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The literature on organization design has been dominated by descriptive models in its dealing with structure and operations. This paper takes an alternative view advocating the use of a normative model to be used in the design of service organizations. This model sees the extent of customer contact with the service organization as a major variable affecting system performance and advocates reconfiguring the structure of the service organization to reflect this impact. The discussion describes a taxonomy used to classify firms along the contact dimension and develops 13 propositions which convey critical distinctions between high and low contact services. Application of the model for managerial decision making involves the use of decoupling and the paper identifies factors which favor/disfavor decoupling in light of existing and desired service delivery objectives.organizational design, decoupling, customer contact, service systems

A heightened awareness of the fundamental behavioral science principles underlying human interactions can be translated directly into service design. Service encounter design can be approached with the same depth and rigor found in goods production. Service encounters can be designed to enhance the customer's experience during the process and their recollection of the process after it is completed. This paper summarizes the key concepts from a panel discussion at the DSI National Meeting in Orlando in November 2000. The panel brought together a number of leading academic researchers to investigate current research questions relating to the human side of the design, development and deployment of new service technologies. Human issues from the customer and service provider vantage are illustrated and challenges to researchers for exploring this perspective are presented.

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