Call for Papers—In Search of a New Alignment in Service Research: An Unprecedented, Dual-Journal Call For Papers

Abstract

It is high time for business and engineering scholars to join forces to advance service research. The editors of two of the top journals in the service area, one from INFORMS’ service science community and one from IEEE’s services computing 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 multipronged orientations and approaches to service research. Transdisciplinary 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. Transdisciplinary 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 transdisciplinary and risk-taking research, and the review policies and procedures for both special issues will be tuned to this end. What is 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.