Studying the Evolution of Skill Profiles in Distributed, Specialization Driven Service Delivery Systems through Work Orchestration

Many sectors of Services Industry like Software Services, Healthcare Services, Customer Care Services etc. have benefited from IT enabled, globally distributed service delivery mechanisms. The first generation delivery models were motivated mainly by cost arbitrage and featured dedicated teams for each major customer (or source of demand). We are now witnessing the emergence of delivery models that go beyond the cost arbitrage considerations. One such trend is the delivery of services via skill-specific service delivery centers. The centers are organized around the core skills of their employees. Instead of having dedicated teams, service requests are dynamically routed to the most appropriate delivery center based on required skills and availability. When executed effectively, it allows organizations to improve utilization measures and exploit locally available skills for global delivery. We consider a model in which a centralized planner orchestrates a network of skills-driven delivery centers to serve a global pool of requests. The delivery centers are semi-autonomous in the sense that they can pursue certain local objectives like diversifying into new skills or improving skill levels as long as they do not significantly hamper overall service delivery. In this paper, we study evolution of skill profiles of the delivery centers from global and local perspectives under this orchestration model. In our model, a stream of service requests, tagged by required skill type and a measure of workload is received by the central planner. The planner orchestrates the delivery by assigning the requests to the centers while matching the skill type and capacity. Ideally, the planner would like to assign the request to optimize some global objectives. However, organizational dynamics require that the centers be allowed to pursue local objectives without significantly affecting overall delivery. To achieve this, we propose the following mechanisms of assigning requests. In the "push" mode, the planner assigns the requests so as to optimize global objectives. In the "pull" mode, it allows the centers to compete for a subset of requests to pursue local objectives. Specifically, the planner auctions a subset of requests and the centers compete for the auctioned requests if they are aligned with local objectives. To enable the auction mechanism, the centers are assigned imaginary budgets. They have to utilize the budget to pursue local objectives. We anticipate scenarios when centers require assistance in pursuing their local objectives. The "aided push" mode allows the planner to aid a center in taking on requests which it would not be able to execute without the aid. We have built a simulation framework aimed at studying the evolution of the system under different scenarios, characterized by: number of delivery centers, their sizes, requests arrival patterns, initial skill profiles, different local objectives, and different global objective of the planner. Our simulation framework and the experiments are designed to obtain important insights on the design of specialization driven service delivery systems through work orchestration. We present extensive experimental results which study various aspects of such a delivery model and present conclusions in the form of design guidelines.