iBusiness, 2011, 3, 61-64
doi:10.4236/ib.2011.31010 Published Online March 2011 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ib)
A Research on Service Recognition
Shuliang Wang1, Jingru Tian1, Shanshan Zou2
1International School of Software, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China; 2International School of Software, Wuhan University, Wuhan,
China; 3Economics and Management School of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
Received December 4th, 2010; revised January 19th, 2011; accepted January 23rd, 2011.
ABSTRACT
Service exists in the service provider and the service receiver. They can produce the contractual relationship which is
value and trust mutually. Peop le can obtain the different intension of service with different knowledge ba ckground and
technique. In this paper, service is recognized in the views of 12 levels. Through the description and analysis of these 12
levels, the method for existing services is summarized. Thereby the important impact on service science is elaborated in
the modern economy.
Keywords: Service Recognition, Service Views, Service Analysis
1. Introduction
In the 21st century, the knowledge is taken as the foun-
dation of information society. Similar to the technology
to make the significance of economical, service is the
soul of knowledge economy. The concept of service is
defined as “The application of scientific, management,
and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization
beneficially performs for and with another” in the mod-
ern economy [1], whereas the traditional service is de-
scribed just as “Deed, act, or performance” [2].
More than 50 years ago, infor mation technolo gy made
a tremendous development. Take this opportunity, com-
puter science separated from electronic engineering and
mathematics, and became an independent discipline. Re-
ferring to the computer science, service science also has
the possibility to establish an independent discipline be-
cause of service economy appearance. And it will bring
us many new challenges and opportunities.
In 2002, Almaden Service Research leading by Spohrer
established, the first IBM Research group completely
dedicated to understanding service innovations from a
sociotechnical systems perspective, including enterprise
transformation and industry evolution. Then on the “Ar-
chitecture of on demand business” summit in May, 2004,
the word of “service science” is finally officially raised as
a new academic discipline [1].
In Maglio and Spohrer 2008, service science is “com-
bines organization and human understanding with busi-
ness and technological understanding to categorize and
explain the many types of service systems that exist as
well as how service systems interact and evolve to
co-create value.” They also commanded that the re-
sources transfer and sharing within and among service
systems is the centre of the service science.
This paper focuses on the service recognitio n to facili-
tate the understanding of service science. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows. The analysis of service is
stated in Section 2. Section 3 presents the 12 levels of
service recognition and a brief description and analysis
for each level is concluded. Finally, there is a summary
in Section 4.
2. Service Analysis
The service exists in the service provider and the service
receiver. They can produce the contractual relationship
which is value and trust mutually. Distinguishing from
the products of manufacturing and product purely proc-
ess of product manufacturing, the services have the on-
stage and the backstage activities, both of them can cre-
ate the values. In the industrialization degree less devel-
opment stage, many services have not been independent
from the traditional industry, are only take a part of the
traditional industry as internal activity in the circulation,
by no means servicing activities content. At present, the
service expresses many new characteristics. They show
as the knowledge and the technical density degree has
enhanced, and the service market and the service provid-
ers to assume globalized unceasingly. These new charac-
teristics, enable the service economy develop rapidly
globally, also actuated the service and the industrial

A Research on Service Recognition 62
transformation , the request service industry br eakthrough
serves the commodity or serves the visible limit, realizes
the service innovation.
3. Service Views
The service has abundant intension and extension, the
goal lies in satisfies the association or individual some
kind of need and by enhances its degree of satisfaction.
When we understanding nature, human and society’s ser-
vice, based on the different knowledge background, or the
different person based on the same knowledge back-
ground, according to the goal request which assigns, uses
the different computing technique, refer to the different
understanding level, the understanding factor and the ref-
erence standard, may obtain the different intension of
service.
3.1. Service Input
Serves come from the nature, human and society’s asso-
ciation or the individual demand. This kind of demand
has the general character, also has the individuality, what
but are more individuality demand. Along with informa-
tion technology’s development, when services input,
except primary need, also increased personalization pa-
rameter. From the different angle and the different di-
mension, may give the service the different category
(Table 1, [3]).
3.2. Service Output
“The service is the user received explicit and implicit
benefits of a complete combination through the relevant
facilities services of medium [4].” The service output is
one “service package”, not only includes the pure service,
but also includes the service medium and so on a series
of visible and the invisible gain combination. Obviously,
the service output is different with the manufacture out-
put. The manufacture output is the visible product which
one kind is clear may result.
3.3. Service Switching Process
Service is the process to meet user needs. Service is to
understand the needs of users, to take action to meet their
needs, and ultimately win the customer satisfaction of a
complete process. This process is invisible, basically can-
not be touched, but the process itself contains the user's
participation.
3.4. Service Standard
The ISO 9000 standards state that “Service is to meet the
needs of users in contact with the users, the service pro-
vider’s activities and results of the activities.” W3C
(World Wide Web Consortium, the World Wide Web
alliance) defines service as: “The service provider com-
pletes a group of work, to serve the final outcome which
the entire customer needs. The final outcome will u sually
cause the entire customer’s condition to change, but pos-
sibly will also cause the provider changing their condi-
tion, or both sides will both have the change.”
3.5. Composition Factor of Service
Services include 4 kind of factors: support services fa-
cilities (to make possible the production of services),
composition of products (services components), center
benefits (service center), and fringe benefits (the expec-
tations of services purchaser). Regarding for these four
kinds of factors, service firms consider it to be service
package, the customer regard them as a whole system,
and producers use them as a system which can provide
services with customer’s expect.
3.6. Service Product Configuration
Service is one special product. The service is “a combina-
tion of entities and intangible”. Any one service is not
completely invisible, but an “entity” and “intangible”
mixture of two parts (Figure 1, Liu, Du, 2008). Service
invisible and product visible forms the sharp comparison,
namely the former’s intangib ility and the latter’s palp abil-
ity. Product is the result of various factors’ combination.
Product mostly with palpable content is called the visible
product; product mostly with intangible content is called
immaterial product, namely service. In service, material-
ity part is easy to uniform and quantitative evaluation. But
non-materiality part is difficult to uniform and quantita-
tive evaluation. In most cases, the tangible products
Table 1. Service category.
Category MethodsHill (1977)Lovelock (1983)Cunningham (2004)
Angle
Category
Dimension
Supply-Oriented
Single Categories
1.service object
2.state durability
3.effect reversibility
4.effect corporality
or spirituality
Supply-Oriented
Combination Categories
1.propertie s of service behavior
2.relationship between supplier
and customer
3. customized degree and demand
sense
4. properties of supply
5.service delivery method
Demand-Oriented
Integration Categories
1.individuation and standardization
2. object relativity

A Research on Service Recognition 63
Figure 1. Definition serv ic e and product by specifici ty.
and intangible products cannot be completely separated.
People were given a specific product or service is often
tangible products and intangible products complexly [5].
3.7. Service Characteristics
Service characteristics concludes: service invisible, the
production and the expense indivisibility, the service
non-storability, the service heterogeneity, customer’s par-
ticipation in service process, does not involve transfer of
ownership, etc. Modern service has a high level of integra-
tion capability and comprehensive professional outsourc-
ing capabilities. Mature professional segments and special
sharing capabilities are two key concepts of modern ser-
vices. For example, there is competition among banks, but
the settlement center can be outsourced to the same com-
pany.
3.8. Service in the Role of Society and Economics
First of all, services can reduce the space between pro-
ducers and consumers, realize all logistics, information
flow and capital flow transmission reasonable and pro-
mote knowledge and technical dissemination. Then the
service also infiltrate in every chain such as physical
goods production, distribution and consumption, and
play a promotion role of realize the value and use value
of physical goods. Moreover, the service can develop the
physical commodity the value to increase its added value,
enhances consumer’s effectiveness, meets the consumer
need well [6].
3.9. Enterprise Service Bus
Gartner believes that the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is
a new structure with developing Web services, messag-
ing middleware, intelligent routing and transmission,
EBS is a central components of the flowing of software
services and application integration. The service realize
communication through routing, addressing and protocol
conversion, use authorization, authentication and identi-
fication to assure security, process message with trans-
formation, the media and certification, ensure service
quality through affair distributed, use logs, measurement,
monitoring, error processing and metadata to implement
management.
3.10. Service Developing Process
Service is always exists, and the service complexity and
integration become higher. An object, has the use value
first, enters into the trading system for the exchange as
goods. When goods move from the traders to customers,
there are communications between people because of the
value of the goods, or other things transmission, and the
commercial contacts and relationships amount these
communications is called service. At present, the in-
creasing scale of services and the increasingly networked
can be used in more areas of information delivery ser-
vices or goods, the increasing number of transactions to
accommodate the same time, getting higher and higher
level of integratio n of services [7].
3.11. Service Development Trend
Provide a more professional or more efficient and cost-effec -
tive service is a commo n trend in the regional bu sine ss [ 8].
According to the investigation, 92.1% enterprise chooses
“to provide a better service”, 61.5% enterprise chooses “to
provide more professional, more efficient and more
cost-effective service”, 30.6% enterprise chooses “to
move up to provide comprehensive services”. The east-
ern area and western area’s government select significant
increasing service-related operation in business in the
next five years. It is much positive than the Northeast
area and the middle area, reflected the fastest and the
slowest economic development in regions with ser-
vice-related business has a large demand. For the indus-
try public services, the needs are significant in every dif-
ferent area, requiring a corresponding increase in per-
sonnel and material inputs.
3.12. Service Mechanism
E-commerce service mechanism mainly has B to B
(Business to Business, enterprise serves other enterprise's
demand through vertical gateway or level gateway, ver-
tical gateway provides product or service to sole indus-
trial type, level gateway provide multi-domains service),
B to C (Business to Client, enterprise take user’s demand
as service target), C to C (Client to Client), C to B (Cli-
ent to Business), B to G (Business to Government, enter-
prise is committed to meet the needs of the government
and other enterprises) and so on. E-government's service
mechanism mainly has G to G (Government to Govern-
ment, including electronic transfer of documents,
e-justice file sharing, financial management, etc.), G to B
(Government to Business, including electronic procure-

A Research on Service Recognition 64
ment and tendering, electronic license processing, infor-
mation resources services, etc.), G to C (Government to
Citizens, including social insurance network services,
transportation management services, residents e-Tax),
IEE (Internal Efficiency and Effectiveness, internal gov-
ernment e-management improving efficiency and effec-
tiveness, including electronic personnel management,
records management, transaction management, etc.). An
enterprise can serve both B to B and B to G at the same
time, many enterprises can be combined to provide ade-
quate services using of collective strength to compete.
Correspondingly, the enterprise and the enterprise may
manage the product through the network (e.g. Digital
China provide IT products through the “e-bridge” Web
site for agents) or the service (e.g. Alibaba provides in-
formation services to enterprises with product sales and
procurement business), the enterprise and the user can
also manage the product (e.g. Joyo provide users with
books, CDs and other products) or the service (e.g.
EACHNET provide users with the auction and other
business information services, Our game website to pro-
vide entertainment services for individual consumers).
Excavation and cultivation in the use of the Internet user
to maintain relations with existing customers in the
process of increasing the value of services increases, ser-
vice-based service capabilities pilot policy attracts more
and more users. For example, Sina Website provides
news, E-mail, advertising, messaging, games and other
services for businesses or individuals, and China ICBC
E-Bank provide financial services for businesses or indi-
viduals online.
4. Conclusions
This paper gives a view of 12 levels of service recogni-
tion so that we can understand the service science more
clearly. The development of services is to maintain and
enhance the market competitiveness of the needs. It is a
necessary requirement for the metabolism of the service
portfolio and also an effective means to mobilize idle
capacity. Furthermore, it helps businesses offset the sea-
sonal fluctuations in demand for services, helps busi-
nesses spread business risks, and it is the opportunities
for enterprise to explore new market. Therefore, service
enterprises should be developed new services suitable for
market through a variety of ways within its capacity.
5. Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by National 973 (2006CB701305,
2007CB310804), National Natural Science Fund of Chi-
na (60743001), Best National Thesis Fund (2005047),
and Natural Science Fund of Hubei Province (CDB132).
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