James C. Spohrer

The science of service is emerging. Undoubtedly, a journey of this complexity, striving to scientifically understand a phenomenon as fundamental and richly diverse as service phenomenon, must be explored along multiple pathways over multiple decades. Therefore, it is always a great pleasure for me to recognize and encourage those embarked on this journey. Truly, we are all students of service, learning from each other as we go.

In this volume, entitled Service Science: The Foundations of Service Engineering and Management authored by Robin Qiu, I would like to draw the careful reader's attention to three main aspects of this work.

The Pioneers: In Chapter 3, a brief overview of the evolution of service research is presented. The complexity and diversity of service phenomenon is reflected in part by the number of academic disciplines whose scholars have written on this topic. Scholars from schools of management, engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, as well as arts and humanities (service design), not to mention practitioners and policy makers in government, have all played a role in the exploration. Figure 3.5 entitled “A sustainable socio-technical process-driven service system” provides an excellent visualization of five types of capital (natural, human, social, financial, and infrastructural) and the processes that transform these resources over time. It is worth noting that each of the major scholarly schools has a primary focus on one of the five major forms of capital.

Putting People First: In Chapter 5, I especially enjoyed the section on putting people first. The book presents novel approaches to the mathematical formalization of service, without losing sight of this important fact—service is about putting people and their experiences first. Pay special attention to Figure 5.8 entitled “Service value diagram corresponding to GE's change effectiveness model”—for though it is one of the simpler diagrams in the book, it highlights that increasing value derives from increasing quality and increasing acceptance, when mutually agreed to and cocreated by providers and customers. Furthermore, with the global rise of smart phones and social media tools, there has never been such an exciting time in human history to gather and analyze big data aspects of service encounters. We are in the age of increasingly powerful tools for value cocreation. This work also makes the important point that value cocreation is also about cotransformation of providers and customers.

Education as a Service: Chapters 7 and 8 provide an excellent example of applying the theoretical developments in this book to the challenge of improving education as a service. Both chapters highlight the value of structural equation modeling techniques as well. Chapter 9 further distills the theoretical developments into a practical and iterative method for daily improvements to service business offerings. Figure 9.3 entitled “Engineering and managing competitive services: scientific perspective” conveys a tremendous amount of methodology quite concisely. Readers familiar with statistical control theory will find this chapter an especially nice summary of the developments in the book.

While much work remains to broadly establish a holistic and lifecycle approach to service systems, this book boldly suggests pathways and approaches to help researchers mathematically formalize service systems and networks in the age of big data, without losing sight of the importance of putting people first. In the coming years, I look forward to reading more along this pathway as the ideas presented are further tested and refined.

James C. Spohrer

Director, IBM University Programs World-Wide (IBM UP)

IBM Almaden Research Center