040193 KU Service Science (MA) (2019W)

The term “information technologies” (IT) is most likely associated with the IT sector, software engineers, and robots. However, there are many markets (for example the service sector) that rely particularly on IT. Indeed, in many instances, the entire process of offering, selling, and consuming a service takes place online. In particular, the remarkable growth of the service sector has come to dominate business activity in most advanced economies over the last decades. Making up a significant part of the world economy, the service sector is a rapidly evolving field that is relied on to dictate the public's satisfaction and success in various areas of everyday life, from banking and communications to education and healthcare. What is more, there is the promising opportunity to innovate in services, to realize the business and societal value from knowledge about service, to research, develop, and deliver new information services and business services.
Services Science is the interdisciplinary application of science, engineering, and management for the purpose of improving services. Services Science also contributes to systematic innovation and improved productivity, and is the guiding force for the improvement of services through improved predictability in the productivity, quality, performance, compliance, development, reusability of knowledge, and operational innovation in services.
As an umbrella term for services over the Internet, e-services include electronic business transactions for handling online orders, application hosting by Application Service Providers (ASPs) and any processing capability that is obtainable on the Web. Using this e-services concept, any application program is a potential e-service, and Internet service providers (ISPs) as well as other companies are logical distributors or access points for such services.
Despite different definitions of the e-service concept, it can be argued that they all agree about the role of technology in facilitating the delivery of services. And, the Internet is the main channel of e-service delivery. And as such online services are ubiquitous in everyday life, these are also important for the entire society.
The objective of this course on Service Science is to provide an insight into the concept of e-services, their delivery channels and platforms, as well as management and engineering issues.
The course will cover topics such as the nature of services, the need for interdisciplinary approaches to services innovation, and the technology and tools needed to provide services innovation.
A major part of this course distinguishes the conceptions “e-services”, “web services”, “IT services”, and “virtual services”. In this context, the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is introduced. SOA is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. Web services make functional building blocks accessible over standard Internet protocols, which are independent of platforms and programming languages. Thereby, these services can represent either new applications or just wrappers around existing systems to make them network-enabled. From a business perspective, this course discusses SOA’s requirements, benefits and challenges. Simultaneously, the basic SOA protocols are presented, in order to provide students an overview of the technical issues. The second part of the course finally closes with a presentation of the SOA Business Value Assessment procedure.

After attending this course, students are able to:
- understand and critique the ways in which researchers and practitioners are defining services and service science;
- articulate the motivation behind the study of service science and relate their own experiences to the study of it;
- apply theories that are emerging in the area of service science and identify current limitations in applying those theories;
- understand the importance of the different e-service