Specifying Enabling Services in Telecommunications Service Systems

In telecommunications, increasingly complex service systems evolve which have the objective to produce ICT services. The increased complexity is due to the convergence of the industry sectors information technology, telecommunications and media. Telecommunication network operators are challenged to modify their business strategies: they can not any more produce ICT services in a vertically integrated fashion but need to market preliminary services as suppliers for other ICT service providers. For this task, modular service concepts known from Service Science and IS research can be employed. ICT service modules, so called Enabling Services, are provided on Service Delivery Platforms to support service development. In this work, an Enabling Service conceptualization is developed. Based on a case study, a process for the specification of Enabling Services is presented

A BRAVE NEW SERVICE WORLD? AN ANALYSIS OF THE SERVICES SECTOR THROUGH THE LENSES OF SERVICE SCIENCE

The services sector is subject to a continuous transformation process and to technological changes and innovations; in the last few years the emergent Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) discipline did several attempts in developing theories and explaining the service industry’s phenomena. The present paper, which is theoretically grounded in the Work Systems Theory, aims at describing the ongoing situation of Service Science applications in specific services industries. We hereby present a study, conducted on 24 academic papers that deal with different applications belonging to the Service Science domain, that provides a classification of each application according to: which part of the Service Science domain it involves, which specific industrial sector it belongs to and finally on which operational level, of a company’s organizational structure, it can be positioned. Although this study cannot describe the whole services sector and all its trends and characteristics, it provides an emblematic description of what the Service Science Management and Engineering discipline means in different industrial fields and which are the main trends and issues related to some specific industrial sectors