This special issue proposal is followed by the success and highly positive feedback resulting from the ESBE 2008 workshop (co-located with ICSOC 2008 in Sydney, Australia) and from the ESBE 2009 workshop (co-located with MCIS 2009 in Athens, Greece). The main aim of the ESBE (Enabling Service Business Ecosystems) series of workshop is to encourage research from interdisciplinary fields of service ecosystems, focusing on technological, business, and sociological terms.

Today, services are used as a core component or utility of business operations and offer programmatic interfaces to applications to exploit these services. The majority of attention on service oriented systems has been contemplated on its related technical standards and technology integration. However, many of today’s available services are not considered as providing relevant business value as their use by third-party clients have unclear terms and conditions with unknown risk. Service oriented paradigm demands a new way of managing services operation, deployment, and longevity in the context of business ecosystems.

Business models are the complex specifications of business rules and processes to enable organizations to grow in a sustainable way. Services impact the way  organizations build, deploy, and manage their information assets and market  capitalization while creating business ecosystems. In this scenario, it is critical that the underlying business models help to meet organizations’ expectations and needs. This special issue will look at the enablers for Service Oriented Systems to evolve, grow, and interact with other services to support complex business ecosystems. Its focus is on creating business value through services and, looking beyond individual businesses, fostering the growth of a service ecosystem. We encourage contributions from different perspectives including sociological, economical, psychological, legal, and technological domains.

Topics of the Special Issue:

We welcome research submissions on all topics related to business models for services and their enablers, including but not limited to those listed below.

Principles, theories, and challenges of business models for services ecosystems
Architectures and implementations of business models for services ecosystems
Formal methods for business concepts applied to services
(Semantic) Business services and ontologies
Business driven service development, discovery, and composition
Service innovation
Human roles in services and human based services
User interactions with service ecosystems
Service development communities
Knowledge management in service ecosystems
Service economics
Pricing models for services and market dynamics
Service oriented business intelligence and analysis
Innovative strategies for making and managing service-based organizations
Service level agreements/ Policies/ Contracts and negotiation
Strategic, tactical, and operational management of service ecosystem
Risk and compliance management in service ecosystems
Change management in service ecosystems
Trust, security, and privacy aspects of service ecosystem
Interdisciplinary studies of service ecosystem
Sociological, economical, psychological, legal, and technological implications of services
Ethical and cultural issues in service ecosystems
Real world case studies

Guest Editors:

Vincenzo D’Andrea, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
G.R. Gangadharan, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Renato Iannella, NICTA, Brisbane, Australia
Michael Weiss, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada


Important Dates

Potential authors are encouraged to send an email with a tentative title and a brief abstract to the guest editors (esbe-si@disi.unitn.it) as soon as possible.

Submission Deadline: May 07, 2010
Notification of First Round Reviews: July 15, 2010
Revised Manuscripts Due: August 15, 2010
Final Acceptance/Rejection Notification (Second Round Reviews):  Sept. 15, 2010
Final Paper Version Due: October 01, 2010

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information are available on the Author Guidelines page [ http://www.inderscience.com/mapper.php?id=31 ].

Papers can be submitted via https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=esbespecialissue2010

You may send one copy in the form of a PDF file attached to esbe-si@disi.unitn.it.