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Software, hardware and now "servicewear"?

Shirley Gregor, Information Age

18/10/2006 21:27:33

"Servicewear?" "Services science?" Do we really need new buzzwords in computing? IBM is pushing its new concept of "services science" vigorously and the message is falling on receptive ears. It's not clear yet exactly what is meant by the terms used, but the challenge of trying to unpack and understand their significance captures the imagination.

Recently IBM held a forum in Sydney attended by 27 senior academics from Australia and New Zealand to explain their new approach. The forum was an excellent device for interesting education providers and we were certainly left with something to think about.

The argument from IBM went something like this:

The world is moving towards service economies, based on growing service sectors in health care, government, banking, finance and insurance. These service sectors are heavily reliant on ICT for innovation and operational efficiency.

A "service" is an interaction between a client and a provider that creates and captures value, so to provide good services we need a good knowledge of both the providers of the service (human and technology combinations) and the recipients (mostly a human), and also of how they interact.

There is a concern that currently graduates and workers in ICT do not have a sufficiently "holistic view" to understand human-technology interactions, service organisations and industries, and the social and policy implications of managing service economies. Thus, education providers need to give their IT students a broad-based education that includes people and business skills as well as technical skills.

The final part of the argument is encapsulated in the description of this new body of knowledge as a "science". The idea is that knowledge in the service areas should be made as rigorous as possible. IBM claims responsibility for the term "computer science", which is now an eminent academically respectable field and it aims to have the services area also given legitimacy as an academic field.

In short, the above is the main argument from IBM. However, what does the "services science" idea mean to industry and education providers in Australia?

First, there is no doubt that Australia is increasingly reliant on a service-based economy.

Second, there is agreement in most quarters that IT students in Australia should be given broad knowledge that includes people, business and technology skills. Industry hirers of IT graduates have been saying this for ages. The sad thing is that we do have many university programs that answer this need, but it is very hard to get visibility for them both within the university and with the broader public.

Often these degrees are in "Information Systems" and include courses from accounting, economics, management and other business areas as well as IT courses. There are also programs that offer combined IT/business degrees and there is some evidence that these programs have remained more resistant to the recent downturn in IT enrolments than most [David Wilson at UTS is quoted as saying this in an article I probably have somewhere.]

However there are still problems: at the Australian National University one program is offered as a Bachelor of Commerce with a major in Information Systems. We find it extremely difficult to describe what this program is about to outsiders.

At our last ANU career day the most common question at our counter was "What is Information Systems?" Only people looking at graduate studies had some conception of what it meant.

If a new concept like "services sciences" can raise public awareness of the need for cross-disciplinary studies including both business and IT for entry into the IT profession then it is worth considering. A new concept might also attract more attention to what actually goes on in IT work.

Again this is something that is hard to promote to the general public, as recognised in recent ICT skills summits and the Government's report from the ICT skills foresighting group.

Conclusions here are that lack of clear understanding of the different roles undertaken by computing professionals is one of the main barriers to interesting prospective students in IT careers.

This last point brings us to the remaining questions about "services sciences": What exactly is meant by the term? IBM has also used the longer expression "Services Science, Management and Engineering", which wraps in three separate concepts and thus understandably lacks cohesive force.

IBM vice-president of research Stuart Feldman said at the Sydney IBM workshop that it was not clear that names for the new field that were developed in North America were necessarily suitable for Australia.

We are left with an opportunity for discussion as to if, and how, we might make use of the services sciences concept in Australia.

What terms should we use? As IT professionals, our main interest is not in services in general, but in "IT-supported services" and that should be made clear. We can learn from and offer support to other service disciplines such as sales and marketing, but we need to focus on the place of IT in the offering of a service.

We can think of an IT-supported artifact as a different type of artefact - as in "servicewear" - IT artefacts that are transitory and impermanent but are still human creations based in IT. In the beginning we had "hardware", which is concrete and touchable. Then we had "software", which has a persisting physical existence, but is not exactly touchable.

Now we have "servicewear", which is not at all touchable (it cannot be dropped). Further, it does not have a persistent physical existence. Because services are a series of actions or activities, they exist only in one time period, as they are carried out, then they no longer exist. The service could be completely provided by software, but the service experience itself is transitory. It is this change in emphasis to the transitory, activity-based nature of the IT artefact produced that is of real interest.

The idea of an artefact as a series of activities is unusual but not new. Comparable ideas are found in performance art and in management where management interventions (strategies) are seen as a type of artefact.

How do we go about providing for a "science" of "ICT-supported services". The fields of IT, computer science and information systems are very new in comparison to older established disciplines such as astronomy and physics, which have very well established scientific paradigms. However, there is increasing attention to how knowledge in design disciplines like engineering and IT can be formalised and made rigorous.

The classic work is 'The Science of the Artificial" by the Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon - a very rewarding read. Similar ideas have been popularised under the heading of "design science" (see March and Smith, 1995) and have been taken up by the author (Gregor, 2006). So we have a good place to start in thinking about the rigour of knowledge for servicewear and how a "science" of services can be justified.

What knowledge areas should be included in programs of service science studies? One approach is to have a smorgasbord of courses that allows cross-disciplinary study, with separate courses of study in business, management and IT, much as our Information Systems and joint-degree programs do now. The University of California, Berkeley, appears to be doing something like this in its certificate program in services sciences.

Another approach is to think about what knowledge is key to ICT-supported services and see how this can be integrated in purpose-built courses. Services are something in which value is created and both sides benefit from the transaction. They are at the more sophisticated and complex end of ICT outputs compared with simple transactional outputs. Offering a financial analysis service is far more complex than producing an invoice. Service products need to be carefully customised to suit the needs of diverse clients. It is likely that some intelligence is needed to add value in a service.

It follows that key IT knowledge areas to be integrated in ICT-service sciences programs should include human-centred design approaches to software-engineering, human-computer interaction design principles, and knowledge from intelligent system disciplines - knowledge-based systems, knowledge management, decision support systems and intelligent agents.

ANU is considering a course like this for introduction in 2007.

IBM has certainly given us something to think about with the services sciences concept and if the imagination of both public and academics can be captured then there may be good prospects for promoting interest in cross-disciplinary studies in IT, business and broader fields, something from which Australian industries and the economy would benefit.

Acknowledgement: The author thanks IBM for the opportunity to attend and speak at the workshop on Service Sciences, Management and Engineering in Sydney on August 29, 2006. It should be noted, however, that the views expressed in this article are those of the author, produced independently of IBM.

Sources of further information: IBM (URL: ibm.com/au/SSME) Gregor, S. (2006). The nature of theory in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 30, 3, 611-642. [ICT skills report from govt] March, S.T., and Smith, G.F. "Design and Natural Science Research on Information Technology," Decision Support Systems (15) 1995, pp. 251-266. Simon, H., The Sciences of the Artificial. (Third edn.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1996. University of California, Berkeley (URL: http://ssme.berkeley/edu/

Professor Shirley Gregor is the ANU Endowed Chair in Information Systems at the Australian National University, Canberra, where she heads the National Centre for Information Systems Research. She is also the Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Economics and Commerce.