Visualization in Service Sciences

Recently, situations surrounding business organizations have been changing rapidly and extensively. Due to the wide availability of broadband Internet in many countries, international division of labor, namely offshoring, has become quite common, and global competition is growing intense. As a result, business organizations must seek to produce added-values and higher efficiency to survive the competition. To produce added-values and higher efficiency, a variety of issues have been coped with in the research area named Service Sciences or Service Engineering (SS in short). Since a large amount of data is acquired, analyzed, and utilized in SS, a scientific and engineering approach is important in it. This paper firstly outlines the SS approach, and then discusses “visualization” issues of it. By addressing “visualization”, important points of SS activities are clarified. Examples show how different parties are related with each other thru different visualizations of massive data and how such differences are important for the service productivity.