What is services science, mangement and engineering (SSME)?

• Application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another ('services').
• Make productivity, quality, performance, compliance, growth, and learning improvements more predictable in work sharing and risk sharing (co-production) relationships.
• A study of socio-econo-computational client-providers systems that co-produce value.

• Social sciences (e.g. ethnography), business, and engineering systems analysis.

• See above.

• It is inherently multidisciplinary and so most likely service science will inherit models from various disciplines.

• Both.

• System analysis, business, ethnography.

• eventually predictable and systematic improvement in productivity and quality in service systems
• Effective service organizations
• Competitive advantage
• Reduced startup time for new graduates to start being productive on jobs

Our position is that business services can be represented at two levels which are different views of the same processes, one at the level of business semantics, the second as that of technical infrastructure. This two-tiered framework is referred to as the Integrated Process and Technology Framework. The first tier is comprised of business processes defined in terms of value chain reference models which can be used for process modeling, gap analysis, simulation, benchmarking and consensus building. The second tier is an architectural representation can be used that maps process models to components of the conceptual architecture and resources used for accurate, fast and flexible implementations of the services in a federation. The two independent but reconciled process representations facilitate the mapping of business process to core collaboration capabilities in a SOA.

Services account for over 70% of the GDP of most industrialized nations, over 60% IBM's revenue, and a tiny fraction of most academic curricula in the US. At IBM, by services we mean not only the computing infrastructure that perhaps provides services over the internet (e.g. on-line reservations, or retail), but also the human workforce involved in providing the services, the customer-facing employees, etc. So why study services? It turns out that in manufacturing of goods, one can exploit economies of scale and hence improve profit margins. However, in knowledge-intensive services, it is currently not possible to systematically improve profit margins in this way since a major part of the service involves interactions between human beings within the providers organization and across the client and provider organizations. Can we, then, understand the services client-provider "system" more systematically? Can we, for example use the tools that are used for understanding systems, and apply it to such socio-econo-computational systems and see where the inefficiencies are, predict the impact of possible policy changes, study the origins of variability, etc? At IBM, we believe that to address these issues we have to tackle the problem in a multidisciplinary way and have established a group of researchers with background in business, ethnography, and computer science and engineering to lead the effort.

While many aspects of services management have been explored, primarily in operations research (we know how to manage supermarket checkout counters, run hotels, and transportation services, etc.), yet services are assuming greater importance, and there is need to study them from new perspectives. A new development in the services area is the emergence of virtual organizations that add value by providing on-the-fly composite services. This panelist advocates a process-centric view of services. From a services point of view, it is necessary to not only model the sequencing and coordination of various tasks as current process modeling approaches do, but also include who is going to do the task, what is their availability, level of experience, etc. along with other resources required to do the task, such as data, equipment, facilities, etc. Current process description languages such as BPEL also fall short in this respect. In addition, they also neglect issues related to roles and authorizations and their security implications. These should form an important part of the process description in a services context. Research is also required in the area of metrics for evaluating the service in terms of quality and other measures of interest to a business.

Service is a physical phenomenon that is defined when two agents or groups of agents are involved in an exchange of resources (products, information, etc.). In the case of service, an unbiased observation is made of the "effort" made by each agent to meet the needs of the other, and this manifests itself in measures such as "response to inquiry or an order" (pre and post-engagement), "adherence to an agreement or a contract (SLA)", etc. However, some of these measures are perceptual and/or cognitive in nature (e.g. acceptable levels of service and customer satisfaction) and volatile (change with time and use). Thus, any systematic experimentation is only feasible, if this cognitive process or perception of "service" can be modeled for observation, influence and change.

Ever since firms moved out of transaction processing to decision support, the MIS field has been trying to understand for over two decades the decision process of users and how it is impacted by their use of IT, and expert systems research for over a decade has been trying to structure the problem solving process of decision makers using various knowledge extraction techniques. These two disciplines can be valuable reference disciplines to better structure the concept of "service." In addition, marketing can also be a reference discipline, as it has been trying to influence an individual's "perception" of value using various theories of innovation adoption and diffusion, and these theories can also provide some clues on how best to "influence" service perception.

If one were to take a scientific approach to define service, then service embedded when two agents interact has to be modeled using various relevant service features and their impact on both tactical and perceptual targets. Tactical targets are those that are relatively insensitive to changes in the way IT is applied and used, or easily measurable (e.g. back-up of data or size of storage in a service level agreement), and perceptual targets are those that are sensitive to IT usage (e.g. satisfaction with the information provided, response time of the system). The impact of various changes in the way services are performed and supported using IT over time are observed and fed back to influence the service features, so the service, as a process, can continue to adapt to changes in the service targets.

The bottom line is - I am not sure service science is entirely a different discipline as much as a way of combining computer science, with the

• engineering approaches to building systems in support of business processes, using various advances in technology such as web services,
• economics approaches to deciding which agent does what process,
• operational approaches to integrate these processes using work-flows, so that certain service level targets are met,
• decision support approaches to understand how the use of external business factors and IT influence the perception of service embedded in transactions among various agents, and
• control systems approaches to support feedback and adaptation of service.