This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, ICSOC 2003, held in Trento, Italy in December 2003. The 38 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 181 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on service description, service composition, quality of service models, service personalization, service semantics, business processes and transactions, business collaborations, service request and coordination, service security and reliability, infrastructure for service delivery, service P2P and grid computing, service and mobile computing, and service computing and applications.

This book demonstrates how to successfully manage and lead healthcare institutions by employing the logic of business model innovation to gain competitive advantages. Since clerk-like routines in professional organizations tend to overlook patient and service-centered healthcare solutions, it challenges the view that competition and collaboration in the healthcare sector should not only incorporate single-end services, therapies or diagnosis related groups. Moreover, the authors focus on holistic business models, which place greater emphasis on customer needs and put customers and patients first. The holistic business models approach addresses topics such as business operations, competitiveness, strategic business objectives, opportunities and threats, critical success factors and key performance indicators.The contributions cover various aspects of service business innovation such as reconfiguring the hospital business model in healthcare delivery, essential characteristics of service business model innovation in healthcare, guided business modeling and analysis for business professionals, patient-driven service delivery models in healthcare, and continuous and co-creative business model creation. All of the contributions introduce business models and strategies, process innovations, and toolkits that can be applied at the managerial level, ensuring the book will be of interest to healthcare professionals, hospital managers and consultants, as well as scholars, whose focus is on improving value-generating and competitive business architectures in the healthcare sector.

Management, Computers, Computer networks, Information exchange, Data processing, IT and Information Management: IT Service Management