Making business sense of services science

By Michael Ogembo Kachieng’a

In December 2005, representatives from leading technology companies, including IBM, Accenture, Electronic Data Systems and Hewlett-Packard, as well as representatives from universities and government agencies, met in Washington, USA, to discuss how to raise interest and awareness in services science.

Services science is a hybrid field that seeks to use technology, business management economics, mathematics and engineering expertise to improve the performance of service business such as transportation, outsourcing, retailing and health care — as well as service functions such as marketing design and customer care services. All these are crucial to new products, manufacturing and business in general.

The blending of different fields in services science is rather tricky. Scientists and technologists tend to regard what is taught at business schools as a mushy combination of anecdotes, success stories and platitudes, wrapped in sweet business jargon. Put a few success stories together, and they become the ‘best practices’.

Sponsors of services science claim that it focuses on the reduction of cost services and the increase of speed of transactions in markets – thus making global trade cheaper and more competitive.

They stress that technological innovations offer the best opportunity for the democratisation of global markets. Their argument is based on the fact that one of the major barriers to global trade is the cost of doing business between nations and businesses.

Reduction of the cost of transactions and delivery times will lead to low cost of doing business, making product and service prices more competitive.

There seems to be general agreement amongst stakeholders in the public and private sectors that the best response to global business competitiveness is through services science.

A number of the universities in the USA, Canada, Japan, China and Europe are offering courses and research programmes in the field of services science.

Competitive advantages

The push for services science is a belated recognition that service industries now employ about 80 per cent of the global workforce; and business education research and policy should reflect the shift and relevance of services in the marketplace.

Global business is all about business-to-business or nation-to-nation service transactions. Therefore, understanding services sciences offers competitive advantages to business organisations in the global marketplace.

Effectively, globalisation is about service trade and commercial transactions. The global market is driven by high-speed convergence of technology, finance and human capital and the winners in the marketplace are determined by the cost of doing business and the speed of transactions. But there is a shortage of expertise and skills where they are needed most – at the intersection of technology and business.

As firms position to exploit technological innovations in pursuit of new values, streamline manufacturing operations and embrace the internet through wholesale changes in business processes and marketing, a huge opportunity exists in the managing technology-business interface.

Nonetheless, no focused efforts are directed towards preparing the human capital that will manage this strategic interface in modern business.

Wealth generation

The technologisation of global economy and business requires people who are talented in the applications of technologies to assist business, governments, and other organisations improve their functionalities and services — and also to tap into new areas of wealth generation.

The complex issues surrounding transformation of the business environment at such fundamental levels require the simultaneous development of both business methods and technology to support such methods in their practical applications.

This is the seedbed of the new discipline that the business world and academia call services science. Supporters of services science do not seem bothered at all. They say similar scepticism greeted computing decades ago. When some advocates of computing started promoting the idea of ‘computer science’ traditionalists sneered that any course of study that had to add the term ‘science’ to its name was not science.

Eventually, computing won over the sceptics. And today, computer science departments are academic fixtures in most universities.

It is interesting to note that IBM, who was an early champion of computer science, is now a leading corporate proponent of services science, sponsoring workshops and awarding research grants.

Why services science?

An accumulation of technological advances and changes in the global business environment are behind the growing interest in services science.

High Internet access, low-cost computing, wireless, electronic sensors and ever-smarter software are tools for building a ‘globalised services economy’.

Traditional service functions such as marketing, call centres and client services are being transformed by information communication technology.

Today, market researchers routinely use analytical and modelling software tools to test hypotheses against statistics from customer databases and sociological studies.

The writer is a Biomedical Engineering Scientist, Consulting Entrepreneur and Professor of Technological Entrepreneurship at the Graduate School of Technology Management, University of Pretoria, South Africa.