Service systems are designed and constructed, are often very large, and, as complex systems, they have emergent properties. This makes them an engineering kind of system (in MIT's terms).[3] [4] For instance, large-scale service systems include major metropolitan hospitals, highway or high-rise construction projects, and large IT outsourcing operations in which one company takes over the daily operations of IT infrastructure for another. In all these cases, systems are designed and constructed to provide and sustain service, yet because of their complexity and size, operations do not always go as planned or expected, and not all interactions or results can be anticipated or accurately predicted.
As the world becomes more complex and uncertain socially and economically, a computational thinking approach has been proposed to model the dynamics and adaptiveness of a service system, aimed at fully leveraging today's ubiquitous digitized information, computing capability and computational power so that the service system can be studied qualitatively and quantitatively. [5]
SSME has been used to describe higher education as a service delivered by colleges and universities that are viewed as complex systems. [6]
