Coding Case Study 5: Theory-building research

different value-creating functions distinguished by Porter 1985: 45–48. In addition to his seven functions, we included an eighth one, “internal customer”, in order to avoid confusion between involving a discipline because of its specific functional expertise on the one hand, and involving it because it is the user of the service on the other hand. Regarding consumption services, at UWV ICT has a dual role being both the internal customer and having a sub-department, which is Table 9.7A Representatives involved in interaction with the service provider Representatives involved at KPN Representatives involved at UWV Component ■ Purchasing category manager ■ Representatives board pension fund 1 ■ Business division representatives ■ Representatives employer’s pension bureau ■ Purchasing ■ External consultant Component ■ Procurement ■ Director financial–economic affairs 2 ■ Business representatives ■ Cash management department ■ Purchasing ■ Legal representatives ■ External consultant Instrumental ■ IT ■ Director ICT 1 ■ Procurement ■ Purchasing ■ Legal ■ Contract management ■ Former director IT business divisions ■ Legal ■ Higher management ■ Service management ■ Architects Instrumental ■ Purchasing category manager 2 ■ Marketingcommunications ■ Business stakeholders Consumption ■ Level and type of involvement ■ Legal depends on type of temporary labour ■ Financial control being purchased ■ ICT control ■ Service management ■ Facility experts ■ External people Table 9.7B Level of perceived risk Consumption Instrumental Component KPN UWV KPN1 KPN2 UWV KPN1 KPN2 UWV1 UWV2 Risk L L H M H H L H H involved with production of the service. Because the ICT department’s main role is that of internal customer, representatives in UWV were categorized as representing the internal customer. For the instrumental services, in the case of KPN1, IT specialists perform the role of business process engineers, aligning the service provider’s operations with KPN’s. Various business representatives are involved in the role of internal customer. For UWV, people from serv- ice management operational ICT representatives are occupied with the daily management of the service provider, and thus with actual service delivery processes. We categorized the participation of higher management in these two service purchases, as well as the participa- tion of accounting representatives and external consultants at UWV as representing infrastructure. For KPN2, the marketing discipline per- forms the role of process engineers, bringing the activities of market- ing agencies in line with KPN’s business strategy. At the same time, marketing is the internal customer of the marketing agencies. Regarding the component services, legal representatives at UWV as well as an external consultant were categorized as representing infrastructure.

9.2.6 Data presentation

Scores obtained through this coding procedure are presented in Table 9.8. The marked cells in this table indicate the presence of involvement of a representative from one of the eight categories rows in an instance of service purchase columns.

9.2.7 Data analysis

An initial inspection of Table 9.8 shows three things: 1. within each service type the cases have a relatively similar set of representatives that are involved in the interaction; 2. between the service types the set of representatives that is involved in the interaction is different; 3. purchasing representatives are involved in all cases for all types of services. Because no variation occurs with regard to purchasing involvement across the different types of services, purchasing involvement will be excluded from the analysis. Regarding consumption services, we formulate the following proposi- tion with the form of a sufficient condition: Proposition 1a P1a: In ongoing interaction associated with consumption services, representatives of the internal customers are always involved. This proposition formulates what is common to the two cases 1 and 2 of a purchase of a consumption service in this study. For the instrumen- tal services we formulate the following proposition with the form of a sufficient condition: Proposition 1b P1b: In ongoing interaction associated with instrumental services, people representing the primary processes of the buying company are always involved, as well as representatives of internal customers. This proposition formulates what is common to all three cases of a purchase of an instrumental service in this study. It does, therefore, not include a statement about the representatives of infrastructure or of production because there were contradicting findings in the three cases for this type of service. Table 9.8 Type of buying company representatives involved Type of Service Consumption Instrumental Component Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4 Case 5 Case 6 Case 7 Case 8 Case 9 KPN UWV KPN1 KPN2 UWV KPN1 KPN2 UWV1 UWV2 Risk L L H M H H L H H Marketing sales Process engineers Production service delivery Infrastructure Procurement HRM Technology Internal customer