It is widely known that the economies of the developed world are predominantly based on services and those of the developing world are headed in the same direction. However, the businesses within the service sector of most economies are still mostly based on narrow and unsystematic methods, leading to lack of competitiveness, speed to value, and most importantly, innovation.
Today Dr. Guruduth Banavar, Associate Director, IBM India Research Laboratory, Bangalore talked to us regarding IBM's initiative called Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME), which aims to create an ecosystem for developing the knowledge base and train the labor force and to make significant advances in service research and innovation. This is what he had to say "We clearly need to develop a more systematic approach to services innovation if we are to sustain this vital new sector in the economy".
The goal of the SSME discipline is to drive productivity, quality, and sustainability of services, while making the learning rates and innovation rates more predictable across the service sector, especially in complex organization to organization services including business to business, nation to nation and government to population. This new academic discipline brings together ongoing work in fields of computer science, management science, and social science to develop skills required in a services-led economy.
Many leading universities across the world have begun exploring and investing in the field of service science (SSME) to develop exactly these cross-disciplinary skills. University of California, Berkeley, Arizona State University and North Carolina State University are among a handful of universities in the United States which have established programs in service science. Universities in Europe and Asia are also creating programs in this area.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Service Science, Management and Engineering
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2 comments:
FYI - the BM students are already offered an exclusive elective in Services Marketing/Engineering. And, it covers the topics in a much higher level of detail than what was covered in the single lecture by the IBM Director! I can vouch for that, being a student in both the elective, as well as the lecture by the IBM guy!
Since you were actually present during the session delivered by Dr. Banavar I'm surprised how you could miss the entire point about SSME.
Firstly, Dr. Banavar was not delivering a course on SSME. He was simply discussing the initiatives taken by IBM to partner with top business and academic leaders across the globe to bridge the future skill gap in the global services economy.
Secondly, many leading universities across the world have only recently begun exploring and investing in SSME. The curriculum of this new academic initiative is still in the process of development. Also, you may recall Dr. Banavar had said that SSME could be an entire degree course (duration 4 years) or even a PG course (duration 2 years). So I'm not sure how you could even compare this entire discipline with a single elective (duration 2-3 months) offered at XLRI for BM.
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