Service Science: The Opportunity to Re-think What We Know About Service Design

Abstract

The evolution of service science or Service Science, Management and Engineering – SSME, provides us with a platform to critically review the area of service design. The drivers for this include the lack of cross-disciplinary writing on service design, the limitations of the treatment of service design as an extension of product design and the dominance of B2C and neglect of B2B design. Three perspectives are used: service delivery systems, service architecture including modularity and platforms, and the service supply chain/network. Empirical examples are provided and a service modularity function is developed. It is argued that an important role of SSME is to be able to link the operationally based service architectures and resulting design methods and information system (IS) architectures, and that there is a need to develop a combined view of the physical, organisational, and IS architectures of services.