designing with discipline in service

Designing {a, with} Discipline in Service Science

I've just finished writing a paper that will be published in a special

issue on Service Science in the IBM Systems Journal in February 2008.

This journal doesn't allow authors to post accepted manuscripts before

they are officially published, which strikes me as a bit quaint, but

it is OK if I post the abstract and say that the full manuscript is

available from me if you ask for it. So here's the abstract, and if

you ask for the full paper (glushko at ischool.berkeley.edu), I'll

send it to you.

The paper is called Designing {a, with} Discipline in Service Science,

which is probably too clever but I like it and if you can't parse the

title you probably won't understand the paper anyway. The paper was

motivated by the call by IBM and others for universities to train

students for new career opportunities in the information and service

economy, usually urging the creation of a new discipline called

"Service Science" or "Service Science, Management, and Engineering"

(SSME).

Several professors at UC Berkeley are interested in topics that

potentially fit into an SSME curriculum, and we might simply have

declared that the Service Science curriculum consisted of the set of

courses we were already teaching, putting old courses in new bottles.

But that didn't seem very satisfying. We wanted to design a discipline

of service science in a more principled and theoretically motivated

way, and the paper explains what we did and why we did it.

Here's the Abstract:

Should we think of service science as a new discipline or simply as a

new curriculum? Some might say it doesn't matter. At the University of

California, Berkeley, we cared relatively little about the

institutional form that service science might take (i.e., what to call

it and how to organize it), but we cared immensely about the

intellectual form (i.e., what it would be about). We sought to design

a discipline of service science in a more principled and theoretically

motivated way - designing a discipline with discipline. Our work began

by asking "What questions would a `service science' have to answer?"

and from that we developed a new framework for understanding service

science. This framework can be visualized as a matrix whose rows are

stages in a service lifecycle and whose columns are disciplines that

can provide answers to the questions that span the lifecycle. This

matrix systematically organizes the issues and challenges of service

science and enables us to compare our model of a service science

discipline with other definitions and curricula. This analysis

identified gaps, overlaps, and opportunities that shaped the design of

our curriculum and especially a new survey course which serves as the

cornerstone of service science education at UC Berkeley.

If you're not up to reading the entire paper, take a look at the

Information and Services Design program at the School of Information

at UC Berkeley.

-Bob Glushko

# posted by Bob Glushko @ 4:24 PM

Comments:

Are you allowed to respond to HttpRequests for the paper?

More seriously, would you post the summary matrix mentioned by the

abstract? (Is it in graphic form?)

# posted by Blogger nate : 1:47 PM

i don't want to get into a debate with the IBM Systems Journal about

whether I'm complying with their policy on pre-publication

distribution... if you want the paper, i'll be happy to send you a

copy

bob

# posted by Blogger Bob Glushko : 1:54 PM