Are You Being Served?

Service is by far the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy today. According to the CIA's World Factbook, services account for approximately 78 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. But researchers who work on methods for improving business performance are still largely stuck in a manufacturing mindset.

"When you think about the kind of things studied in school, nobody is studying services," said Paul Maglio, senior manager of services systems research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

In actuality, some people are studying services.

Researchers in academia and the private sector are putting a new emphasis on the dominant sector of our economy. Merging expertise in business, economics, IT, industrial engineering, psychology, law and other fields, these specialists are molding a new professional discipline, described as "services science."

Ask 10 experts what services science means and you'll probably hear 10 different definitions. Boil them down, though, and you'll get something like this: the study, from a multidisciplinary perspective, of how service systems behave, how to improve existing services and how to create entirely new ones.

Anatole Gershman, global director of research at Accenture Technology Labs in Chicago, speaks of "entering the state of industrialization of services." Just as the advent of cheap energy, cheap transportation and standardized parts led to the Industrial Revolution, he said, the rise of computing power (energy), the Internet (transportation) and standardized processes (standardized parts) is fueling a similar revolution in services.

In manufacturing, researchers know what kinds of improvements they're aiming for -- smaller, faster, cheaper integrated circuits, etc. -- Maglio said, adding that in the services industry, however, the objectives are less defined. "We don't know where the next great innovation or the next great improvement in services is going to come." Those creating the services science discipline are "trying to put service systems on the kind of predictable innovation and improvement footing manufacturing systems are on." Most likely, he said, that involves integrating people, technology and business in novel ways.

To Bob Glushko, adjunct professor in the Services Science, Management and Engineering program at the University of California, Berkeley, services science is about designing services that actually work for the 21st century. That means services based on new design principles, made possible by integrating knowledge from what used to be entirely separate professional disciplines.

Take the development of online services. Berkeley has excellent professors who teach user interfaces design and back-end infrastructures design, Glushko said. "You have a challenge that students tend to pick one or the other to specialize in." But an online service that works well requires excellent design at both the front and back ends. Ideally it also needs a generalized interface that can be tailored to run on desktop computers, laptops, PDAs, cell phones and voice-based systems. Integrating these disciplines will yield better online services -- a key goal of services science.


Beyond Business School
The quest for excellence and innovation in services is nothing new at Arizona State University's (ASU) Center for Services Leadership, part of the university's W.P. Carey School of Business. The center's experts have been helping companies with the quest for those goals for 20 years. "I think what's different now is that the impetus is coming from beyond the business school," said Mary Jo Bitner, academic director at the center, in Tempe. ASU's computer science and engineering programs are starting to shine a spotlight on the service sector as well. So now, Bitner said, it may be time to start looking across disciplines at the same issue to see if newer and better conclusions can be drawn.

Bitner said the center has combined forces with ASU's computer science and engineering programs to apply to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for funds to