Summary

The shifting focus of service from the 1980s to 2000shas proved that IT not only lowers the cost of servicebut creates avenues to enhance and increase revenuethrough service. The new type of service, e-service,is mobile, flexible, interactive, and interchangeable.While service science provides an avenue for futureservice researches, the specific research areas fromthe IT perspective still need to be elaborated.This book introduces a novel concept--servicemining--to address several research areas fromtechnology, model, management, and applicationperspectives. Service mining is defined as "a systematicalprocess including service discovery, serviceexperience, service recovery, and service retentionto discover unique patterns and exceptionalvalues within the existing services."The goal of service mining is similar to data mining,text mining, or web mining, and aims to "detectsomething new" from the service pool. The majordifference is the feature of service is quite distinctfrom the mining target, like data or text.This book devises concepts of service mining andidentifies the possible applications. The author providesa roadmap of service mining to researchers,managers, and marketers in service sectors.