What service?

Abstract

Technology is changing society, organizations, and interactions between service organizations and customers at a fast pace. Moreover, technology is transforming the nature of services and, in academia, multidisciplinary research is trying to make sense of these changes and leverage the opportunity of service innovation in different fields. After a brief review of the literature focused on services, we found that the term "service" is often used to mean many different things. This paper explores the meaning and scope of services in technological and managerial domains. As a final result, we summarize the concepts of services in the broad areas of management and technology that we found in the literature. Management refers to the concepts that are often used in the fields of marketing and operations management, whereas technology includes the service-like concepts from the fields of software engineering and information systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.