15 December 2011

Minitrack Chairs: Wei-Lun Chang, Yen-Hao Hsieh

Description: 

The shift focus of service from 1980’s to 2000’s has addressed that IT not only lowers the cost of service but creates avenues to enhance revenue through service. In particular, companies expand revenue through IT–based service nowadays. The new type of service, e-service, has several features such as mobile, flexible, interactive, and interchangeable. Additionally, e-services have much to offer in overcoming obstacles faced by traditional service industry. The concept of Service Science was proposed by IBM which combines several issues into traditional service management. Moreover, the paradigm of service also transferred from traditional service industry to IT-based service industry. Fedex is an excellent example that successfully transfers to paradigm of e-service, including self-service, customization, search engine, flexibility, and automatic response. Google is another great example of enterprise to provide IT-based services (i.e., e-services) in the new paradigm.

Service mining, which is novel, addressing several research areas from the viewpoints of technology, model, management, and application. Service mining is defined as “a systematical process including service discovery, service experience, service recovery and service retention to discover unique patterns and exceptional values within the existing service pool. The goal of service mining is similar to data mining, text mining or web mining which aims to “detect something new” from the service pool. The major difference is the feature of service which is quite distinct to mining target such as data or text. In other words, service is a process of value co-creation and different by various perception of customer. In the concept of service mining, the mining target is not only the traditional services but also IT-based services.

Service mining covers a process of discovering patterns, such as service discovery, service experience, service recovery, and service retention. Based on the four steps of service mining process, the concept covers from service exploratory to service maintenance.

In addition, Service mining covers five elements: infrastructure, technology, model, management, and application. Service mining covers beyond the existing service management and is considered as a branch of service science.

The goal of this mini-track is to attract different disciplines such as artificial intelligence, management, operations management, and statistics to focus on mining “services” in the new paradigm. Due to the significant revenue of service industry around the world, service mining is worth to investigate to help companies earn more profit from now on.

Suggested Topics:

Service Mining Research Topics:Technology- Artificial intelligence, Statistics

Model: Operations management, Management science

Management: Service alliance/cooperation, Service branding, Service pricing,Service innovation, Service recovery/retention, Service productivity

Application: Social network services, Web services, E-services, Traditional services