What is service?

Service is a work done by a person or a group of people for the benefit of others. The term, service, exists right from the beginning of human history. There are many definitions for service.
According to James Fitzimmons, “A service is a time-perishable, intangible expereience performed for a customer acting in the role of co-producer.”

According to Christian Gronoos, “A service is an activity or series of activities of more or less intangible nature that normally, but not necessarily, take place in interactions between customer and service employees and/or physical resources or goods and/or systems of the service provider, which are provided as solutions to customer problems.”

Each service involves two sides: service provider and service consumer. The service provider offers the service to the service consumer. Both of them can interact in real time or offline. So, there is a kind of relationships-based interactions between service provider and consumer in order to achieve a business goal or solution objective.

IT-enabled business service has two features: service operation model and service charge model. Service operation model tells how the service is to be delivered and service charge model specifies how the delivered service is to be charged.
There are many ways in which service can be delivered thanks to information technologies: hosted service model, businsess process outsourcing (BPO), data centerd outsourcing and so on.