Half a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion
As I promised in my last blog entry, all the distractions are over ... I'm now officially married, so I've run out of excuses -- time to start blogging!
Apparently, while I was off getting married, my boss, my boss' boss, and our Chief Technologist in SIO were furiously blogging away - describing service innovation, service science, and what our group in Sun is all about... so I thought I'd add to the chorus and throw in a bit of my perspective as well.
Hopefully you've already read some of the descriptions for Service Science - like "the study, design, and implementation of services systems – complex systems in which specific arrangements of people and technologies take actions that provide value for others". I'll admit, that sounds a little heady, does it not? After all, I'm an engineer at heart - so I've spent a long time defining and thinking about my career in terms of how many different screwdrivers I've turned (i.e. design systems, build systems, launch systems, manage systems, repair systems, etc.) so why would a techie like me be interested in something that is so ... if you will ... "intangible"?
First reason - the marketplace. From the research I've been able to gather, it would appear that the Information Technology market is almost a trillion dollar market worldwide (>$830bn, give or take a few billion). Of that near-trillion dollars, wanna guess where the most spending is? I'll give you a hint ... it's not in "iron" ...
Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight delivered some statistics on this at the Service Innovation Design & Development conference in 2007, as quoted by BusinessWeek. According to the figures from Peer Insight - the revenues from the top 10 "non-energy" firms in the US saw 65% of their 2005 revenues come from services. This includes big name companies like WalMart and GE. Now, having had the GE repairmen out to my house twice so far this year to work on my appliances - that one didn't surprise me so much. But WalMart? Services? That one was a bit of a shocker - definitely going to have to research them a bit more.
Even more amazingly, though, these top 10 non-energy companies saw 85% of their 2005 profits come from services - according to Rae's research.
If that's not enough reason to believe that the time is here to be researching in Services Innovation and Service Sciences, then I don't know what is. Even Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) had a Services Science initiative as a part of her "Innovation Agenda" in her run for the Democratic nomination to be president.
So it's a pretty interesting time to be here in the SIO at Sun. For my entire professional career, I've held the philosophy that "if the computer can do the job, then it should be doing the job..." It should be interesting if we can start making some of that a reality...
Apparently, while I was off getting married, my boss, my boss' boss, and our Chief Technologist in SIO were furiously blogging away - describing service innovation, service science, and what our group in Sun is all about... so I thought I'd add to the chorus and throw in a bit of my perspective as well.
Hopefully you've already read some of the descriptions for Service Science - like "the study, design, and implementation of services systems – complex systems in which specific arrangements of people and technologies take actions that provide value for others". I'll admit, that sounds a little heady, does it not? After all, I'm an engineer at heart - so I've spent a long time defining and thinking about my career in terms of how many different screwdrivers I've turned (i.e. design systems, build systems, launch systems, manage systems, repair systems, etc.) so why would a techie like me be interested in something that is so ... if you will ... "intangible"?
First reason - the marketplace. From the research I've been able to gather, it would appear that the Information Technology market is almost a trillion dollar market worldwide (>$830bn, give or take a few billion). Of that near-trillion dollars, wanna guess where the most spending is? I'll give you a hint ... it's not in "iron" ...
- Storage - $30bn
- Servers - $50bn
- Networking - $70bn
- Software - $230bn
- Services - $450bn
Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight delivered some statistics on this at the Service Innovation Design & Development conference in 2007, as quoted by BusinessWeek. According to the figures from Peer Insight - the revenues from the top 10 "non-energy" firms in the US saw 65% of their 2005 revenues come from services. This includes big name companies like WalMart and GE. Now, having had the GE repairmen out to my house twice so far this year to work on my appliances - that one didn't surprise me so much. But WalMart? Services? That one was a bit of a shocker - definitely going to have to research them a bit more.
Even more amazingly, though, these top 10 non-energy companies saw 85% of their 2005 profits come from services - according to Rae's research.
If that's not enough reason to believe that the time is here to be researching in Services Innovation and Service Sciences, then I don't know what is. Even Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) had a Services Science initiative as a part of her "Innovation Agenda" in her run for the Democratic nomination to be president.
So it's a pretty interesting time to be here in the SIO at Sun. For my entire professional career, I've held the philosophy that "if the computer can do the job, then it should be doing the job..." It should be interesting if we can start making some of that a reality...
