Service Science: An Approach to Increasing Service Innovation and Work System Productivity

Paul Maglio
IBM Almaden Research Center

This talk will provide a brief overview of IBM Research and our initial exploratory efforts to work with academics in establishing service science courses and programs -- not unlike IBM's efforts in the middle of the last century to help establish computer science. Why service science?

• First, the economies of most developed countries are dominated by services (70% of the labor, GDP, etc.).
• Second, even traditional manufacturing companies like GE (70% services revenue) and IBM (50% services revenue) need to add high value services to grow their businesses ( http://www.almaden.ibm.com/asr/events/serviceinnovation/).
• Third, information services and business services are two of the fastest growing segments of the service economy -- the rise of web services, service oriented architectures, and self service systems speak in part to the relationship between the emerging discipline of service science and computer science.
• Finally, research indicates that improving productivity -- one type of service innovation -- often requires technical, social, and business innovations combined. ?The coevolution of technology, business, and social innovations, relates ?to waves of changing work practices rippling through populations of people (http://almaden.ibm.com/coevolution).

Joint work with James Spohrer.

About the speaker:

Paul Maglio is Senior Manager of Human Systems Research at the IBM Almaden Research Center. In his nine years at IBM Research, Paul has worked and published extensively in the areas of human-computer interaction, intelligent agents, web intermediaries, system management, and autonomic computing. He has a PhD in cognitive science from UCSD, and an SB in computer science and engineering from MIT.

Contact information:

Paul Maglio
Senior Manager, Human Systems Research
IBM Almaden Research Center
Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Road
San Jose, CA 95120
408-927-2857