Emerging service orientations and transformations (SOT)
Agility and innovation are essential for survival in today's business world. Mergers and acquisitions, new regulations, rapidly changing technology, increasing competition and heightened customer expectations mean companies must become more responsive to changing demands, i.e. become more agile. This move to agility through innovation has been referred to as the Binnovation services based economy. If properly applied, 'service orientation^ and Bservice transformation^ can support the agility organizations are seeking. To achieve long term agility, companies must co create their offerings with customers, and break siloed business processes into modular customer centric independent services that can be reused on the fly in loosely coupled dynamic business processes or Bout tasked^ to external service providers that provides modularity and flexibility. On the other side, the sourcing of IT services needs to be aligned in a manner that takes cost advantage and flexibility of the commoditization of hardware (e.g. on demand, utility computing, cloud computing, software oriented infrastructure with virtualized resources, infrastructure service providers) software (e.g. the software as service model, software oriented architecture, application service providers) and even business processes (e.g. out tasking, ITIL, SCORE) Basically, organizations are working two major initiatives: 1) service innovation, orientation and transformation to become more customer centric and how to break siloed business process to modular customer centric services; 2) how to source IT services with external services computing that will make themmore flexible and agile to respond market needs much more efficiently and effectively. These have been our prime motivation for this special issue, which was conceived as a vehicle for understanding some of today's issues and look at opportunities for in context of service orientation and transformation. We aimed to investigate this paradigm, review the impact of service and service innovations on federations of enterprises, organizational structures and individuals; investigate its tenets and evaluate relevant management and technical approaches to architecture, infrastructure, business processes, workflows and strategy. Papers included in this Special Issue were selected and revised extensively from the work presented at the Third Australasian Conference on Service Research and Innovation held in Sydney, Australia on November 27 29, 2013. All six papers use theoretically grounded analysis to investigate a wide range of substantive issues and opportunities to increase outcomes of service orientation and transformation with service innovations and processes. We also emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of service innovation solutions by including studies that bring different theoretical background, in strategy, management, information systems and computer science. The authors' results in all of the articles have implications for services that go beyond the immediate application settings on which they report. These papers also showcase the application of an array of research methods, including surveys, experiments and design science. In the remainder of this Guest Editor's Introduction, we will briefly discuss each of the articles in the special issue to identify their main thrust of the authors' investigation and the relevant findings for theory and practice. The first two papers provide a coherent characterization of the 'service system' 'service innovation^ and 'service Haluk Demirkan haluk@uw.edu
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