Service science, management and engineering

Service science, management, and engineering (SSME) is a term introduced by IBM to describe an interdisciplinary approach to the study and innovation of service systems. 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.[1] The interdisciplinary nature of the field calls for a curriculum and competencies to advance the development and contribution of the field of SSME.[2]

Definition of service

In national economic statistics, the service sector is often defined as whatever is not agriculture or manufacturing (service sector – tertiary sector of the economy (Colin Clark)). 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 (Lusch & Vargo), often done as a single, customized job. And most cases, service requires substantial input from the customer or client (Sampson) – 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 (Teboul). 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:

Services are economic activities offered by one party to another, most commonly employing time-based performances to bring about desired results in recipients themselves or in objects or other assets for which purchasers have responsibility. In exchange for their money, time, and effort, service customers expect to obtain value from access to goods, labor, professional skills, facilities, networks, and systems; but they do not normally take ownership of any of the physical elements involved. LOVELOCK & WIRTZ, "Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy," 6/e; (Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall 2007).
A service is a time-perishable, intangible experience performed for a customer acting in the role of a co-producer. FITZSIMMONS & FITZSIMMONS "Service management". (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill 2003).
Service [is] the application of specialized competences (knowledge and skills), through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself. LUSCH & VARGO, "The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing". (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. 2006).
Service is a process of transformation of service consumer' needs by utilizing necessary resources, in which dimensions of consumer experience manifest themselves in the themes of a service encounter or service encounter chain. (Editorial: We Must Rethink Service Encounters, INFORMS Service Science, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2013).
Service is the “result of at least one activity, necessarily performed at the interface between the supplier and customer, that is generally intangible". ISO/IEC Guide 76:2020 Development of service standards – Recommendations for addressing consumer issues (URL: https://www.iso.org/standard/73717.html).

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 (both b2b and b2c) is to hire another person or organization to do work that an individual or corporate entity doesn't want to do (or lacks the skills, knowledge, physical capabilities or equipment to perform). 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 (in MIT's terms).[3] [4] 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 digitized information, computing capability and computational power so that the service system can be studied qualitatively and quantitatively. [5]

Toward a science of service

SSME articles have appeared in the leading journals of major professional associations. For instance, see IEEE Computer Steps Toward a Science of Service Systems and the special issue of Communications of the ACM focused entirely on service science. For a framework for service ontology evaluation see.[6]

SSME degree programs and research centers have been created at universities globally. For instance, UC Berkeley created an SSME program. And North Carolina State University created an MBA track 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 Copenhagen Business School,Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland, Arizona State University, Northern Illinois University, UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State University, Utah State University, RPI, University of Manchester, Helsinki University of Technology (now as Aalto University), The University of Sydney, Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University, Masaryk University, University of Milano Bicocca, an MBA in Services Sciences, Management And Engineering at Lusofona University – Information Systems School (Portugal), Design And Engineering Services at Senac University Center (Brasil), Geneva University and an MBA at Institute of Service Science National Tsing Hua University.

SSME arose in part as a response to the growth of service revenue in information technology companies, and the need to become more scientific in innovation creation processes for service offerings. In 2003, IBM began working with universities to fund research and establish education programs that combined engineering, management, and systems sciences methods to improve service systems - establishing Service Science, Management, and Engineering to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the effort. HP has created the Centre for Systems and Services Sciences for the same reason. Cisco, HP, and IBM formed a professional association called "the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals" to promote SSME skills development and sharing of innovation practices. The NESSI (Networked European Software and Services Initiative) group in the European Union has established a Services Sciences Working Group.

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 (save for a few economists studying the relationship between investment and innovation in service industries; e.g., GADREY & GALLOUJ). 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. 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 (as in physics or chemistry for example) 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 name a small subset of the necessary disciplines) 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.

Service Science

SSME is often referred to as service science for short.[7] The flagship journal Service Science is published by the professional association 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 INFORMS Meetings & Conferences page.

Service Science is an interdisciplinary field that provides a foundation for service engineering and service management. [8] 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 (i.e., market analysis, design, engineering, delivery, and sustaining) in an integral and quantitative manner. Service is people-centric, 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.

gollark: I suppose I could just implicitly vote against things.

gollark: I read it. I just don't care much if the rule exists or not.

gollark: I just didn't actually care about that at all.

gollark: Consider that people can in fact actually disagree with (claimed) reasoning for things instead of just arbitrarily hating you.

gollark: false dichotomy → consume bee.

References

IfM and IBM (2007) "Succeeding Through Service Innovation: A service perspective for education, research, business and government.", "Cambridge Service Science, Management and Engineering Symposium"
Choudaha, Rahul (2008) "Competency-based curriculum for a master's program in Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME)", "Doctoral dissertation, University of Denver"
"MIT-NSF Workshop on Smarter Service Systems".
"The Continuing Evolution of Service Science".
Qiu, R. (2009) "Computational Thinking of Service Systems: Dynamics and Adaptiveness Modeling" "INFORMS Service Science Vol 1., No 1."
Deb, B. (2012). "Towards a Framework for Service Ontology Evaluation". International Journal of Computer Applications. 48 (5): 12–15. doi:10.5120/7343-9986.
Spohrer, J., Kwan SK. (2009) "Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED): An Emerging Discipline - Outline & References", International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector, Vol. 1, No. 3.
Qiu, R. (2014) "Service Science: The Foundations of Service Engineering and Management", "John Wiley & Sons"