Alok Rishi: Service Science (and other thought snippets)

The world is not just flat, but vertical, dense, ... having grown up in New Delhi (living in San Francisco bay area now), I find that I am instantly transported to my comfort zone, walking through such jostling streets, as in a recent trip to Kowloon/Hong Kong.  Despite language barriers, something about all that hustle-bustle makes me feel more connected within our species:

 (I spot at least two ubiquitous MNC icons)

As part of the [relatively recently established] Services Innovation Office (SIO) at Sun, we have formally embarked on a collaborative exploration, study, research, and development of Service Science at Sun.  We have been quietly active in this emerging field for over a year now, under the leadership of Sun Services CTO, Jon Greaves - getting to know the communities of interest, studying the literature on the subject, developing research relationships with top universities around the globe, understanding the industry, academic, and government perspectives and goals in pursuing Service Science. Most importantly, we have been doing deep introspection on the subject - how can we, Sun, participate and help lay the scientific foundation on which to design, build, and deliver innovative services for our customers and our industry at large(?) Much more on this to come, but first...

What IS Service Science?

While there is no firm definition of Service Science, by far the most comprehensive overview I have read (courtesy, Jim Spohrer, more on our visit with him later) comes from the University of Cambridge symposium on services science and innovation:

• "Succeeding through Service Innovation"

Service Science is really a cross-pollination of ideas from wide-ranging areas that impact the anticipation, prediction, design, development, delivery, consumption, feedback, evolution...of services.

An analog that resonates:  At the advent of computers, scientists and practitioners from diverse disciplines – logic, mathematics, physics, engineering, cognitive science, philosophy – converged to study computational systems, and formed a new field: Computer Science. Given that we are in a services-led global economy now, a similar convergence is taking place across disciplines - social sciences, technology, operations research, management, economics, complex dynamic systems - the formation of Service Science - to lay the theoretical, scientific foundation on which services R&D and innovation can occur. The way Computer Science enabled our understanding and ability to innovate all computational systems, hopefully, Service Science will do the same, for all service systems.

Andy Ma (Senior Manager, Service Engineering at Sun) has a great blog entry on service science (and in general, with lovely photos - wow Andy, great photography!). Andy's talk at the academic conference in Chengdu, China, provides a good overview of Sun's perspective on Service Science:

• Putting the Science into Services
  

He also has just the illustration on the above analogy:

Within the Service Science group at Sun, just some of our immediate areas of interest that we are researching:

• Autonomics - how can computers manage other computers e.g. error prediction, detection, correction, optimization, without human intervention. Applied to small, medium, large-scale network of systems. In particular, how to automate the task of managing extremely large-scale grids/clouds and allow them to run uninterrupted and optimally.
  
• *-as-a-Service - alleviating the burden on individual enterprises, who are currently needing to build many infrastructure elements from scratch e.g. security/identity management. And rendering them as network services. Back to computer science...I like to think of *aaS as a VERY wide-scale refactoring or design pattern for a service :-)
• Infrastructure and Application lifecycle/management services for cloud computing - defacto cloud computing is an inevitability (and this is not Sun rhetoric ;-) - how to make it much easier to both manage the cloud itself and the development, deployment, optimization, monitoring, management of applications running on the cloud.
• Open Services - accelerate innovation via open design and development of service systems architectures and more importantly, building open services communities (much like the open source software model), understanding the social networking/dynamics of services communities - build the ecosystem, not just the service.
• Knowledge - yes, that final frontier in services. How to better capture, integrate, utilize context-sensitive knowledge within service systems.

Much more on Service Science to come...

Better than any pundit's projections for the staggering growth of mobile devices and services, especially in Asia - I was convinced, as soon as I sat in my taxi at the Hong Kong Airport: