Service science, management and engineering


Service science, management, and engineering is a term introduced by IBM to describe service science, an interdisciplinary approach to the study, design, and implementation of service systems – complex systems in which specific arrangements of people and technologies take actions that provide value for others. More precisely, SSME has been defined as the application of science, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another.
Today, SSME is a call for academia, industry, and governments to focus on becoming more systematic about innovation in the service sector, which is the largest sector of the economy in most industrialized nations, and is fast becoming the largest sector in developing nations as well. SSME is also a proposed academic discipline and research area that would complement – rather than replace – the many disciplines that contribute to knowledge about service. The interdisciplinary nature of the field calls for a curriculum and competencies to advance the development and contribution of the field of SSME.

Definition of service

In national economic statistics, the service sector is often defined as whatever is not agriculture or manufacturing. Intuitively, services are processes, performances, or experiences that one person or organization does for the benefit of another – such as custom tailoring a suit, cooking a dinner to order, driving a limousine, mounting a legal defense, setting a broken bone, teaching a class, or running a business's information technology infrastructure and applications. In all cases, service involves deployment of knowledge, skills, and competences that one person or organization has for the benefit of another, often done as a single, customized job. And in all cases, service requires substantial input from the customer or client – how else could your steak be customized for you unless you tell you waiter how you want it prepared? In general there are so-called front-stage and back-stage activities in any business transaction – front stage being the part that comes in contact with the customer and back stage being the part that does not. Service depends on having a high degree of front-stage activities to interact with the customer, whereas traditional manufacturing requires very little customer input to the production process and depends almost entirely on back-stage activities.
There are many definitions of service in the literature. Here are a few:
Historically, service scholars emphasized customization, but the world is changing. One of the contributions of SSME may be to help service managers to achieve standardization and its more sophisticated sibling, assembly of standardized modular service elements in several "customizable" but highly predictable permutations. Many customers seek and value standardization because it reduces variability and usually helps bring prices down. Services in the digital economy employ standardization and mass customization. A new service definition might focus on the technical nature of modern-day service, rather than on explaining away why service productivity is not doing as well as manufacturing, so that we can do something to advance the service economy.
Not all services require substantial input from the customer – one of the motivations for outsourcing in electronic commerce contexts is to hire another person or organization to do work that an individual or corporate entity doesn't want to do. Particularly in areas such as maintenance, cleaning, and repair, the customer's goal may be to become involved as little as possible, preferring to leave it to the experts to determine what needs to be done. In such instances, the front-stage is pretty small. Yet when teaching service, there's a risk of spending too much time on discussing the high-contact, customizable services that we enjoy using ourselves and not nearly enough in studying and researching the more "boring" but fast growing areas in b2b where much of the action is highly repetitive, often substantially automated, and takes place primarily behind the scenes.

Service systems

"Service system" is a term that frequently appears in the service management, service operations, services marketing, service design, and service engineering literatures.
Service involves both a provider and a client working together to create value. A doctor interviews a patient, conducts some tests, and prescribes some medicine – the patient answers the questions, cooperates with the tests, and ingests the medicine faithfully. Perhaps technologies and other people are involved in the tests or in the assignment and filling of prescriptions. Together, doctor, patient, others, and technologies co-create value – in this case, patient health. These relationships and dependencies can be viewed as a system of interacting parts. In many cases, a service system is a complex kind of system – a system in which the parts interact with each other in a non-linear manner. As such, a service system is not only the sum of its parts; complex interactions between the different parts create a system which behaves in a difficult-to-predict set of patterns. In many cases, a main source of complexity in a service system is its people: the client, the provider, or other organizations.
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. 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 digitalized information, computing capability and computational power so that the service system can be studied qualitatively and quantitatively.

Toward a science of service

There is a long history of academic and industrial interest in the service sector – starting with Adam Smith and continuing right up to the present day. Yet most such interest in service has focused narrowly on marketing or management or economics. With the rise of technology-enabled services, many traditionally manufacturing-based companies have begun to see more and more revenue generated by service operations. So in industry, there was a growing recognition that service innovation is now as important – if not more important than – technology innovation. Yet, service innovation is generally unknown.
The key to service science is interdisciplinarity, focusing not merely on one aspect of service but rather on service as a system of interacting parts that include people, technology, and business. As such, service science draws on ideas from a number of existing disciplines – including computer science, cognitive science, economics, organizational behavior, human resources management, marketing, operations research, and others – and aims to integrate them into a coherent whole. In fact, IBM relabeled its initiative in this area to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the effort. HP has created the for the same reason. Oracle Corp. working with IBM, joined in creating an industry consortium called the focused on establishing what it calls "service science" as both a key area for investment by companies and governments and as a full-blown academic discipline.
The NESSI group in the European Union has established a
Definitions of 'service science' can be misleading. An analogy can be made with Computer Science. The success of CS is not in the definition of a basic science but more in its ability to bring together diverse disciplines, such as mathematics, electronics and psychology to solve problems that require they all be there and talk a language that demonstrates common purpose. Services Science may be the same thing – just bigger – as an interdisciplinary umbrella that enables economists, social scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists and legislators to cooperate in order to achieve a larger goal – analysis, construction, management and evolution of the most complex systems we have ever attempted to construct.
Universities have begun to act on the need for service science or SSME as well. For instance, UC Berkeley created an . And North Carolina State University created an for service and a computer engineering degree for services as well. In both cases, the schools recognize the interdisciplinary character of the field and incorporate content from a variety of disciplines. Other schools with interdisciplinary interests in SSME include ,, , , , , , , , University of Manchester, Helsinki University of Technology, , , , , , , , an MBA in Services Sciences, Management And Engineering at , Design And Engineering Services at , and an MBA at .
Academic publications in SSME are also starting to appear. For instance, see the special issue of the and IEEE Computer .
For a framework for service ontology evaluation see.

Service Science

Service is people-centric, truly societal, cultural, and bilateral. The type and nature of a service dictates how service should be designed and delivered, which accordingly determine how a series of service encounters should occur throughout its lifecycle. The type, order, frequency, timing, time, efficiency, and effectiveness of the series of service encounters throughout the service lifecycle determine the quality of services perceived by customers who purchase and consume the services.
Service Science is truly an interdisciplinary field. With the foundation of systems theory, operations research, management science, marketing science, advanced computing and communication technology, network theory, social computing, and analytics, Service Science can be rigorously developed, involving descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive research of a service spanning its lifecycle in an integral and quantitative manner.
The flagship journal is published by INFORMS. The journal publishes innovative and original papers on all topics related to service, including work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. It is the primary forum for presenting new theories and new empirical results in the emerging, interdisciplinary science of service, incorporating research, education, and practice, documenting empirical, modeling, and theoretical studies of service and service systems.
INFORMS has an annual international conference on Service Science. You can find it from page.