Exploring Services Science

In contemporary dynamic markets, approaches to management based on systems theory have assumed increasing relevance, leading firms to valorise a holistic optic to challenge environmental changes. In particular, Viable Systems Approach (vSa) symbolizes the aforementioned holistic view of enterprises, introducing some innovative concepts that renovate traditional managerial paradigms in terms of decision-making. Simultaneously, in the field of service research, Service Science can be interpreted as an all-encompassing framework investigating the efficiency of firms, which are in turn intended as service systems; there are numerous points of convergence between Service Science research stream and the vSa. Therefore, this paper aims to combine the two, highlighting the common features, in order to propose insights for an integrated and shared macro level conceptualization of service systems and smart service systems. The main goal is to demonstrate the opportunities for capturing emerging contributes to Service Science advances. This can be achieved by fostering different views and paradigms, such as the vSa, thus avoiding a possible “missed call” from the existing worldwide Service Science research community.

Public higher education services receive nowadays intense attention from the society from at least two perspectives: the high level professional performances requested by companies and public administration as final customers of the educational service system, on one side, and the problem encountered by the authorities in deciding how to dedicate the financial support for universities from the public budget, taking into account also the present state of the labour market and its trend, on another side. Starting from empirical considerations, this paper proposes an ontology model of a generic public higher education service system and several scenarios regarding a qualitative game modelling approach of a Teacher-Student interaction when this service system is placed in an emerging economy and, comparatively, in a mature free market economy.

The concept of strategic sourcing recognizes that procurement is not just a cost function, but supports the firm’s effort to achieve its long-term objectives. Organizations more and more expect from their chief procurement officer (CPO) to develop long-term and short-term plans in procurement. Typically, however, procurement is driven by a tactical spend management sourcing process aimed at cost saving targets, which is not able to support organizations in achieving strategic objectives like innovation, value creation, sustainable competitive advantage and long-term partnerships. A paradigm shift from a tactical way of thinking about sourcing to a more strategic way of thinking is needed by focusing on value-driven targets. To help realize the new paradigm of value-driven management in sourcing, we designed a systemic view on strategic sourcing based on Service-Dominant Logic and (service) systems thinking. We used this systemic view to develop the conceptual basis of a new modeling and analysis language that helps organizations in exploring sourcing alternatives according to value-driven management.

In the context of service innovation, the question of when to assess a new service by customer and how to achieve personalized assessment are yet to be explored. This is especially true under the situations of uncertainty when it comes to bringing the effectiveness of new service’s promotion and decision making, i.e., for service provider to attain service competitiveness and for potential service customer to decide whether to try the new service. Accordingly, an appropriate expectation positioning method proposed in this study aims to collect and analyze psychological information from potential service customer in order to make service promotion decisions capable of achieving service provider’s purpose as well as satisfying service customer, utilizing Cumulative Prospect Theory.

With increasing importance of business models in modern businesses and continuous business models innovations, it is becoming important to know whether the current processes support proposed business model or can be modified to support the proposed business model. This aspect of Business model innovation is known as business model implementation and it has received little attention in business model related research. In this paper, we explore the relationship between various business model elements with service processes, so that one can systematically assess process readiness for a business model in the future. Focus of this paper is on implementation of new or modified business model in an existing organization already delivering offerings.

This paper presents experience obtained in modelling and simulation of stakeholder-driven interactions for improved transport service design. The presented results describe value-aware, service model driven design artefacts supporting smart transport service development. The Socio-Technical System Engineering process is used in order to generate modelling and simulation artefacts, based on an executable representation of requirements. As a case study, the paper presents an improved design approach for a city transport information service to support travellers with valuable information regarding planning a trip in a city. This attempt to integrate agent-based modelling and simulation experience into the development of smart transport services emphasises the role of the development platform that provides tools for model analysis, validation, simulation, and real-time animation. The development platform’s role in transposing the above mentioned aspects in practice is emphasized and integration guidelines of the STSE process steps with the IBM Rational Rhapsody®development platform are described.

The growing competition asks for high efficiency in business with the aid of Business Process Management (BPM). This article proposes a practical initiative to incorporate and leverage the BPM into organization. The research commences with the overview on the proliferation of BPM in academic community and industry. The authors modeled the appropriate processes to provide the frame for understanding and applying the BPM methodology within any organization. The obtained result, Supplier – Input – Process – Output – Customer (SIPOC) diagram maps out flow and process relationships that help document and communicate stakeholders how BPM processes should be performed.

To improve their chances of survival, enterprises need to cope with the challenges caused by today’s dynamic markets, regulations, customer demands, novel technologies, etc. The shift towards a service-oriented economy as underlined by the concept of Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic is gaining traction within the Service Science community and industry. This shift towards service-dominated business models makes it even more important for enterprises to be agile to meet the rapidly changing customer demands. This demand for agility is reinforced in the context of knowledge-based service organizations (KBSOs), for which flexible service provision is a fundamental requirement. Against this background, we argue that the capability-driven design may provide the KBSOs the required degree of flexibility. Towards this goal, we present an approach for the capability-driven design of enterprises. More precisely, our contributions are (i) the introduction of a capability-based paradigm that contributes to the design of flexible services in KBSOs, (ii) an architecture of our service design and deployment environment and (iii) a demonstration of using our approach based on a real-world use case from an organization in the utilities industry. Our results and insights are based on our work in the EU-FP7 project “Capability as a Service in Digital Enterprises” (CaaS).

The relation between requirements and architecture is a crucial part of an information system, standing as one of the main challenges for its successful development, with traditional projects focused on the connection of functional requirements with architecture components having a tendency to ignore quality concerns. As the quality attributes of a system support its architecture high level structure and behavior, also being highly related to its early nonfunctional requirements, there is a pressing need to align these two realities. Following our solution for aligning business requirements with services quality characteristics by derivation of a logical architecture, we now propose the specification of a metamodel and method supporting a three-dimensional approach for handling the alignment of quality issues between requirements and architecture. Taking advantage of a cube structure and method definition within a SPEM approach, which is adaptable to model variations, our proposal contributes to an improved aligned and traceable solution.

From a service science approach, this paper describes the use of sentiment analysis technology to analyze visitor’s reviews in order to design experiences in the tourism business sector. Despite what the mere accidental observation could show, tourism is one of the significant experiences for human beings and that makes it optimal to test new concepts in service science, such as experience design and sentiment analysis. This is the first time in the literature that both concepts are used in the analysis of a large number of tourist reviews across a whole country. The value of this work lies in providing experience design recommendations on the basis of a systematic study. Thus, the potential of analyzing services through a scientific focus is shown .

Compared with manufacturing industries, service industries have a distinct characteristic called “heterogeneity”, i.e., there is a wide variation in service offerings to different customers due to their individualized demands. Traditional resource-centric services computing paradigm tries to make use of mass customization approaches to fulfill customer demands in a cost-effective way, but sacrifices the personalization degree and decreases customer satisfaction. We propose a user-centric paradigm called “Personal Service Eco-Environment (PSE2)” which plays as a “personal assistant” of each user. PSE2 is composed of personal data, services, and social relations around a user, and fully-personalized service/social collaboration solutions are to be planned on the basis of the individualized characteristics extracted from his personal data and the dynamic multi-end context. This paper introduces the high-level architecture and design philosophy of PSE2.

A better evaluation and understanding of the client’s perception of the service provided by hotels is critical for hotel managers, especially in the “Travel 2.0” era, where tourists not only access but also actively review the service provided. This paper analyses data automatically collected from TripAdvisor reviews regarding 2 star and 5 star hotels in Porto. TripAdvisor user generated content is explored through text mining techniques with the purpose of creating word clouds, synthesizing and prioritizing the aspects of the service raised by customers. Furthermore, this content is analyzed using the SERVQUAL model to identify the service quality dimensions most valued by guests of the two types of hotels. The results of the preliminary study demonstrate that the methodology proposed allows us to identify service perceptions with reasonable effectiveness, highlighting the potential of the procedure to become a complementary tool for hotel management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how service innovations (in a living lab context) contribute to co-create value in a service network. Exploratory research is developed using a qualitative approach and case study on mobility services in Bologna. Our findings reveal that the involved entities are able to recombine their existing resources and design a new value proposition based on the ICT solution. Theoretical and empirical research suggests that collaboration and participation in decision making are critical to service system reconfiguration. The study shows the importance of including insights from Service Science Management and Engineering and Design (SSMED) in the management of network theory. Moreover, the research paves the way for new perspectives on analysis of local governance issues based on value co-creation processes in the ICT service solution context. Using this perspective, service innovations in the overall management of public services view a city as a Smart Local Service System (SLSS), whose competitiveness depends on its ability to access and share common resources to create mutual value.

The identification of customer needs is an important task for Service Design. The paper proposes an approach for automatically detecting customer needs from micro blog data (e.g. Twitter). It shows first results on identification models and lays the foundation for future research in this field.

To meet the challenge of delivering products to the customers in a minimum time, Time Minimization Transportation Problem (TMTP) provides a powerful framework to determine the better ways to deliver products to the customer. In this paper, we present a new procedure for determining an initial basic feasible solution of TMTP. Comparative study is accomplished between the presented procedure and the other existing procedures in virtue of sample examples which demonstrate that the presented procedure requires less number of iterations to reach the optimal transportation time.

This conceptual paper considers the cooperative enterprise model in the light of how it can be affected by the digital world and - at the same time - of how it can positively affect both the Internet and its users. The aim of the paper is therefore twofold: (i) to consider the extent and the way in which cooperative principles are going to be affected by the transition of these firms towards ‘digital materiality’ [1]; (ii) to outline the potential implications of a diffusion of cooperative forms to Internet organizations and users. Based on the traits of this enterprise model, an emerging perspective is described whereby the ‘cooperative’(especially if considered as a ‘service system’) has an interesting potential both as a competent actor in the domain of virtual enterprises and as a possible driver for safeguarding Internet users.

Mobile Application Software (M-Apps) is increasingly popular and by now represents the interactive trendiest software. Investigations about their valuation paradigms are so increasingly common. Even if M-Apps belong to the broad category of Intellectual Property assets, underlying business model is so innovative and different from traditional intangibles that they require new valuation paradigms. The main research question of this paper is to investigate about Service as a primary value driver of M-Apps. A Service-Value-Approach is proposed as a new appraisal method, which embodies customers’ perception of M-Apps service value. The empirical evidence fully confirms the hypothesis of the mediating role of Service Quality on application value. This study has practical implications for both scholars and professionals as it provides significant empirical evidence of the role of Service Quality into M-Apps valuation, and value co-creation between providers and users.

This paper develops an innovative methodology to assess municipal performance concerning the environmental efficiency of new buildings construction, focusing on the consumption of different types of materials. This study aims to support local governments in the definition of policies for improvements in service provision based on the results of a benchmarking study. The methodology developed includes two stages. The first step concerns the evaluation of municipal environmental efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis and the identification of factors that may explain different levels of performance. The second step enables the classification of municipalities in terms of the efforts required to achieve environmental efficiency. For this purpose, we used clustering analysis, namely the k-means algorithm. To illustrate the methodology developed, we analyzed the data of the major materials used in the construction of new buildings (metals, non-metallic minerals, fossil fuels, and biomass) in the municipalities of Lisbon metropolitan area between 2003 and 2009. The study revealed that the environmental efficiency of new buildings construction varies considerably among municipalities, suggesting a high potential for performance improvement.

As the interest in “Agile” Adoption continues to grow, there is an increasing need for organizations to understand how to adopt it successfully. This study has as objective to identify the concerns of deployment of agile practices and provide insight into existing challenges of adopting “Agile”. First, the existing literature and case studies are reviewed. A definition of “Agile” Adoption is then formed based on the literature by breaking down the concept. The work deepens the understanding of the complex issue associated with “Agile” Adoption, contributes to the knowledge of “Agile” Adoption and improvement of the software development processes. We surveyed 5 companies, in total 200 employees. Finally, we present 25 impediments for the company’s “Agile” Adoption that were identified based on the interviews. Software companies, who plan their current strategy for “Agile” Adoption, might use the processed output.

This paper aims to analyze how new technologies are applied in the sport field with specific focus on soccer sport and the related training process. Recently, different areas in the sport sector have been deeply changed thanks to technology, mainly information technology (IT) and internet, with relevant social and economic effects. Starting from the different sub-organizational areas identified in the literature (sport management, sport medicine, athletes’ performance improvement, disability and social integration, sporting event management process), this paper focuses on the soccer sport, evidencing the main effects derived from the technology in terms of the cohabitation of human side and technical part in this specific team sport. This phenomenon is still under searched, so this theoretical study, conducted through a deep review of the literature, aims to propose a more clear picture of the social, economic and technical implications of technology in the soccer area, also identifying new research perspectives.

In the last years, are emerging new hybrid structures in the organizational landscape that combine characteristics from different sectors. Social enterprises are a particular type of organization whose operations address social and economic concerns. These organizations face many challenges once mission and profit aims are integrated in the same strategy. In this paper are identified the main operations decisions in social enterprises and is drafted a research agenda for service operations decisions in hybrid organizations. Are pointed four main topics that claim more research efforts: (1) Goals of operations strategy; (2) Mix owned versus external resources; (3) Integration of resources for social versus income generating activities; (4) Performance management.

Business process management (BPM) activities can be divided into categories such as design, modelling, execution, monitoring, and optimization. Some of these activities are usually automated, mainly the first ones, where Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD) solutions, also know as process mining, can automatically find process models (using unstructured, event-level logs). However, BPM usually involves several activities that are executed in different applications, which are not integrated with each other, or are even manually executed. This may involve the waste of resources and time, and eventually not applying BPM with full potential. We propose an integrated solution, that allows to complete the BPM cycle in a single application and with most of the steps automatically. This proposal was applied in practice in the context of a research project and the results are being integrated into a commercial product.

The convergence of globalization and digitalization has thoroughly transformed the business environment. Therefore, enterprises need a user-centered and open-innovation ecosystem to promote the value co-creation process in order to perform better than their rivals. This paper presents a service-oriented approach for designing a Living Lab for continuous performance improvement in enterprises, especially small-and-medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The proposed Living Lab is an on-going project for the creation of a living laboratory that will support the upgrading program for SMEs in developing countries. The purpose of this Living Lab is to integrate the co-creation and experimentation of innovative ideas and performance improvements in real-life use cases.

Enterprises’ networks (formal and informal) are an ever-growing economic phenomenon, especially in Europe, characterised by a large number of Small and Medium Enterprises. The new economic opportunities are making possible the creation of new types of organizations where the deployment of information technology into knowledge work will increase organizational productivity and effectiveness. The aim of the paper is to summarise the results of the NEMESYS research project funded under the Lazio Region Structural Funds, where a digital platform has been developed in order to deliver services to enterprise networks independently from the network shape and enabling efficiency and effectiveness of the business activities.

A significant proportion of organizations delivering it services follows and combines some it management frameworks. At the organizational level, they often act in accordance with itil, the most used itservice management (itsm) framework. At the project management level, a growing part of them are willing to work with agile methods. However, itil favours the Waterfall life cycle, such as in prince2 or pmbok, to the detriment of agile methods. Nevertheless, it is also assumed that itsm best practices have to be adapted to, e.g., the environment, the kind of it services and the culture of it organizations. So there is a legitimate issue to raise: How can itil v.3 and agile project management coexist in an it organization?In this paper, we positively answer to this question by describing how to adapt itil v.3 when it is associated with scrum, the most popular agile method. First, we detail the current itil structure when a software implementation project is carried out. Then, we identify and explain which are the itil elements to modify in comparison with Waterfall-based project management methodologies. Lastly, we describe and illustrate eight interfaces between itil v.3 and scrum.

The rapid evolution of Internet had a big impact on how digital media is being shared and distributed. Nowadays, copyright violation is a major concern, as security issues still exist in video content traffic. Moreover, a heterogeneous environment often increases the need for retransmission of content, so, the bandwidth consumption is larger and creates congestion at the network level and higher energy consumption. In this paper, we try to tackle these problems and introduce SStream, a solution which can be used to deliver multimedia content in an efficient and secured manner. Our solution is based on a new and innovative encryption scheme, Attribute-Based Encryption. SStream protects the digital content by avoiding piracy and enforcing access control. We evaluated our solution and show that the added security layer does not impact the quality of the content.

Software migration to services is composed of three important parts: source code characterization, target code modeling, and transformation of legacy artifacts to develop services. Moreover, if the same target code model is defined as a common migration target for several existing applications with similar functionality, it is also possible to support interoperation and integration, in addition to migration to software services. This method for software migration may be applied in hazard management, where the availability of systems to manage particular environmental or social hazards may be insufficient when chain reactions and correlated events have to be treated simultaneously. Existing applications for monitoring hazards and emergency response may be migrated towards service-oriented systems, capable to orchestrate decision making and response actions. The target model proposed in this paper is a process template for integrating services irrespective of the hazard type, with the possibility to reuse the realizations of visualization and notification activities. The example implemented in our study was based on process binding to services specific for water and air pollution management.

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) represents an evolution of networked and service-oriented manufacturing models, focusing on the new opportunities in networked manufacturing enabled by the emergence of cloud computing platforms. The paper reports results obtained in developing service-oriented mechanisms that optimize resource allocation in a private cloud implemented with IBM CloudBurst 2.1 for manufacturing enterprises. A predictive mechanism is described that augments the generic threshold-based implementation by recognizing repetitive patterns in application usage. Then, a queued resource allocation bus architecture extended with computation of alternative schedules is proposed; this is a service oriented mechanism assuring adaptability of the private CMfg system to workload fluctuations; the implementation is on IBM CloudBurst 2.1 and uses a genetic algorithm for smart resource allocation. A multilayer QoS monitoring architecture, designed for the cloud, is reported.

Planning of manager’s workload is an elusive and challenging issue that has no exact quantitative tools. This paper develops for the first time (to the best of our knowledge) an analytical model that shows how a manager’s activity and its associated workload can be analyzed as a provision of various services. The model is essentially a queuing model of tasks with arrivals, waiting time, and services (with a single server). The model is first analyzed in the most general way, finding the mean values of waiting times and queue length. While the proposed model is for one manager, it is based on very general assumptions and would fit most practical environments. Then, a simpler model for determining the optimal span of control for a manager is developed and illustrated using a numerical example.

The design and delivery of services have changed tremendously over the last decade. Yet the conceptualization of services should place a greater emphasis on the social and environmental aspects of value design, and services should also be incorporated as an essential part in the production and delivery of products. The addition of clean services (CleanServs) to the various stages of the product’s life cycle can reduce both resource use and pollution emission. Moreover, servicizing the product’s life cycle can also add various environmental and social values, and thereby increasing the sustainability of the final solution. Finally, the potential of servicizing to increase the sustainability of the physical resources based life cycle of goods was illustrated by the example of the life cycle of printed book.

In the last period substantial effort was dedicated to solve resource allocation, planning and coordination problems for loosely coupled multi-agent systems through combinatorial techniques, especially Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DisCSP). Some preoccupations were directed to the extension and adaptation of these results to manufacturing planning/scheduling problems. This work will exploit the DisCSP techniques that could be used to manufacturing execution systems based on holonic organization in order to integrate a DisCSP planning mechanism and then reformulate the agent-holon model and the inter-holon connections from a service perspective.

Technology has taken its toll on human life and is present everywhere. Within the context of smart cities projects, there is a need to see how social relationship can be translated to objects and a new paradigm - the Social Internet of Things tries to address this transition. This research aims to develop a new approach for the product service systems design in the context of the social internet of things, with a case study of the development of a new smart social bike service. The research uses the design thinking approach to integrate concept of product service system into the multi-level service design. New service concepts are proposed and an architecture is designed for the operationalization of the service based on the Social Internet of Things paradigm. This research aims to show how service design methods can be applied in the context of product service systems and social internet of things.

In order to improve the client experience but also to increase revenue, there are single-point access websites which offer services belonging to multiple business organizations, and which employ ad services to entice the potential clients by presenting related products.This paper presents a generic business model that uses an event-driven service-oriented architecture for performing actions on organization items (e.g., reserving a room at a hotel or a table at a restaurant, making a doctor’s appointment, or purchasing a product). The system can be viewed as an aggregator of organizations to which businesses can adhere and offer their services to potential clients. There is also proposed a novel method that uses service composition in order to allow scheduling algorithms to be efficiently implemented. Due to its modularization, flexibility and extensibility, the proposed model is an effective tool for enhancing the user experience by offering the clients easy access to items from different business organizations and by making suggestions for other related organization items depending on the user’s actions and preferences.

Nowadays, businesses have one main goal: to make profit. But this cannot be done at the expense of the customer, and, in order to keep the customer happy and to make him purchase more products, businesses offer after-sale services and promotions. This paper proposes a system that allows online businesses to benefit from each other’s customer base, without breaching the user privacy, by monitoring purchases and recommending to the customer products and services from other businesses in the system. This is achieved using a service-oriented architecture that employs mobile agents in order to increase the system flexibility, extensibility and security. The considered approach allows dynamical changes to the system’s structure and also module updates, largely due to the autonomy of the mobile agents. Therefore, the proposed system is an effective method of increasing business revenue and improving the customer experience, while also offering the possibility of implementing other marketing techniques in a high-level privacy and security environment.

Despite the numerous benefits that the implementation of a servitization strategy can bring to manufacturing companies, several challenges have to be faced. Among others, changes in competences, resources, organisational structure and value network relationships are required in order to create, capture and deliver new value. In such a context, this paper investigates how the servitization level of a product-service offering impacts on a product-service provider as well as on its value-creation network. A theoretical conceptual model, derived from literature, is developed and then expanded into an explanatory conceptual framework through a case-based methodology. Evidence from the empirical investigation is then discussed and summarised into twelve propositions. Finally, contribution to both theory and practice, as well as some directions for future research, is pointed out.

The increasing number of mobile users raises serious challenges upon middle-tier synchronization techniques and algorithms. The dynamics of backend systems, as well as those of frontend devices translates into an ever-growing demand for service standardization and flexibility. The current paper describes a flexible, scalable, platform-independent system relying on a distributed backend to provide data synchronization services in a multi-user system. The paper describes the desired architectural model used for this approach, continues with the description of the algorithm used by the backend subsystems and briefly describes an exemplary implementation of the aforementioned design.

Various types and massive amounts of data are collected in multiple industries. The proliferation of data provides numerous opportunities to improve existing services and develop new ones. Although data utilization contributes to advancing service, studies on the design of new service concepts using data are rare. The present study proposes a data-driven approach to designing new service concepts. The proposed approach is aimed at helping service designers to understand customer behaviors and contexts through data analysis and then generate new service concepts efficiently on the basis of such understanding. A case using bus driving data is introduced to illustrate the process of the proposed approach. The proposed approach provides a basis for the systematic design of new service concepts by enabling efficient data analysis. It also holds the potential to create a synergetic effect if incorporated into existing approaches to designing new service concepts.

Service Delivery is one of the most important aspects in every nowadays platforms. Big Data and all analytics processes and services are responsible for new models of service delivery. In this paper we propose an architecture based on message queues for communication between various data sources (e.g. sensors) and a central application, providing stability of delivered services in case of faults: if the central application does not work, messages from the sensors will remain unused in queue and be consumed when the application will be back on-line. Implementation was achieved with RabbitMQ. Also, we have proposed a web application that will generate statistics based on a large volume of data. When we add a new filter (that will generate new statistics), considered as a new task, it must be taken up by a scheduler. The interface is able to configure how many such tasks can run in parallel. Finally, we implemented the proposed architecture to support faults and to be scalable.

Enterprises nowadays are intensifying their efforts to create value through big data initiatives as well as knowledge management systems to outperform their competitors. Big data is considered as a revolution that transforms traditional enterprises into Data-Driven Organizations (DDOs) in which knowledge discovered from big data will be integrated into traditional organizational knowledge to improve decision-making and to facilitate organizational learning. This paper proposes a service-oriented framework for designing a new generation of big data-driven knowledge management systems to help enterprises to promote knowledge development and to obtain more business value from big data. The key artefacts of the framework are presented based on design science research, including constructs, model, and method. The objective of the framework is to promote both knowledge exploration and knowledge exploitation that need to take place simultaneously in DDOs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a priority topic for research and innovation in ICT as well as a major trend for its development in the next period. Due to the large variety of IoT based solutions and their economic and social impact, the healthcare is among most relevant application domains to illustrate this trend. The paper presents the main adopted design and development decisions to build a platform for prototyping IoT based assistive applications with health monitoring capabilities. The prototyping approach is expected to improve the quality and speed up the deployment of these interdisciplinary solutions. A special emphasis was put on the platform architecture which is based on an IoT reference model and a reference architecture to take advantage of, and be compliant with relevant solutions in this field. The functional and information views of the platform architecture are detailed and the main development solutions are outlined.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the architecture of a system that combines the strengths of agents and web services to address the practical application of freight brokering. This is an important real-life business problem which aims to provide matchmaking services that facilitate the connection of the owners of goods with the freight transportation providers. The paper presents the general architecture of the system including agents and web services, as well as the use cases and the details of its main operations. Our system can be beneficial to logistics companies by increasing the quality of provided services and by reducing costs.

Modern e-service providers rely on service innovation to stay relevant. Once a new service package is designed, implementation-specific aspects such as value (co-)creation and cost/benefit analysis are investigated. However, due to time-to-market or competitive advantage constraints, innovative services are rarely assessed for potential risks of fraud before they are put out on the market. But these risks may result in loss of economic value for actors involved in the e-service’s provision.Our $$e^{3}fraud$$ approach automatically generates and prioritizes undesired-able scenarios from a business value model of the e-service, thereby drastically reducing the time needed to conduct an assessment. We provide examples from telecom service provision to motivate and illustrate the utility of the tool.

The “sharing revolution” would not be possible without digital technologies and the diffusion of ICT worldwide. ICT has created a new level playing field also thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms, and a new concept, the “sharing and collaborative consumption online”, is expanding. This concept is based on what can be called CASH - “collaboration”, “access”, “sharing” rather than “ownership” meant also as a chance to collect money in addition to monthly salary. This paper aims to describe a successful P2P platform that well reflect the CASH concept, Airbnb, currently the leader of the online accommodation marketplace, using the case study approach and the SWOT analysis methodology. This analysis is useful in order to understand the main features and functioning of such a platform and what to expect for the years to come. Results show that Airbnb is growing at high speed in terms of users and profits but some challenges have to be faced in the next future linked to regulatory issues and to traditional accommodation market and citizens reactions.

The paper describes the development of a fleet management system for public transport services, operating in semi heterarchical mode: (1) hierarchical on long term, with optimal activity planning and resource scheduling; (2) heterarchical– agile and robust at disturbances, with real-time rescheduling of unavailable drivers, not operational busses and blocked routes. The holonic paradigm is used; the holonic transport control architecture, the types of holons and the basic cooperation rules between them are presented. The paper describes the Service Scheduler, as centralized, hierarchical information system used for optimized, long-term capacity managing. The decentralized, heterarchical Delegate MAS (Multi-agent System) performs real-time change management for capacity and demand matching, based on intelligent devices embedded on resources. An implementing MAS framework based on JADE is proposed.

The alignment of the information technology implementation with the ever-changing business strategies in an enterprise drives modernization of the legacy system. However, the existing modernization contexts have not adequately addressed the focus of customer experience and service-orientation within the SaaS system development. This paper investigates the modernization process of legacy system into SaaS system using services concept through multidisciplinary approach. Several best practices are discussed to propose the Service-Oriented Modernization Framework (SOMF) which involves the maturity model for evolution roadmap identification, the service-oriented SaaS reference architecture, and the User-Centered Service-Oriented Software Reengineering (UCSOSR) methodology. An industrial case study is demonstrated by applying the framework to develop the public transport document generator as a service. The modernization process described in the framework provides a comprehensive and systematic guideline in developing a scalable system. In conclusion, this research, by integrating service analysis and design with SOA towards the SaaS modernization, enables the creation of an agile business model to achieve competitive advantages.

This study proposes an optimization model to improve the robustness of an existing bus schedule. Robustness represents the ability of schedules to absorb deviations from the timetable and to prevent their propagation through the daily operations. The model developed proposes an optimal assignment of arrival times and distribution of slacks among Time Control Points of a bus line, in order to minimize delays and anticipations from schedule. This required the use of data collected through GPS devices installed in buses, informing the location of buses during their daily operation. The robustness of bus schedules was evaluated through the quantification of delays and anticipations of real observations of bus shifts by comparison with the timetable. The performance measures used to evaluate robustness are the average delay (or anticipation) of buses by comparison with the timetable, and the probability that a passenger that arrives on time according to the timetable will miss the bus or have to wait more than a specified threshold at a Time Control Point. We also compared the improvement of the schedule proposed by the optimization model with the original schedule. The results obtained in a real-world case study, corresponding to a bus line operating in Porto, showed that the model could return an improved schedule for all performance measures considered when compared with the original schedule.

The Internet of Things paradigm has most of the times been associated with distributed devices directly connected to the Web, uniquely identifiable and with different sensing-processing-driving capabilities. The paper addresses this context, with focus on industry driven solutions for cloud communications, describing how these technologies impact the mobile telecommunications world as well as consumers, with a clear perspective on different service models for network operators. We present an implementation strategy and showcase two different scenarios to validate our service presentation solutions, with details on data representation for a semantic interfacing of heterogeneous connected devices.

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) has many advantages and its introduction is, at the moment, in different stages of progress in various European countries. Reasons such as historic paths, elements and procedures of her affect the progress stages, including issues of law, politics and economics strengths and weakness of national systems. A shared observation among countries underscores the value that can be co-created by the interaction between doctors, nurses, and patients. Certainly the technology has an important role in this value co-creation, facilitating the exchange of information, reducing errors, and enabling more effective and appropriate treatments. We present finally the concrete case of Kaiser Permanente, showing how the interaction between the healthcare providers, patients and demonstrating the ensuing value in improved health for people.

Mounting pressure on governments to understand how well they can promote the health of their population is forcing national health systems to reconfigure their service delivery processes. The latest piece in the organisational puzzle is co-production: a concept that co-opts patients and informal caregivers in the self-management, realization and delivery of specific health care processes. Service management principles, especially those of value creation and co-production, acknowledge the need to engage the user and their personal network in a joint production effort. The paper supports this timely claim using the Outpatient Parenteral Antibiotic Therapy (or OPAT) illustrative case study to show how the concept of customer value-in-exchange and value-in-use applied to the successful health care co-production practice necessarily casts the patients and their informal caregivers as co-creators of value. From the theoretical perspective, the study shows how the provider sphere is not a closed dimension that limits itself to offering a value proposition. The study underlines the need for management to pay greater attention to the informal caregivers, given that these actors need to be orchestrated and that their role is set to become even more pivotal.

The measurement of work-related stress (WRS) for health providers is a crucial but cumbersome task. In this study a “WRS identity card” (WRS-ID) is proposed to self-monitor WRS risk in one organization, with an emphasis on health professionals and administrative employees at hospital. The method is based on a standard questionnaire purposely designed and validated by INAIL, the National Authorities for Prevention and Protection of Health at Workplace, which provides input data for a statistical inference analysis. The procedure is illustrated on a representative dataset from medical organization to discriminate between WRS levels between different departments. More specifically, thanks to over 3000 questionnaires anonymously administered by authors in hospital departments in one of the most relevant health care organization in the Southern Italy, it has been outlined how innovative and effective tools to monitor WRS are crucial, especially due to the specific health care workers’ psycho-physical conditions. Theoretical and managerial implications have been provided.

Health care organizations and systems seem to benefit for the adoption and implementation of innovation driven by new technologies for seeking legitimacy and building trust with patients as to proceed towards a sustainable development. New technologies lead to develop health care as a process innovation-driven and patient-centered by improving quality and efficiency of health care services. Policies tend to help for diffusion and dissemination of innovation as to support the implementation of new technologies in health care service delivery. Sustainable health care organizations tend to develop or follow innovation by new technologies conforming to policies driving the diffusion of innovation for continuous improvement within health care delivery and systems.

In the first part, the paper describes the Romanian e-Health service, the modalities of its operation in terms of patients medical data usage. The usage of medical data is very important, both administrative or medical point of view. Medically they have the ability to increase the efficiency of decision-making for all health care providers, both in the private and in the public area. It presents how a medical document model can be used nationwide and internationally and how it can facilitate the interoperability of medical data. In order to do that, a medical questionnaire is proposed (a model presentation of health data in a systematic and uniform way) that generates prerequisites standardization documents which represents in fact the patient’s medical history and disease description. Once the questionnaire has been defined (which varies depending on existing medical specialties), the corresponding XML schema is generated that makes computer-computer interaction available.

Currently in many countries in Europe there is a lack of medical staff in hospitals, and mostly physicians, also the physicians employed are overwhelmed by different activities and by a high number of patients. In many cases due to the lack of time the physicians are helped by other medical staff to fill the observations in the observation sheet. Many times some observations are recorded badly or omitted. This paper offers a solution to this problem, by proposing an electronic patient clinical observation sheet which will store the physician observations in audio files. This can bring noticeable improvements regarding the time spent by the physician to write on the observation sheet the evolution of the patient and the recommended medication. The observations are recorded in audio files converted in text using cloud services. The text files are added to the observation sheet, allowing the physician to use the time efficiently.

Service oriented perspectives represent an opportunity of innovation and an answer to current challenges for social welfare, sustainable development and everyday life. The prevention of food waste requires new networked and collaborating competences, in the light of the increasing inefficiencies of modern economic growth models and the improvement of new paradigms for sustainable development. This research presents the case of a project that, while addressing food waste at the level of several organizations throughout the supply chain, implemented a recovering process to reduce food impairment. The project (R.e.b.u.s.) applies the efficiency system originally developed for school and university canteens to other food donors. In order to support this project, a far-reaching educational program for sustainable development was started in schools, universities and through public events. By educating the local community and enhancing processes that drive a change in behaviour, this initiative proved essential for the successful prevention of food waste.

This paper describes the assessment of performance of educational services recurring to benchmarking. We adopted two perspectives for the evaluation of secondary schools, aligned with the objectives of different stakeholders. In the society perspective schools are viewed as promoting students achievement (ideally including not only academic results but also interpersonal capacities) given the students characteristics in terms of academic abilities and socio-economic backgrounds. In the educational authorities perspective schools are viewed as transforming a set of resources (including students with given characteristics in terms of academic abilities and socio-economic backgrounds and also school resources, such as teachers) into students achievement. The relative performance assessment was carried out using Data Envelopment Analysis models, followed by an exploratory analysis of contextual indicators that potentially affect schools’ performance, in order to understand their impact on the educational process.

The purpose of this study was to examining the factors that lead to cloud computing adoption in a higher education setting. This cross-sectional empirical research is based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework. Data was collected by surveying 96 students from University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania. The factors that affect cloud computing adoption in higher education were identified and tested using LISREL software. The findings suggested that factors identified can be successfully integrated in our conceptual model. Perceived value and usefulness have a strong positive influence on intentions to use cloud computing in higher education, but student’s attitude towards technology had no significant effects on dependent variable. Perceived risk has significant negative effects on students’ intentions to use cloud computing. The findings are expected to enhance the understanding of cloud computing adoption for students and faculty members. The implication of these findings for faculty members and students are discussed.

With the rise of service science, management and engineering as an independent and interdisciplinary research school, several courses and entire study programs emerged in several universities around the world. Several textbooks address teaching service science from the perspective of a specific discipline such as marketing, operations management or computer science. Therefore, so far teaching service science requires the preparation and combination of lecture material from different textbooks and other teaching material, since there was a lack of interdisciplinary and integrated textbooks for teaching service science. This paper reviews existing service textbooks for motivating the need for an integrated service science textbook. Furthermore, the outline of a new forthcoming interdisciplinary service science textbook is presented. This textbook integrates several disciplines, such as business and economics, quantitative sciences, and computer science. The textbook therefore provides an interdisciplinary map of the world of service science that conquers the challenges to explain service systems to students and practitioners. This enables lecturers to organize their courses along a comprehensive and integrated course concept which has been the result of teaching service science at universities for several years.

The paper describes an initiative carried out on the Italian territory, the ASAP Service Management Forum, as an exemplary practice contributing to spreading the service management culture across firms as well as cross-fertilizing good practices and the development of joint academia-practitioners’s research and education initiative. Within the ASAP Service Management Forum community, in particular, an extensive study has been carried out about the competence needed for service management roles and the professional lifelong training activities carried out at company level. Moreover, an analysis of the educational activities carried out at the M.Sc. or post-master level in Italy and abroad has been carried out. The results of these studies show that despite the growing interest and development of activities and educational activities in the field there is still a largely untapped potential in this area.