Since 2004, I have been involved in a variety of research projects related to the emerging field of service science. The presented concept and principles of service science in this book are surely derived from those funded studies. The funded projects include US NSF Grants (DMI-0620340 and DMI-0734149), Department of Education Grant (08JA630040, China), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Endowed Professor Scholarships (1009-905346 and 1009-908332), Chinese NSF Grants (70541007, 70772073, and 70902026), and IBM Faculty Award (2008–2009, China), and IBM Grants (SYRTHU5, D07009SUR, JLP201111006-1, NUAA-SUR-2012), Jiangsu Science and Technology Innovation Award (JSTIA269008, Jiangsu, China), and Penn State COIL RIG Grant (2012-14). Without their financial supports, I might never have had an opportunity of working in this emerging and promising field.

Portions of the content of Chapter 5 were previously published as a chapter entitled “Information Technology as a Service” in Enterprise Service Computing: From Concept to Deployment, which was published by Idea Group Publishing (Hershey, PA) in 2007, Copyright 2007, IGI Global, www.igi-global.com. Portions of the content of this book were previously published as chapters entitled “BPM” and “BPM/SOA, Business Analytics and Intelligence” in Business-Oriented Enterprise Integration for Organizational Agility, which was published by IGI Global (Hershey, PA) in 2013, Copyright 2013, IGI Global, www.igi-global.com. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Portions of the content of Chapter 6 were previously published in Service Science, 1(1), 42–55, entitled “Computational thinking of service systems: dynamics and adaptiveness modeling” and are used with permission from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS, https://www.informs.org). INFORMS is not responsible for the errors introduced in the translation of the original work. During the period of developing this project, the author wrote several editorial columns for Service Science. The author made cross-references between those editorial columns and this book.

The author would like to acknowledge the help of all involved in the collation and review process of this book, without their supports the project could not have been satisfactorily completed. Special thanks also go to all the staff at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., whose contributions throughout the whole process from inception of the initial idea to final publication have been invaluable. In particular, I am very grateful to Susanne Steitz-Filler, Senior Editor, who continuously prodded via e-mail for keeping the project on schedule. I want to thank anonymous reviewers whose insights and criticisms helped substantially improve the quality of this book.

Robin G. Qiu, PhD