IBM and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced the first “Service Science, Management, and Engineering – SSME Meet 2007″ in India to help representatives from the academia, industry and government to brainstorm on the emerging trends in an increasingly services-based economy and the “interdisciplinary curriculum†necessary for technical talent to succeed in the marketplace. The conference will be held on 21st June, 2007 at Hotel Taj West End, Bangalore.
Dr. Guruduth Banavar, Associate Director, IBM India Research Laboratory, Bangalore, said, “The SSME summit will aim at triggering a national discussion on SSME as the focus for growth and competitive advantage, and to build the foundation of a new interdisciplinary curriculum in leading Indian Universities.” He added, “Today’s services economy necessitates a new academic discipline for the 21st Century. And, curricula must transform to reflect the realities of today and tomorrow — SSME is the answer for curricula change.”
Many leading universities across the world have begun exploring and investing in the field of service science – also called service sciences, management, and engineering – to develop exactly these cross-disciplinary skills. UC Berkeley, Arizona State and North Carolina State are among a handful of American universities which have established graduate level programs in service science. Universities in Europe and Asia are also creating programs in this area.
“We are working with top business and academic leaders across the globe to form a consortium to bridge the future skill gap in the global services economy,†said Amol Mahmuni, IBM India University Relations Program Director. “SSME education will enable young graduates the skill to go on to become successful entrepreneurs, executives, researchers, and practitioners, with a solid grounding in theory and practice to design complex solutions.â€
The world economy is experiencing the largest labor force migration in history, driven by an environment altered by broader global communications, growth of emerging markets and technology innovation. Services now accounts for more than 50 percent of the labor force in Brazil, Russia, Japan and Germany and over 75 percent of the labor force in India, the United States and the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, this shift to services has created a huge skills gap, especially in the area of high value services, and many leading universities across the globe have begun exploring and investing in this area, working in tandem with thought leaders in the business world.
The new interdisciplinary academic field “Service Science, Management, and Engineering,” or SSME, aims at studying, improving and teaching services innovation. Its goal is to create a services sector that can develop and implement technological applications to help businesses, governments and other organizations improve what they do and tap into completely new areas of opportunity. There is a need for new skills to address business and technical issues in a services business environment, as well as a need for a more systematic approach to research and teaching in services, in part by bridging academic disciplinary boundaries. To address these vital issues, the workshop will have series of brainstorming sessions on issues related to services innovation, curriculum to meet the future needs of industry, methods for teaching services innovation and the creation of an SSME ecosystem in India.
“It’s important for all college students with a passion for innovation to understand that technology is becoming more pervasive, less costly, and more useful in business,” said Murali Grandhi, Chairperson, ACM, Bangalore Chapter. “Societal advancements are coming from a fusion of several different disciplines, including services science, which combines computer science and engineering, business, and social sciences together into one field.â€
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, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social, cognitive and legal sciences, to develop skills required in a services-led economy.
Earlier, IBM and the Indian School of Business (ISB) have a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for joint research to develop “research on Service Science, Management and Engineering†(SSME). As part of this initiative, ISB and IBM create cutting edge research and develop case studies to streamlining service processes and replicate them across industries. Please mention any other links
Since 2004, IBM has hosted a series of conferences and workshops, inviting hundreds of faculty from universities around the world, in a call to action. Many leading universities across the globe have begun exploring and investing in this area, working in tandem with thought leaders in the business world. The global SSME research community is aggressively laying the groundwork for this challenging new research area.
