Improving service quality and productivity: Exploring the digital connections scaling model

The basic model argues that Digital Connections Scaling (DCS) of customers, providers and/or resources is a fundamental way to reduce service cycle time and transaction cost, and thereby to improve service quality and productivity. Digitisation makes entities connectable, and scaling decreases the marginal cost for the customer and the provider to cocreate new values. Three types of economies of DCS are postulated: the accumulation effect, the networking effect and the ecosystem effect on facilitating value propositions and cocreation. The paper also presents enterprise engineering principles, new micro-economic production functions, and an extended cyber-infrastructure model to substantiate DCS. Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.