Suchergebnisse

In this paper we present the Greek Interoperability Center (GIC), which constitutes a common and uniform framework for web services hosting and use. Those web services are either implemented by Ministry of Finance or other Ministries (web service clients). The aim of GIC is to act as a hub for the exchange of business/operational data between Public Sector Agencies but also to establish a uniform way to implement web services (and clients) in terms of security and web service implementation techniques. This was accomplished by implementing an Enterprise Service Bus as well as a number of "horizontal" functionalities named Common Implementation Framework.

PurposeThe companies are struggling to collect invoices due to the decrease in the economic growth. This global trend does not only affect undeveloped countries, but it also has a strong impact on the developed countries. Improving the debt collection process become a significant element to maintain financial stability. The institutions that are specialized on collecting payments, debt collection agencies and their call centers, with their expertise in the field can improve the payment process. Yet, managing evaluating the performance of debt collection agencies is a very hard process that involves uncertainty and imprecision. Performance measurement (PM) is a combination of numerically expressed characteristics which give insight about the success or degree of accomplishment of an activity. PM can be handled in various levels such as individual, team, department or company. The aim of this study is to present a systematic and objective PM method for call centers.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, first an exploratory approach is used to understand the call center measurement problem. Several meetings are done with the representatives of both call center firms and the parent firms that outsource debt collection process. Simultaneously, a broad literature review is conducted. An iterative approach is selected to reach deeper knowledge on the process. New meetings are planned and scope of the literature review has changed based on this iterative approach. After these steps, the problem has been considered as the multi-criteria decision-making problem since more than one criteria should be considered for evaluating the performances of call centers. The result of the literature review and the meetings with experts show that defining the weights for the criteria is very crucial for evaluating the performances accurately. Collecting human judgment for defining the weights of call center criteria necessitates dealing with vagueness and uncertainty. The intuitionistic fuzzy sets excellent tools for representing uncertainty. Interval valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets can easily represent the human judgments. Thus, in this study, an intuitionistic fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approach is used to design the proposed methodology. Incomplete interval-valued intuitionistic preference relations are used to determine the weights of the indicators aggregating linguistic evaluations of the decision makers.FindingsThe proposed approach provides an objective calculation of performance measurement. In order to provide objectivity, indicator performance functions are proposed for the first time in this study. Nine different functions and related parameters are defined to objectively measure indicator performances.Originality/valueThe paper proposes an objective and easy-to-modify approach for call-center PM, which can be used by call center managers. It presents a new fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method for call center performance evaluation, which can consider the multi-experts' judgments under vagueness and impreciseness, which may be conflicting and incomplete interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. Also nine new functions are defined for indicator performance.

"In den letzten Jahren haben sich ForscherInnen aus unterschiedlichen
Richtungen der Industrie-, Arbeits- und Organisationssoziologie für Call
Center interessiert. Der Grund dafür liegt nicht allein darin, dass es sich um
einen schnell expandierenden Bereich der Dienstleistungsarbeit handelt. Es
scheint vielmehr, dass sich in den Call Centern exemplarisch eine Reihe von
Themen und Tendenzen bündelt, die die Arbeit in Dienstleistungs- und
Wissensgesellschaften bestimmen. So sprechen etwa d'Alessio und
Oberbeck (1999, S. 157) vom 'organisatorischen Kristallisationspunkt von
neuen Arbeitsbeziehungen, Beschäftigungsverhältnissen und einer neuen
Dienstleistungskultur'. An den Call Centern 'kristallisieren' auch zentrale Fragen der deutschen
und britischen Industriesoziologie In Großbritannien hat dabei sowohl die
Expansion der Call Center als auch deren Erforschung früher begonnen als
in der Bundesrepublik – angestoßen insbesondere durch die Deregulierungen
und Privatisierungen in den Finanzdienstleistungen in den 80er und 90er
Jahren. Für die deutschsprachige Industriesoziologie ist traditionell die Frage
der Qualifikationsentwicklung leitend (Lane 1992; Brose 1998). Hier stehen
Call Center für eine Rückkehr des Taylorismus, für Dequalifizierung oder
Polarisierung oder für flexible Bewegungen zwischen
Deinstitutionalisierung und betrieblicher Rekonstruktion von Qualifikation.
Die britische labour process debate befasst sich zentral mit Fragen
betrieblicher Herrschaft und Kontrolle. Hier stehen sich materialistische und
'postmoderne', diskursorientierte Sichtweisen gegenüber." (Autorenreferat)

The relative importance of financial services in national economies varied over the course of the twentieth century. Rajan and Zingales note that "by most measures, countries were more financially developed in 1913 than in 1980 and only recently have they surpassed their 1913 levels" and that "indicators of financial development fell in all countries after 1929, reaching their nadir around 1980. Since then has been a revival of financial markets." This revival of financial markets over the last thirty years has led to the study of "financialization" that is variously defined with differing uses, but here is understood as "the growing importance of financial markets as a source of profits in the economy."