Center for Services Research and Education

A Response to Marketplace Realities
A Pragmatic Emphasis
The Matrices of Quality
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A Response to Marketplace Realities:
The goal of the Center for Services Research and Education (CSRE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is to help reverse these trends by increasing the understanding of the service sector and its functioning, and educating a stream of students and managers who will seek careers in service industries.

CSRE focuses the diverse resources of a major technological research university on theissue of declining productivity and competitiveness in the service sector. CSRE uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches to problem solving and investigates the various applications of technology - and in particular information technology - to productivity and competitiveness.

CSRE is a thoroughly interdisciplinary center: It brings to bear the talent and expertise of more than 20 faculty from Rensselaer's School of Engineering, Science, Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Architecture, and their students, to seek solutions to broad-based, practical problems.

In the past, research and education in the service sector have tended to follow disciplinary lines: Experts in tranportation systems, health care delivery systems, or organizational and management systems, for example, have investigated those aspects of one or more service industries and then prescribed solutions.

In contrast, CSRE takes a holistic approach to the multifaced service sector and brings together experts from engineering, marketing, psychology, economics and management policy and organization, among others. These experts examine the common elements that characterize all aspects of the service sector and develop generic principles that apply accross the wide spectrum of services.

This holistic approach is essential in coming to an understanding of an increasingly complex and diverse sector that is ubiquitous - embracing everything from psychotherapy practitioners to public utilities.

Currently, CRSE is one of the few centers in the united states performing research on the service sector and investigating major policy issue as they apply to this important area. CRSE places emphasis on both research and education. Nationwide, not enough talented engineering and sciences students are considering careers in service sector. Rensselaer is an exception in this rule. For example, currently one of the top three employers of RPI graduates is an information technology consulting firm.

As is the case with other Rensselaer's centers of excellence, The Rensselaer Statistical Consulting Center is sensitive to and respects clients' need for confidentiality. The center is primary housed in the Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems and is a part of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which was founded in 1824 as the nation's oldest technological university. With an undergraduate and graduate population of 6,000 students Rensselaer is co-educational, non-sectarian, university located in New York State's Capital District, within 250 miles of New York city, Boston and Montreal.

A Pragmatic Emphasis:
CRSE reflects Rensselaer's pragmatic, applications approach to problem solving. Today, CRSE researchers are:

• Providing critical information based innovations to health systems, transportation systems, and public emergency management. In the health domain, a multi year effort in long-term health care (particularly case mix reimursement and quality assurance) has been the focus of research sponsored by the US Department of Health and Human Services;
• Developing routing and siting methodologies for hazardous materials and waste;
• Performing innovative research in advance technology as it applies to investment banking and financing firms, state-of-the-art software vendors, and telecommunications compnies;
• Developing principles for managing fast-track organizations; and,
• Researching reliability and quality of software engineering and large-scale integer programming for telecommunications companies.

The Matrices of Quality:
Productivity in services is specially difficult to measure because of problems in numerically defining output and estabilishing an objective basis for quality; for example, we cant assume that the value of critical services such as fire departments, police forces and some banking and welfare services is equal to only their costs, not only numbersbut measurement methodologies become critical.

But how do you evaluate quality? The models up until now have been primarily subjective - whatever the customer identifies as quality is in fact quality. Can this heretofore-subjective process be estabilished on some more objective basis?

For the next several years, CRSE will be looking as whether objective standards and models for quality can be set. CRSE will study the possibility of incorporating this concept of quality into the initial design of services.

For More information on the Center of Services Research and Education, contact:

Dr. Daniel Berg
Building CII, Room 5017
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
Phone: (518) 276-2895
Email: bergd@rpi.edu