Professional service supply chains

Professional service (PS) exchanges are seldom narrowly bounded in time and space. This conceptual paper discusses prolonged PS sequences involving different professionals and different types of professionals. It is framed by the dual concepts of service episodes, representing the client's perspective and experience, and PS supply chains, that is, organized sequences of professional, clerical, and technical services explicitly set up to provide specific results, such as producing a financial product, designing a house, or replacing a hip. Four illustrative, empirically inspired situations are used to characterize episodes and supply chains. Each exemplar, two each from the health and social work sectors, is real and draws on publicly available data. The richness of the public information is a reflection of the fact that each is some form of failure or “disaster” (Altay and Ramirez, 2010). This dual conceptualization leads to a holistic perspective obtained by using the complex adaptive systems framework (Dooley and Van de ven, 1999, Levin, 1998) as a lens. The paper concludes with a discussion of the dynamics of such service systems and some proposals for a research agenda.