Service science – the trend and the future core

With the increasing emphasis on the service sector in global business, the rise of the new scholarly domain of service science became inevitable. This innovative research domain appears to be a promising discipline in the modern business environment. Although, the term service science was issued by IBM a mere 6 years ago, it rapidly took off as the Council on Competitiveness published the Palmisano Report in that same year, forecasting that services would become the motor of economic development in the years to come. Service science applies a wealth of scientific methods from various disciplines, including management science, cognitive science, social science, computer science, economics, and engineering. As the global service-based economy and its research fields expand, the services, the vehicle of future business growth, will and should be the focus of business-related fields. This special issue comprises papers from the INFORMS 2010 Service Science Conference, organized by the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, and held on 7–10 July 2010, in Taipei, Taiwan. From 78 submissions, 19 papers having high evaluation scores were selected, and the authors were invited to submit an extended version of the conference paper for further review. After review and revision, seven papers were accepted for publication in this special issue. These papers describe a cross-section of practical application experiences and state-of-the-art research work using service science methodologies across a variety of industrial domains in several countries. Accordingly, outstanding and insightful results are reported in these papers. Recently, commerce-related subjects have stimulated the broader use of computer science along with other state-of-the-art technologies. Any method for analysis derived from the principles gains superiority over others. Accordingly, Mehravaran and Logendran proposed mathematical programming models for the bicriteria unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times in a supply chain. Moreover, the authors also built a search algorithm to find optimal and near optimal solutions for the problem, which has been shown to be NP-hard. Their work indicates that their algorithm is capable of producing high quality solutions within a reasonable computation time. Owing to the dramatic expansion of computer science and Internet-based technologies, the management of renewable resources such as human resources may be estimated by IT systems as part of an IT infrastructure library. Consequently, the twin objectives of better fulfilling customer needs and maximizing the efficiency of resources can be achieved. Grabarnik and Shwartz’s paper describes an IT system-based approach for scheduling of requests for services in groups, which minimizes the duration of requests that use partially overlapping sets of resources. This article validates its empirical results by comparing them to existing open source schedulers, illustrating that their approach is superior. The preliminary integrated approach used by Grabarnik and Shwartz has thus created new insights for the discipline. With the proliferation of cutting-edge devices such as computers and laptops, e-learning, also known as online learning, has drawn global interest. Now a major social trend, the rapid evolution in e-learning has led to the use of portable communication devices, such as cell phones, in a new learning style, called mobile learning (m-learning). In their paper concerning m-learning, Crescente and Lee collaborate to examine this up-to-date learning style. The authors establish a theoretical framework for m-learning, and suggest that this field has great promise as an academic discipline. Their research in this rising discipline has laid an innovative foundation for future researchers in associated fields. Another excellent case of applying methods in the service sciences to better examine the service-oriented issues of the local cultural industry (LCI) in Taiwan is the work of Chen. His study in this volume not only emphasizes service quality improvement for LCIs, but also adopts an integrated method of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the quality function deployment, along with the balanced scorecard, to meet the needs of creative, systematic, and customeroriented solutions. Since globalization and localization have flourished worldwide in recent years, distinct cultural and historical resources of certain regions have been exploited by a variety of manufacturing and service industries. The tourist industry, often an LCI, is a key industry in many nations. In Chen’s study, I-lan County was used as a reference for LCI in Taiwan. They concluded that