Volume 19, Number 1 Article by Gautam Sinha March, 2007
Readings in Services Management : By Vinnie Jauhari and Umashankar Venkatesh, 2005, Institute for International Management and Technology, Gurgaon, pp 470, Price: Rs 850. :
The rise of the services industry in India generates a need to document the management practices and processes of the services sector. The book provides a good framework for understanding the key aspects of the five new emerging sectors in India – healthcare, education services, hospitality, financial services and of course IT and ITES. With the existing management education system biased towards the manufacturing sector, it is important for management education to include services management in addition to the traditional functional specialisations.
The research papers brought together in this book are invaluable as they provide a deep insight into the problems faced by the services sector.
The section on the health care sector contains a useful paper on health security financing which systematically covers the different modes of financing health care and the pros and cons of each. The paper on ‘Patients’ Perception of Medical Services’ helps brings out the areas of improvement in the government health institutions and private health institutions from the patient’s (customer’s) point of view. The other market research paper on ‘Estimating Cost of Government Health Care Services in India’ is very interesting as it is the first time that a cost analysis of government rural health care services has been attempted. The paper builds a cost analysis framework on which unit costs have been estimated. This kind of analysis will be very beneficial for other service providers as well.
A general observation is that material on the educational services sector is difficult to find. The papers included in this section highlight different aspects of the educational sector such as the marketing of higher education, quality of secondary education and the labour market requirement and B-school teaching method analysis. The papers on university financing and the exploration of managerial skills and organisational climate are very informative. This section could have been structured better. Informative papers on the educational services sector could have been selected to provide a background for a better understanding of the related market research papers.
This section on the hospitality sector provides a comprehensive and useful picture of various managerial issues in the hospitality industry, covering it from different angles – from technologies used in the hotel industry to the trend of entrepreneurship in the hotel industry. There is also an interesting analysis of online privacy concerns that traces what happens to information when a hotel booking is made online.
The section on the financial sector, with its emphasis on banking, is the best part of the book and correlates well the information provided and the research work in the field. The research methodologies used in all these research papers is very sound. The papers on the State Bank of India and on ‘Metamorphosis of Marketing Financial Services in India’ are worthy of mention.
The well structured section in IT and ITES has informative papers on the Indian software sector and e-commerce in India. The empirical studies on information systems are very interesting, and the issue of why service businesses use interactive technologies in marketing has also been addressed. The papers have treated supply chain management systems and customer relationship management comprehensively.
Overall, the book is a good attempt to document the experiences in the services sector. However, a better approach would have been to provide an introduction to each sub-sector say, banking in financial services, and follow them up with market research papers based on the concepts presented in the introductory papers. This would have helped the reader to appreciate and assimilate the subject matter better.
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