IT Service Management and Engineering: An Intelligent Decision-Making Support Systems Approach

Services, which have been defined as “. . . the application of competences for the benefit of another, meaning that service is a kind of action, performance, or promise that’s exchanged for value between provider and client” [12], are becoming a relevant concept in the modern world. The economic perspective shift from product design, product manufacturing, and product distribution to service design, service composition, and service delivering, can be explained from a market focus on delivering guaranteed functionalities of services through the concept of service systems [12]. As foresighted by Quinn [10], the main trading items are now services (financial, educational, healthcare, logistic, managerial, energy, informational, entertainment, and so on) as an opposite or complementary concept to products in the modern worldwide economy [2,7]. Thus, nowadays business organizations focus on delivering “help, utility, experience, information or other intellectual content . . . account for more than 70% of total value added in the OECD” [11]. We believe that such a service-oriented worldview and shift demands new engineering and managerial