In conjunction with INFORMS Service Science
An Unprecedented, Dual-Journal Call For Papers
It is high time for engineering and business scholars to join forces to advance service
research. The editors of two of the top journals in the service area, one from IEEE’s
services computing community and one from INFORMS’ service science community,
invite you to break out of your disciplinary comfort zone. Parallel special issues have
been commissioned to intentionally challenge and disrupt the status quo. This dual
special issue is intended to reconcile existing multi-pronged orientations and
approaches to service research.
Trans-disciplinary service research will leapfrog the current landscape to improve
services computing formalisms while concomitantly designing and delivering the
highest quality business service systems that can profitably delight customers and
clients. In many areas, modern research advances have benefited from multiple
perspectives. Trans-disciplinary research means reaching out to scholars from other
backgrounds. It means that vocabulary, research methods and historical foundations
need to be shared, taught, challenged and reconciled. It’s going to be hard work. It
will take time. But it’s what is needed. This dual-journal call-for-papers is intended to
catalyze trans-disciplinary and risk-taking research, and the review policies and
procedures for both special issues will be tuned to this end.
What’s missing has been a research agenda to reconcile business service systems and
systems of systems ideals with services computing’s formal methods, standards, best
practices and repeatable processes. New research is essential to address what has
become an important inflection point: the business services and services computing
research agendas need to be viewed from a common, global, societal lens. At stake is
the continued viability of both research streams.
Some science and engineering scholars view business services research as a soft
discipline, but there is significant respect for formal business process and workflow
methods that can deliver model-driven development. Business researchers often view
the engineering and computer science perspectives as remiss in addressing the
essential and dynamic elements of customer co-production, B2B contracting and
pricing, but there is significant respect for services computing’s role in distributing,
cost-effective scaling and personalization of computing service capability. Both areas
are in transition, given the increasing value of big data methods and associated
possibilities. Yes, there will be dueling methodologies, ranging from empirical to
execution benchmarks to proof, and there will be dueling problems, ranging from NP-Complete to novel business strategy frameworks. Potential authors will need to
leave their comfort zones behind and work together across disciplinary lines.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

x Big Data Analytics and Algorithms
x Service-Centric Business Models
x Service Modeling and Implementation
x Service Delivery, Deployment and Maintenance Service
x Value Chains, Value Co-creation, and Service Innovation
x Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Industry Standards and Solution Stacks
x Service-based Grid/Cloud/Autonomic Computing/Big Data
x Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) Negotiation, Automation and Orchestration
x Service Security, Privacy and Trust
x Quality of Services (QoS) and Cost of Services (CoS)
x Services Engineering Practices and Case Studies
x Trust and Loyalty in Service Business Models
x Cultural, Language, Social and Legal Obstacles in Service Business Models
x Case Studies in Service Business Models (e.g., healthcare, financial, aviation,
etc.)
x Business Process Integration, Collaboration and Management
x Business Process Modeling Methodology and Integration Architecture
x Monitoring of Services, Process Mining, and Quality of Service
x Practices in Service Science and Big Data


Important Dates:
Deadline for paper submission: March 1, 2015
First-round reviews (expected): May 1, 2015
Revisions due: June 15, 2015
Second-round reviews (expected): August 1, 2015
Final papers due: October 1, 2015
Expected publication: Late 2015 or early 2016