Goodbye, comp-sci -- now it's 'service' as a science

As often discussed on these pages and elsewhere, organizations are hungering for individuals that not only have technical know-how, but also business acumen.

Responding to the demand for more of these renaissance professionals, IBM posted an interesting bit of business-academia fusion at its Website, heralding the emergence of "Service Science, Management and Engineering" (SSME) as a new curriculum offered at universities and colleges.

The site calls SSME as the study of "dynamic configurations of people, technologies, organizations and shared information that create and deliver value to customers, providers and other stakeholders—and how they can use management and engineering practices to improve them."

In other words, get students studying "service systems," not just computer systems.

That's 'service' as in service economy, but also 'service' as in service oriented architecture. IBM's Jim Spohrer connected the dots between services in both a service economy and SOA sense. It started out when all businesses began working in earnest to "grow differentiation through superior service, becoming heavily dependent on IT systems to maintain knowledge-intensive relationships with customers and apply new discoveries to create more value in the relationship." Add to this the growth of knowledge-intensive economies around the world.

Thus, "services" need to be viewed from both a business perspective and a technical perspective, Spohrer said. As he put it:

"Service systems are complex systems that dynamically configure access to resources (people, organizations, technology and information) to interact with other service systems and mutually create and capture value. From a globally integrated enterprise perspective, service systems can be thought of as service centers. From a Component Business Model and service-oriented architecture perspective, service systems can be thought of as business components or the building-block service components that make up an enterprise. Service systems interact via types of value propositions (internal and external business models) that connect them into vast global service networks."

There you have it -- out with "computer science," in with "service science, management and engineering."