Greetings Services Researchers!

As we go to press with this issue, we are in the enviable position of having a special issue that attracted more than one issue’s worth of attention from worthy authors in the services discipline. Stemming from a recent AMCIS mini-track on Advances in Services Research, the papers represented here are among the best work that we saw at that conference, and were invited for additional revision based on those merits. We’re sure you’ll find this interesting and stimulating reading. I owe a debt of gratitude to the man behind the scenes, Chad Christensen, who has been Ramesh’s capable aid in shepherding these papers to print. All of the minutia involved with getting a paper out of revision and into typesetting is what we owe Chad; for no journal could run without a capable back-office operation, and we are lucky that we have that. In this issue, Comte et al. write of service network enablement through a novel value distribution model. Indicative of the leading edge thinking this series of issues was intended to engender, this article breaks new ground in the conceptualization of services provision. Mahadevan and Kettinger consider the services oriented architecture as a means for prioritizing service to customers. In as much as services are often seen as jointly produced between providers and recipients, this view has much promise in the IT-enabled services world. Yang et al. come from a software testing perspective – one of the most important IT services provided in modern application development and they consider how best to assess the quality of testing services in their contribution. Mary Tate and David Johnstone provide a fascinating contribution that considers how services have changed in the era of Information and Communication Technologies. Not only do ICT give us new services to deliver, but new delivery venues, and all of this changes how recipients perceive the process. We hope you enjoy the offerings in this special issue, and that you will continue to watch these pages for the most innovative work in the services realm.