Guest Editor: Dr. Yingdong Lu, USA.

It is widely accepted that workforce management is critical to profitability, growth and client satisfaction of companies in service industry. Considerable amount of resources have been devoted in improving workforce management in industry practices. New methodologies emerge in a very fast pace in different areas. Meanwhile, at theory front, mimicking the development of supply chain management theory for the manufacturing industry, exciting new research topics on workforce management are being investigated from various angles by researchers from different fields.

Service Science aims to facilitate the development of new theories, as well as their permeation to the practice fields. Our goal is to provide a platform for both researchers and practitioners to communicate their new ideas, so that important problems in workforce management can be addressed from more complete point of view. Of course, every problem solved naturally generates many more new challenges, we also expect the interactions between academia and industry to stimulate new ideas, models and analytical methods.

The issue provides a global forum for presenting academically-thorough research and case studies in both theoretical development and applied research in the area of workforce management.  We are specifically interested in the development and implementation of quantitative methods, such as those developed in the field of statistics, operations research and machine learning.

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Issues, gaps, and unmet needs in workforce management practice
• Service business trends and transformation
• Analytic methods for workforce management
• Data issues in workforce management analysis
• Performance analysis and capacity planning for contact centers
• Health care related workforce management
• Long term workforce evolution and planning

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page (http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/author.php)

Important Dates

Full paper deadline: 30 April, 2010

Notification of acceptance and review results: 30 June, 2010

Revised submission deadline: 1 Aug., 2010

Final acceptance: 15 Aug., 2010

Editors and Notes

All papers must be submitted to the guest editor.

Guest editor’s contact information

Dr. Yingdong Lu

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,

Yorktown Heights,

NY 10598, USA.

(yingdong@us.ibm.com)