Service Science and Practice

The idea behind this book is extremely simple. And the title of this book, that was designed with the help of the editors from the publisher is totally descriptive and does not contain any dose of deliberate marketing mislead. Having graduated as a computer scientist and having worked in the industry for a long period, I have accumulated an extremely great amount of experiences all of which relate to subop-timalities in service related issues: not only how one provides a service but also how This introductory chapter aims to make clear the holistic nature of services to our lives linking the science part to the practice matters. Bringing examples for service successes and failures, this chapter shall help the reader position him or herself with the field under examination. We present and discuss the collaborative approach towards service design and the contextualisation of services as leverage for attaining competitive advantage. Critical factors are listed that concern relationship management in business service contexts and which are considered in terms of the collaboration dimension. The chapter closes with an examination of power dependencies and trust in collaborative service arrangements.