Services Science, Engineering and Management Conference, at IBM Palisades, October 6-7

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the Systemic Business Community ( http://systemicbusiness.org ).

Bob Glushko, University of California, Berkeley

Not an academic, but an entrepreneur

• Dismayed, expected to see 20 people
• Don't know how to frame this as intellectual determinism
• Stumbling through

History: a lot of us were services science, and didn't know it

• Came from a background of cognitive science
• Started up company, one on helping desktop publishing
• Web put out of business, so tried to capture the first B2B marketplace forums
• Wanted to retire
• Came to Berkeley, working in the School of Information, library school after its mercy killing, headed by Hal Varian, who brought in law professors and economists
• IBM invited Bob to a workshop

With nudging: IBM gave a faculty award, so would give a talk once in a while

• Jim bought 100 copies of document engineering
• Came onto Berkeley as a director
• First course developed, offered this semester

Try to think about services science really meant, as opposed to old wine in new bottles

• A discipline, as opposed to a curriculum
• If you think about disciplines, want the program to be what you're go at
• What would a discipline look like?

Let's not start from what we got, what are the key issues?

• Services science from people at the tent raising isn't the same as who we would invite
• Don't care if first to market, want to be right to market
• Sat around the table for 6 months, asked what the important issues would be, and then what would help to answer them

Examples:

• Change over time?
• How does it innovate?
• How do firms learn, and teach?
• Where does services come from, and how do they evolve?
• Can we plug in: core competencies (management), trust (sociologists), terms and conditions (law) ...

What can we do? Let's do it.

From June, spent time developing "An Information and Services Economy" course look like?

• Would read everything from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Chandler to Prahalad
• Decided to try to read everything
• Reading Palmisano paper on the Global Organization

Teaching a course in web-based services (not web services), how can the web be used to deliver stuff

• e.g. http quality of service

Redesign Document Engineering course

Service Innovation, taught by Hank Chesbrough

Have more adjuncts than faculty teaching the course

• e.g. information systems clinic, hired someone from IBM teaching professional consulting skills: business process analysis, document modelling

Services Science lecture series

Already had two CEOs of Silicon Valley startups

Has been exciting

Need to pull it together in the class, because guest lectures didn't do that

Variable depth: can read Palmisano, but can't read Oliver Williamson

Chumming: draw in CEO lectures for one hour per week, then fill the rest

Skeptics: can't get tenure in services science

Others: I support this, where do I get the money?

[Questions]

From marketing, tend to focus everything on customers. What do the customers say about value, and co-creation?

• There are more slides

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