Services Sciences (public)

Mission

Over the last couple of years, workshops have been organized by corporations and academic institutions including EU-IST, HP, IBM, NSF*, UC Berkeley, US Department of Commerce, and others, on multiple aspects of the sciences of systems and services with the intention of identifying and understanding the challenges, issues, models and theories necessary to optimise their impact on the academic, business, and social communities world-wide.

The NESSI Services Sciences & Systems Engineering Working Group is beginning to address what it means to be in a services-driven world in which harnessing services in the right way can be complex, delicate, and critical to the achievement of societal and business objectives. The Working group envisages a multi-disciplinary (e.g., economics, computational and mathematical sciences, management sciences, social-policy sciences, and others) effort for tackling some of the challenges in understanding services and deriving principles for harnessing services for providing appropriate value.

The NESSI Landscape is focussed not only on suggesting an enabling framework and technology for business services in Europe but also on the long-term development of economic, social and organisational services across Europe.

Challenge

The challenge: to establish attainable expectations that services systems will function according to their specifications, at predicted costs, throughout their intended lifetimes.

Designing and managing efficient, reliable, and cost effective services is not easy, as frequent commercial and public sector failures continue to demonstrate. There are few organisations that do not, at least in private, acknowledge that we are rapidly approaching a crisis. Industry, academia, and customers must either learn to specify and manage the complicated systems that services represent or risk economic and intellectual stagnation.

There are many reasons for why services are difficult to both specify and maintain; key amongst these are:

Scale ― these systems are the most complicated and ambitious artefacts we have ever attempted to engineer and it’s getting worse;
Integration ― these require that hard academic disciplines as diverse as social sciences, mathematics, engineering and economics be combined in an understandable and controllable manner;
Environment ― many of these systems (e.g., IT systems, business ecosystems) operate in a world of uncertain and/or shifting policy, legislation and economics;
Communications ― few of these systems can be comprehended in their totality by key stakeholders, leading to a poor understanding as to how key decisions in areas as diverse as process, technologies, expectation setting and financial policy will impact the effectiveness of the whole system.

Systems failures frequently have multiple factors ― for example, the United Kingdom Child Support Agency appears dogged by interactions between the dynamics of the underlying information systems that support policy, internal working processes, political policy and goals, and the external social environment and personal expectations of its customers. This is a recurring problem across many business and government critical services.

Whilst the exact nature of these interactions and their impact on the success or otherwise of service changes from example to example, their recurrence in late, over-budget and under-performing programmes illustrates the need to develop the integrative sciences and their corresponding engineering disciplines that will make the expectation that complicated, robust systems can be constructed and managed a realistic one.