This book essentially introduces a new perspective of service study. By taking a holistic view of the service lifecycle, we discuss approaches to explore the real-time dynamics of service systems and networks. We advocate that a service must be defined as a value cocreation and transformation process. As such, we can holistically analyze the performance of service systems that enable and execute complex and heterogeneous services. By leveraging the advances in computing and network technologies, social science, management science, and other relevant fields, we present the concept and principles of putting people first in service and demonstrate that service networks in light of service encounters can be comprehensively explored in a closed-loop and real-time manner. The presented framework can be potentially applied in facilitating service organizations to understand and capture market trends, design and engineer service products and delivery networks, execute service operations, and control and manage the service lifecycles for competitive advantage.

Service research is not new. In fact, service research in the field of marketing has an over 30-year-history. In addition to research and development in service marketing, academics and practitioners have actively developed a variety of theories, methods, and tools and then applied them to address service delivery efficiency and effectiveness issues in service operations and management across the service industry for decades. Recently, significant attention in the service research is related to a variety of exploratory studies of service systems, focusing on how to leverage the advances of management science, systems and network theory, and computing and network technologies to help service organizations improve the overall performance of their service systems from both engineering and operational perspectives.

Note that the worldwide economy was dominated by manufacturing during the last couple of centuries. As a result, both academics and practitioners paid much attention to the design, development, production, and innovation of physical products. The economic shift from manufacturing to service made us rethink people's social, physiological, and psychological roles in the economic activities. However, inertial thinking is part of sociopsychological norms to the majority of human beings, resulting in many service organizations offering and delivering their services using manufacturing mindsets. Consequently, the advances in social science, management science, computing technologies, and others are not well integrated and thus leveraged in support of effective service engineering and management as needed in the service industry.

Change is the only constant in today's business world. The effectiveness () of a service as a solution to meet the changing needs of customers is equal to the product of the quality () of the technical attributes of the solution and the acceptance () of that solution by the customers, that is, . However, the customers' acceptance changes rapidly, varying with people, time, places, cultures, and service contexts. Because people's acceptance is largely subjective, manufacturing mindsets with a focus on physical attributes indeed become ineffective when applied in the field of service engineering and management. Hence, to address the discussed change acceleration phenomena with scientific rigor, we must rely on people-centric and service mindsets. In fact, the introduction of putting employee and customers first in the 1990s radically made a turn in the way how service organizations should develop, operate, and manage businesses and measure their successes. Indeed, people-centered service mindsets have afterwards been emerging and receiving more and more attention in the service industry.

Bearing this discussion in mind, we consider a service as a transformation process rather than an offered product. Truly, both provider-side and customer-side people are always involved in an interactive manner in service. Hence, we view a service as a value cocreation process. For a service, goods are frequently the conduits of service provision; the physical attributes and technical characteristics that specify the goods are indispensable to the service. The quality () of the technical attributes in the service, indeed, mainly defines the quality of the goods. To a service customer, is frequently perceived in service provision as the quality of designated service functionalities that are defined in a service specification. As indicated in the equation of , the value of also depends on the value of , which is largely related to sociopsychological perceptions of the customer throughout the service lifecycle. Although this is well understood conceptually, however, the service industry lacks methods and tools to explore and measure and in service in a holistic, real-time, and quantitative manner.

Services are highly heterogeneous. For a given service, a specific customer and a service provider essentially cocreate the service values that meet the respective needs of the customer and the service provider. Thus, each service is unique. The variability of service and the need for measuring sociopsychological perceptions had made extremely challenging the full exploration of the service lifecycle, spanning market discovery, engineering, delivery, and sustaining, in an integrated and quantitative manner.

Indeed, the prior lack of means to monitor and capture people's dynamics throughout the service lifecycle has prohibited us from gaining insights into the service engineering and management in a service organization. Promisingly, we believe that the combination of the following advances in technologies has made possible the design and development of the needed means and methods that can help service organizations overcome the challenges:

• Digitalization
• Networks and telecommunications
• Collaborative methods and tools
• The fast advances in social network media
• Big data technologies and analytics methods and tools

In other words, real-time data on the dynamics of service cocreation processes from both service providers and customers could be comprehensively captured and analyzed if needed. (Surely, people's privacies must never be compromised, which are beyond the coverage of this book.) When the enabling technologies are appropriately implemented, we can create and execute smarter working and consuming practices so that we can make service cocreation processes not only beneficial but also enjoyable.

Simply put, enormous opportunities truly lie ahead of us. We quite often ask ourselves: “Do we have right methods and tools that ensure service systems to perform in such a way that the respective values for both service providers and customers can be optimally cocreated, at present and in the long run?” However, the question remains unanswered, partially or totally. By leveraging both systems methods and networks analytics, in this book we present one solution to address this unanswered question.

Holistically, a service organization is a service system, essentially consisting of service providers, customers, products, and processes. Different from a goods-producing system, a service system must be people-centered. Therefore, a service system surely is socio-technical. On the basis of the earlier discussion, we understand that it is the transformation process that ties all other system constituents together and cocreates the respective values for both service providers and customers. Whether the values can be fully met relies on the efficient, effective, and smart business operations that are engineered, executed, and managed across the service system.

Service is people-centric, truly cultural and bilateral. The type and nature of a service dictate how a service is performed, which accordingly determines how a series of service encounters could occur throughout its service lifecycle. The type, order, frequency, timing, time, efficiency, and effectiveness of the series of service encounters throughout the service lifecycles determine the quality of services perceived by customers who purchase and consume the services. Note that the people-centered, interactive, and behavioral activities in a service system essentially engender a service cocreation network. Indeed, as the velocity of globalization accelerates, the changes and influences are more ambient, quick, and substantial, impacting us as providers or customers in dynamic and complex ways that have not seen before. The understanding of service networks is essential for service providers to be able to design, offer, and manage services for competitive advantage in the long run.

Because of the sociotechnical nature of a service system, we use a systems approach to evaluate the performance of the service system, aimed at capturing both utilitarian functions and sociopsychological needs that characterize service systems. However, the true people's behavioral and attitudinal dynamics of a sociotechnical system requires conducting real-time, corresponding social network analytics. As a result, the insights of the service interactions in the formed service networks can be truly explored and understood, which assist stakeholders to make respective while cooperative informed decisions at the point of need to improve their service cocreation processes across the service lifecycles in an optimal manner.

To get a comprehensive understanding of this new perspective of service research, readers should read chapters sequentially. Brief introductions to all chapters in this book are provided in the following:

• Chapter 1. Introducing service by briefly reviewing the evolution of service, we emphasize that the holistic view of service is a must in today and the future's world economy.
• Chapter 2. Discussing the concept of cocreation in the service industry. A definition of service for this book is provided, which radically lays the foundation for the remaining chapters in this book.
• Chapter 3. Exploring cocreation transformation processes. We articulate that the increasing complexity of service research and development requires the science of service in a new perspective.
• Chapter 4. Looking into service science fundamentals. By analyzing the dynamics of service, we define laws of service in general. A holistic and sociotechnical view of service becomes essential for us to develop service science.
• Chapter 5. Revealing the digitalization of service systems and networks. We argue that putting people first should be a mindset. The mindset is what service organizations must bear when they design and develop their service systems. Through leveraging process-aware computing systems and sensor-based networks, people's behavioral and sociopsychological data and information can be well monitored and captured.
• Chapter 6. Showing computational thinking of service systems and networks. By taking advantage of the digitalization of service systems and networks, we demonstrate that the system dynamics of service cocreation processes can be fully modeled, analyzed, and controlled in a closed-loop, real-time, and quantitative manner.
• Chapter 7. Using education examples to show how service and service systems can be explored from a systems perspective. Specifically, we apply structural equation modeling to investigate mechanisms of improving educational service systems. By integrating cross-section and longitudinal analyses, we demonstrate the tremendous potential of the applications of the proposed approach in the general field of service engineering and management.
• Chapter 8. Using an online education example to demonstrate the dynamics of service networks. The concept and principles of putting people first are illustrated in great detail in this chapter. When people-sensing mechanisms are well implemented in a service system, service networks that are essentially formed from service interactions within the service system can be fully investigated. We present effective data, network, and business analytics with a focus on looking into the insights of the service system in real time. Ultimately, once system performance modeling and service network analysis are well integrated in a closed-loop, real-time, and quantitative manner, we can truly help service organizations perform optimal service engineering and management throughout the service lifecycle.
• Chapter 9. Concluding the book with some final remarks. We articulate that innovative approaches to the development of Service Science are truly needed. However, we advocate that the service research and practice community must appreciate and continue to develop a variety of methodologies and tools that can be well derived and evolved from the known theories and principles in systems theory, operations research, marketing science, organizational behavior and theory, network theory, social computing, and analytics.

This book does not intend to cover the state of the art in the service research field. Instead, this book simply provides readers a new perspective of service research and practice. It could serve as a good reference book for scholars and practitioners in the contemporary service engineering and management field.

Disclaimer

No product or service mentioned in this book is endorsed by its maker or provider, nor are any claims of the capabilities of the product or service discussed or mentioned. Products and company names mentioned may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Robin G. Qiu, PhD

Professor of Information Science

Pennsylvania State University