News Release

Faculty member’s book honored by American Library Association

January 14, 2008

The newest book from Penn State Harrisburg faculty member James T. Ziegenfuss Jr. has drawn high praise from the American Library Association and its Choice magazine. This society of 35,000 librarians selects books for library collections nationwide.

Customer Friendly: the Organizational Architecture of Service, published in 2007, is among those listed as Outstanding Academic Titles in the January issue of Choice ,“reflecting the best in scholarly titles reviewed” by the magazine.

In awarding Outstanding Academic Titles of 2007, the editors of Choice apply several criteria to reviewed titles, including: overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form, originality or uniqueness of treatment, value to students, and importance in building library collections. The book was selected in the Business, Management, and Labor category.

The ALA reports the list of honorees is quite selective and contains approximately 10 percent of 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year. Its editors base their selections on the reviewer’s evaluation of the work, the editor’s knowledge of the field, and the reviewer’s record.

The reviewer said in the September 2007 issue of Choice, “Adjectives such as clever, innovative, and unique really come to mind in describing the core import of Customer Friendly by Ziegenfuss. It will be highly regarded by serious students of customer service and those struggling to build strong customer service practice in their enterprises. Ziegenfuss’ work takes its rightful place among leading college and university texts dealing with customer service and is a valuable asset for curricular libraries.”

Customer Friendly is designed to enhance how organizations can consistently deliver high-quality service. Published by Rowman & Littlefield/University Press, the book builds on the theory and application of “systems thinking” to organization design and behavior by showing how products, structure, psychological climate, culture, and leadership work together to produce customer-friendly experiences.

Professor of Management and Health Care Systems in Penn State Harrisburg’s graduate programs in health and public administration, Ziegenfuss has written more than 100 articles for journals and conferences and authored 11 books on health care, management, strategic planning, and administration. He is an active consultant to public and private organizations.