legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program, "of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system", yet still in use. Often referencing a system as "legacy" means that it paved the way for the standards that would follow it. This can also imply that the system is out of date or in need of replacement.
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.
In telecommunication, provisioning involves the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide new services to its users. In National Security/Emergency Preparedness telecommunications services, "provisioning" equates to "initiation" and includes altering the state of an existing priority service or capability.
In product development, an end user is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrators, database administrators, Information technology (IT) experts, software professionals and computer technicians. End users typically do not possess the technical understanding or skill of the product designers, a fact easily overlooked and forgotten by designers: leading to features creating low customer satisfaction. In information technology, end users are not "customers" in the usual sense—they are typically employees of the customer. For example, if a large retail corporation buys a software package for its employees to use, even though the large retail corporation was the "customer" which purchased the software, the end users are the employees of the company, who will use the software at work.
Wang Laboratories was a US computer company founded in 1951 by An Wang and G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1954–1963), Tewksbury, Massachusetts (1963–1976), and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts (1976–1997). At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of US$3 billion and employed over 33,000 people. It was one of the leading companies during the time of the Massachusetts Miracle.
Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity which otherwise is or could be carried out internally, i.e. in-house, and sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another. The term outsourcing, which came from the phrase outside resourcing, originated no later than 1981. The concept, which The Economist says has "made its presence felt since the time of the Second World War", often involves the contracting out of a business process, operational, and/or non-core functions, such as manufacturing, facility management, call center/call center support.
A management information system (MIS) is an information system used for decision-making, and for the coordination, control, analysis, and visualization of information in an organization. The study of the management information systems involves people, processes and technology in an organizational context.
Electronic data processing (EDP) can refer to the use of automated methods to process commercial data. Typically, this uses relatively simple, repetitive activities to process large volumes of similar information. For example: stock updates applied to an inventory, banking transactions applied to account and customer master files, booking and ticketing transactions to an airline's reservation system, billing for utility services. The modifier "electronic" or "automatic" was used with "data processing" (DP), especially c. 1960, to distinguish human clerical data processing from that done by computer.
Technical support, also known as tech support, is a call centre type customer service provided by companies to advise and assist registered users with issues concerning their technical products. Traditionally done on the phone, technical support can now be conducted online or through chat. At present, most large and mid-size companies have outsourced their tech support operations. Many companies provide discussion boards for users of their products to interact; such forums allow companies to reduce their support costs without losing the benefit of customer feedback.
Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as on-demand software, web-based software, or web-hosted software.
Cincom Systems, Inc., is a privately held multinational computer technology corporation founded in 1968 by Tom Nies, Tom Richley, and Claude Bogardus.
NOMAD is a relational database and fourth-generation language (4GL), originally developed in the 1970s by time-sharing vendor National CSS. While it is still in use today, its widest use was in the 1970s and 1980s. NOMAD supports both the relational and hierarchical database models.
End-user development (EUD) or end-user programming (EUP) refers to activities and tools that allow end-users – people who are not professional software developers – to program computers. People who are not professional developers can use EUD tools to create or modify software artifacts and complex data objects without significant knowledge of a programming language. In 2005 it was estimated that by 2012 there would be more than 55 million end-user developers in the United States, compared with fewer than 3 million professional programmers. Various EUD approaches exist, and it is an active research topic within the field of computer science and human-computer interaction. Examples include natural language programming, spreadsheets, scripting languages, visual programming, trigger-action programming and programming by example.
Legacy modernization, also known as software modernization or platform modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to modern computer programming languages, architectures, software libraries, protocols or hardware platforms. Legacy transformation aims to retain and extend the value of the legacy investment through migration to new platforms to benefit from the advantage of the new technologies.
Accounting software is a computer program that maintains account books on computers, including recording transactions and account balances. It may depends on virtual thinking. Depending on the purpose, the software can manage budgets, perform accounting tasks for multiple currencies, perform payroll and customer relationship management, and prepare financial reporting. Work to have accounting functions be implemented on computers goes back to the earliest days of electronic data processing. Over time, accounting software has revolutionized from supporting basic accounting operations to performing real-time accounting and supporting financial processing and reporting. Cloud accounting software was first introduced in 2011, and it allowed the performance of all accounting functions through the internet.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was a provider of modular mid-range and high-end computer data storage systems, software and services. Its operations are now a part of Hitachi Vantara.
Cloud collaboration is a method of sharing and co-authoring computer files via cloud computing, whereby documents are uploaded to a central "cloud" for storage, where they can then be accessed by other users. Cloud collaboration technologies allow users to upload, comment and collaborate on documents and even amend the document itself, evolving the document. Businesses in the last few years have increasingly been switching to use of cloud collaboration.
Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future.
One person may supervise 4-6 or more stations
responsible for self-sourcing mortgage loans
Applications created by end users can ... IBI's new data access tool, Focus Reporter for Windows ...
Inadequate expertise leads to underdeveloped systems ... Lack of organizational focus
Lack of documentation for applications ... testing and documentation of end user developed software.
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