Service science, management and engineering

Service science, management, and engineering (SSME) is a term introduced by IBM to describe service science, an interdisciplinary approach to 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. More precisely, SSME has been defined as the application of science, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another.

Today, SSME is a call for academia, industry, and governments to focus on becoming more systematic about innovation in the service sector, which is the largest sector of the economy in most industrialized nations, and is fast becoming the largest sector in developing nations as well. SSME is also a proposed academic discipline and research area that would complement – rather than replace – the many disciplines that contribute to knowledge about service. The interdisciplinary nature of the field calls for a curriculum and competencies to advance the development and contribution of the field of SSME.

In national economic statistics, the service sector is often defined as whatever is not agriculture or manufacturing (service sector – tertiary sector of the economy (Colin Clark)). Intuitively, services are processes, performances, or experiences that one person or organization does for the benefit of another – such as custom tailoring suit, cooking a dinner to order, driving a limousine, mounting a legal defense, setting a broken bone, teaching a class, or running a business's information technology infrastructure and applications. In all cases, service involves deployment of knowledge, skills, and competences that one person or organization has for the benefit of another (Lusch & Vargo), often done as a single, customized job. And in all cases, service requires substantial input from the customer or client (Sampson) – how else could your steak be customized for you unless you tell you waiter how you want it prepared? In general there are so-called front-stage and back-stage activities in any business transaction – front stage being the part that comes in contact with the customer and back stage being the part that does not (Teboul). Service depends on having a high degree of front-stage activities to interact with the customer, whereas traditional manufacturing requires very little customer input to the production process and depends almost entirely on back-stage activities.

There are many definitions of service in the literature. Here are a few:

Historically, service scholars emphasized customization, but the world is changing. One of the contributions of SSME may be to help service managers to achieve standardization and its more sophisticated sibling, assembly of standardized modular service elements in several "customizable" but highly predictable permutations. Many customers seek and value standardization because it reduces variability and usually helps bring prices down. Services in the digital economy employ standardization and mass customization. A new service definition might focus on the technical nature of modern-day service, rather than on explaining away why service productivity is not doing as well as manufacturing, so that we can do something to advance the service economy.

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