Talk:Service science, management and engineering/Archives/2012

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• interdisciplinary approach?
• urgent call to action?
• proposed academic discipline and research area?

Can't be all of these at the same time can it? --RichardVeryard 15:48, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

The first is not SSME itself but a large aspect of it resulting from the fact that businesses have interacting departments whose interfaces need to be understood, and whose operations can serve a wide range of needs depending on the line of business.

The second is less an aspect than a point, namely that organizations (businesses and institutions) stand to benefit from an understanding of how they currently work and how they might work better, an urgent need warranting a call for action.

The third is closest to what service science seems to aspire to becoming. As things stand we have no shortage of individual authors who may not even have an MBA jumping into the fray on their own say-so and endlessly spouting off on how they think businesses should be operated, with no serious review of whether their opinions are right or useful. The service science concept seems to call for replacing this with a community of people with this sort of understanding as their common goal, which proposes, debates, evaluates, and establishes the principles of their science, judging them for their accuracy as an account of what presently happens, and for their efficacy as principles businesses can follow to enhance their efficiency.

The part I have trouble with is, how is IBM's jumping into the fray in this way not simply more of the same thing with IBM in place of authors? If this were in response to a call from business schools around the world to get more scientific about their stuff, the role of academia here would be understandable. But if it's an end run by IBM around business schools, a sort of vote of no confidence in them, in which IBM instead coopts various universities' Operations Research and related engineering departments into lending academic respectability to this end run, then this is an extremely interesting commentary on the world's business schools being made by a company whose judgments and opinions have historically been very sound.

If I were IBM I would respond to such a question by saying that business schools have failed to produce any such science, and attribute this to the fact that business schools, however interdisciplinary they may claim to be, lack the tradition of scientific method that so strongly pervades science and engineering schools. IBM's expectation seems to be that the concept of a science is held to a much higher standard at engineering than business schools, and therefore the former hold out more promise as a home in which service science can develop. Forty years ago many academics wanted to know, how could computer science could have any principles beyond those already well understood in what they snidely referred to as slide rule science: we already know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, they said, how could doing it faster change the principles in any way? Fortunately the B in IBM's name was not interpreted back then as meaning that computer science would thrive best in business schools, or CS might have looked totally different. (My initial CS training in the 1960's was in a physics school, home to Sydney University's Basser Computer Department, then granting only the Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing and the very occasional postgraduate degree.)

Today computers have gone from high-tech tool to commodity---they're still high-tech but economically speaking their commodity nature makes them much less interesting to the business world than thirty years ago. The new view, promoted energetically by IBM as part of bailing themselves out of the commodity well they fell into in the late 1980s, is that customers are most effectively served by whole-problem solutions. Computers solve only part of a problem, and the complexity of integrating them into the non-computer part of the solution has been a nightmare for those buying into the idea that computers will somehow make their life easier. The plummetting cost of computers means that the bulk of the cost of incorporating computers into a solution lies elsewhere than the computers themselves. Only by selling an integrated solution, says IBM, will the computer be an effective tool for the customer. Accordingly IBM sold off its commodity disk service and bought PricewaterhouseCoopers' consulting business with some of the proceeds (so service science evangelist Jim Spohrer, who spoke today at a Stanford CS faculty lunch, tells the story). This replaced nonexistent margins from a commodity unit by the substantial margins associated with selling whole-problem solutions, organized by PwC's CBM package developed to that end before the IBM purchase, which was the top-of-the-line such product meeting that need as far as IBM was concerned. CBM brings a lot of organizational structure to running a business that IBM had been unable to find anywhere else, least of all from the academic business journals that one might have expected to be the best sources of such organizational structure.

From that perspective the goal of service science might be described as bringing scientific method to bear on the principles underlying CBM so as to give them the clarity and power we associate with established sciences such as operations research and computer science. Whether this is even possible for systems as complex as businesses is a nice question, we can't say the jury is out on it because the jury hasn't even been assembled yet. The science that the jury is ultimately going to judge is currently just an embryo in a state of original sin. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 00:54, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, even the name seems to be in dispute. Looking at most of the links and based on a presentation I attended from one of the founding academics in the field, I think this article should be called "Services Science, Management, and Engineering". There seems to be strong agreement on the "Services", and that was also one of the points he emphasized in his talk. Most of the websites also call it "Science" rather than "Sciences", and it seems split on the second comma, but I personally favor it. However, I don't know how to change the actual name of an article, so I posted this message instead... Shanen 07:22, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

IBM Systems Journal Vol. 47, No.1, 2008 [1] This edition of the IBM Systems Journal is completely dedicated to Service Science, Management, and Engineering articles. I think it should be linked in, but I don't know if it should be an external link, or put as one of the listed academic journals.

Its choice of title for its subject matter seems to answer the above question 'What exactly is the name of SSME?'--Gramery (talk) 02:11, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

This page could probably use a few updates.

(1) SSME is also becoming (sometimes) known as SSMED, with the addition of Design. This is a small point, but illustrated in movements by institutions such as in Finland (where Aalto University has incorporated a school of art and design). I wonder if redirection pages or disambiguation pages should be created for SSME and SSMED.

(2) The April 2008 report by the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing at http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/ssme/ may be helpful in tightening up language and definitions.

Daviding (talk) 16:20, 28 September 2009 (UTC)