Introduction to the Special Issue on Smart Service Engineering

Abstract

At present, the importance of services is increasing significantly in times of modernization and digitization of production systems. While the challenges of “Industry 4.0”, the “Industrial Inter- net of Things”, cyber-physical systems and smart factories are progressively being discussed at the product level, the question of how far services can be developed on the basis of a broad information base can also be specifically raised at the service level. The resulting approaches are also subsumed under the term “Smart Services”, with “Smart” usually being used for context-sensitive services tailored to the needs of the customer. The emerging field in service research is characterized in particular by the fact that IT is no longer under- stood as a pure “transformer” of digital services, but much more as an “enabler” of completely new approaches. In order to explore these approaches, it is important to examine to what extent today’s services and existing methods of service engineering for tomorrow’s smart services can be revolutionized. Service modeling can clarify interfaces between innovative technologies and new, individual business models and thus provide a valuable basis for discussion.