The Evolution and Mission of INFORMS Service Science
guest article by Paul P. Maglio
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) has published Service Science since 2012. When I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief in 2013, I had a clear idea of the mission of the journal and clear idea on where to go and how to get there. I guess this kind of confidence is necessary, but I quickly learned that nothing is clear. Service science, the field, is emerging from a broad range of scholarship and practice among many disciplines and many industries. Service Science, the journal, receives manuscripts that are narrow and broad, conceptual and empirical, and well, all over the map. About the only thing clear to me now is that the field and the journal are evolving together. In this brief note, I share some of my thoughts on the field and the journal, and I invite you to contribute to their co-evolution.
As I see it, service depends on people, human behavior, human cognition, human emotions, and human needs. Service systems are getting larger, incorporating global enterprises, global industries, and world governments. Data is getting bigger, capturing both human actions and economic transactions on an unimaginable scale. Technology is getting more powerful, for instance, supporting and automating service interactions and service operations. Service is about people working together and with technology to create mutual value. In this context, service science is the study of service and service systems. It may involve methods and theories from a range of disciplines, including operations, industrial engineering, marketing, computer science, psychology, information systems, design, and more. It may require methods from more than a single discipline. It may require combining multiple methods to learn about interactions among people, technology, organizations, and information, and about how they create value in different contexts and in different conditions.

Top 150 keywords of Service Science articles between 2012 and 2014 represented as a ‘word cloud’ in which font size is proportional to frequency, with the smallest size representing a single article only. Maglio, P. (2014). Editorial – On methods, disciplines, and applications. Service Science, 6(4), 207-208.
INFORMS Service Science, the journal, documents empirical, modeling, and theoretical studies of service and service systems. Service Science publishes innovative and original papers on all topics related to service, including work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. It is the primary forum for presenting new theories and new empirical results in the emerging, interdisciplinary science of service, incorporating research, education, and practice, documenting empirical, modeling, and theoretical studies of service and service systems. Topics covered include service management, operations, engineering, economics, design, and marketing; service system analysis and computational simulation; service theories and research methods; and case studies and application areas, such as healthcare, energy, finance, information technology, logistics, and public services.
INFORMS Service Science aspires to be the flagship journal of service science research, aiming to carve out a unique niche among service-related journals, with its main objects of study, service and service systems. Other such journals tend to take their main object of study as one or more of industries, management, operations, marketing, quality, web services, or information systems – in the context of services. Other journals that take service as primary rely on a more disciplinary perspective (marketing, operations, design, information systems, or other area), whereas Service Science emphasizes work that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Though all articles appearing in Service Science need not be interdisciplinary, a typical article will take a service-centric perspective, methodological or conceptual approach from multiple disciplines, and connect to the emerging service science literature, concepts, methods, and theories.
In the end, advancing the study of service and service systems depends on our collective action – on our community of scholars, scientists, engineers, and practitioners. This emerging community – you are part of it! – is the reason I’m so excited about journal. You can help advance the field by submitting your best work on service to INFORMS Service Science!
Paul P. Maglio
University of California, Merced
Editor “Service Science”