In the last years, IT assumed a key role in supporting the core business development of an enterprise. The enabling factor guiding the ‘alignment' between IT and business was the adoption of the service-oriented approach, based on the fact that IT resources and infrastructures must be implemented according to the SOA architectural paradigm to support core business activities.

Today, adopting the service-oriented approach does not only imply making actions at architectural and infrastructural level to solve IT interoperability issues (SOA-based ICT solutions). The real problem is not just application interoperability. The real challenge is to be able to adopt a structured approach for the overall service governance: in other terms, applying Service Engineering at the next level, shifting from Service-Oriented Software Architectures to Service-Oriented Enterprises.

Service Engineering means Concepts (sharing of common standard understanding), Models (abstraction and description of reality), Methodologies (spreading approaches and procedures), Tools & Techniques (supporting activities) to adopt the service-oriented approach taking into account each dimension of interest, not only the architectural and infrastructural dimension.

Thanks to the multidisciplinary competences matured in several cutting edge research, education and innovation projects, we developed different reference concepts, models, methodologies, tools and techniques for Service Engineering: they represent our "Thinking in Services". Some examples are:

• Concepts - key features to describe a business service (business functionalities, ownership, quality, price etc.)
• Models - a model to govern the Service Engineering actuation at 360-degree (not only at architectural and infrastructural level, but also considering organization aspects etc.).
• Methodologies - service co-design, a structured approach to identify the real expectations of final users of services, based on the three concepts of "People", "Business" and "Technologies" together.
• Tools and Techniques - the Map of shared services to identify and represent the service portfolio ("as-is") and to support the service evolution strategy of an Enterprise ("to-be"); a prototypal middleware, result of a multi-year project research, capable of executing composite applications based on Web Services.