Knowledge workers in the service sector-some musings

Its been 15 months since I joined Airtel, since then I've been lucky to work in a company which is (nearly equal parts) an utility, consumer goods, services and products company. Also, Airtel's outsourcing the 'core' operations of network and IT made it to global Bschool case studies-for example http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=33647 In recent times, the top leadership rejig may lead one to think that Airtel is now a consumer products company. After all, with the CEO, CFO, CMO etc from HUL(Indian arm of Unilever and a CXO factory), one may be forgiven for thinking thats the case. However, things can't be more different. For example, a channel manager in FMCG must manage physical inventory/branding/availability without customization, while his telecom counterpart manages zero inventory, and can often customize the recharge plan etc. This is just the tip of the ice berg, but this post is on service sector in general, not just Airtel, so I return to the topic.

I was reading a research paper on TRIZ in service sector(http://www.realinnovation.com/archives/2003/12/d/04.pdf) where it explained that Service development is differentiated from physical product development because of the unique characteristics of service products, such as customer participation, simultaneity, heterogeneity, intangibility and perishability, etc

1. tighter coupling between marketing and operations aspects. Service Operations integrates customer experience management involving customer service, operations, marketing etc
2. Since end product is intangible, the soft skills matter a lot in front end roles, so this percolates into the (otherwise) non client facing roles too like finance.
3. Inventory does not exist in service sector-so this is both a boon(less logistics hassle) and also a nightmare(manpower utilization)

Also, knowledge work does not happen only in services sector, even the service/support functions in manufacturing/agriculture can add a lot of value, however since there are unique issues in the service sector, thought to comment on them in the blog