Towards an interdisciplinary view on service science — The case of the financial services industry

In the last decade service science has received considerable attention in the research community. Most research regards services either from a business or a technical perspective. This paper argues that existing approaches still lack detailed models for the application of the inter-disciplinary nature of Service Science as well as an application of these concepts in practice. This paper describes a first attempt to apply the characteristics of service-oriented architectures from the information systems discipline to the business domain. It depicts autonomy and modularity, interoperability and interface orientation as major design principles that promise potentials when transferred to the business domain. The proposed inter-disciplinary approach was applied at the case of Zürcher Kantonalbank in Switzerland that realized a company-wide Service Management concept according to the presented design principles.