OR and the management of electronic services

This review paper is meant to provide some insight to the relation between operations research and the management of electronic services. We use the term electronic services, within the broader e-business context, to refer to any service that is delivered to the customer via electronic means, mainly the Internet as a new channel to communicate with customers, but also through mobile and other digital communications. During the last years we have experienced an explosion in the development of electronic services, which is creating abundant opportunities for operations research (OR) applications, required to empower several types of technology-mediated interactions, exploit the large-scale digital data sources, and automate the recurring operational decisions. In this paper we summarise the various aspects in which operations research may support the management of electronic services, taking into account the different characteristics of alternative electronic media, such as the Internet, mobile communications, interactive television etc.