(based on IBM SJ paper)
The following are some notes of interest:
Economic statistics conclusively demonstrate that global economies are increasingly based on information and services, and that demand is growing and exceeding supply for people with the knowledge and skills to be effective workers in this new economy. A consensus is emerging that the cumulative and interconnected innovations in information and computing technology, industrial engineering, business strategy, economics, law, and elsewhere cannot be described and understood by a single academic discipline.
Many of the concepts, techniques, for service design and operations originate in and emphasize person-to-person services. However, they do not fit well when person-to-person services are replaced or complemented by self-service, and hardly fit at all for automated IT services provided by one IT process to another. We might conclude that the word "service", in person-to-person services, service architecture, are homonyms and not try to unify them conceptually and methodologically, but we will make little progress toward a service science if we do not find abstractions that unify them or establish clear boundaries between them.
Many seem to view it as unquestioned dogma that a customer-centric approach is inevitable and essential.However, while a focus on the customer and customer interactions (the front stage) has been shown to contribute to quality in person-to-person services, it is not straightforward to apply the same focus to the design of self-service and automated information-intensive services.
The questions that can be asked about a service science inquire about some activity in the life cycle of a service. We can ask, How is a service: designed, planned, forecasted, specified, provisioned, composed, integrated, deployed, delivered, managed, certified, used, reused, evaluated, optimized, archived, etc.
This list, while far from complete, but illustrates that a very large number of activities or processes could be important parts of the life cycle of a service or set of services. Because services can be people-to-people, people-to-technology (self-service), or computer-to-computer (e.g., Web services), a variety of methodologies apply to the service life cycle. These methodologies partition the life cycle differently, use different words to talk about each activity, and make different design decisions and trade-offs.
When different disciplines and perspectives come together, the outcome is unpredictable. One discipline can become dominant and absorb parts of the others, or the overlapping pieces can break away and form a new field. But if the new field never becomes more than the sum of its parts, it can fade away over time. Occasionally, however, a new and important discipline emerges as a synthetic combination. The multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary character of the transition to a service-dominated economy makes it intrinsically difficult to define what a new, unifying discipline might look like. We might posit that a new and synthetic discipline of service science is desirable, but we should not assume that it is inevitable.
Economic statistics conclusively demonstrate that global economies are increasingly based on information and services, and that demand is growing and exceeding supply for people with the knowledge and skills to be effective workers in this new economy. A consensus is emerging that the cumulative and interconnected innovations in information and computing technology, industrial engineering, business strategy, economics, law, and elsewhere cannot be described and understood by a single academic discipline.
Many of the concepts, techniques, for service design and operations originate in and emphasize person-to-person services. However, they do not fit well when person-to-person services are replaced or complemented by self-service, and hardly fit at all for automated IT services provided by one IT process to another. We might conclude that the word "service", in person-to-person services, service architecture, are homonyms and not try to unify them conceptually and methodologically, but we will make little progress toward a service science if we do not find abstractions that unify them or establish clear boundaries between them.
Many seem to view it as unquestioned dogma that a customer-centric approach is inevitable and essential.However, while a focus on the customer and customer interactions (the front stage) has been shown to contribute to quality in person-to-person services, it is not straightforward to apply the same focus to the design of self-service and automated information-intensive services.
The questions that can be asked about a service science inquire about some activity in the life cycle of a service. We can ask, How is a service: designed, planned, forecasted, specified, provisioned, composed, integrated, deployed, delivered, managed, certified, used, reused, evaluated, optimized, archived, etc.
This list, while far from complete, but illustrates that a very large number of activities or processes could be important parts of the life cycle of a service or set of services. Because services can be people-to-people, people-to-technology (self-service), or computer-to-computer (e.g., Web services), a variety of methodologies apply to the service life cycle. These methodologies partition the life cycle differently, use different words to talk about each activity, and make different design decisions and trade-offs.
When different disciplines and perspectives come together, the outcome is unpredictable. One discipline can become dominant and absorb parts of the others, or the overlapping pieces can break away and form a new field. But if the new field never becomes more than the sum of its parts, it can fade away over time. Occasionally, however, a new and important discipline emerges as a synthetic combination. The multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary character of the transition to a service-dominated economy makes it intrinsically difficult to define what a new, unifying discipline might look like. We might posit that a new and synthetic discipline of service science is desirable, but we should not assume that it is inevitable.
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