CSOs in the house?

Sorry for the long hiatus between posts. It's been a busy start to Fall '07, including such happenings as:

- The 2nd Annual Chief Service Officer's Summit

- The 37th Annual S-Business World Conference

- A characteristically dramatic ALCS victory for my hometown Boston Red Sox.

As much as I'd like to devote today's post to the latter, there's just not much left to be said, with Boston's legion of storied sports writers penning hourly on new sub-plots and pre-Series melodrama... Except maybe, Go Sox!

So, on to the topic of the day: key insight from the CSO Summit. Keynote speaker Michael Treacy - author of Discipline of Market Leaders and other business books - encouraged delegates to Innovate, Learn, and Adapt in their service strategies. Against this backdrop, it struck me that many of the attending OEMs still hold the precarious view that service is mainly maintenance and repair.

The discussion panel in which I participated touched on the issue that the same forces of commoditization that squeeze products are acting upon mainstream services as well.

So, what does it mean to constantly innovate services? In the context of Smart Services, connecting serviceable equipment to a network is indeed an innovation, but not a competitively differentiable one, at least not over the long term. OEMs must constantly uncover new ways to exploit machine data to deliver new value-added services to their customers.

Preventing equipment from failing is a given. But OEMs that embed themselves in their customers' long-term asset management strategies will win in the end. Here are some ways leading OEMs are leveraging Smart Services to accomplish this:

- Track performance discrepancies among work shifts, to uncover training gaps

- Monitor energy consumption to comply with green regulations

- Provide system of record for customers' financial audits

- Identify asset interdependencies, and provide systemic asset performance optimization plans

- Maintain centralized asset knowledge repository in order to optimize the utilization of high-cost resources

What are some ways your company is going beyond break/fix with its smart service offerings? Post a comment, and tell us about it.