CFP: Frontiers in Service Conference Taiwan July 4-7 2013

Frontiers in Service

July 4-7, 2013, Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.im.ntu.edu.tw/frontiers2013
Conference Co-Chairs: Ming-Hui Huang, A. Parasuraman, and Katherine N. Lemon
 
The 22nd annual Frontiers in Service Conference will be July 4-7, 2013 in Taipei, Taiwan, hosted by the College of Management at the National Taiwan University. The 2013 Frontiers in Service Conference, sponsored by INFORMS, the American Marketing Association, the University of Maryland’s Center for Excellence in Service, and the National Science Council, Taiwan, and IBM, is the world’s leading annual conference on service research and management. It attracts prominent thought leaders and industry experts from around the world to share cutting-edge knowledge and best practices on how to improve service quality, enhance service productivity, and foster service innovation.
 
The conference will cover a wide variety of service topics, including service science, service marketing, service operations, and service management. Case studies by business practitioners are encouraged, and a “Best Practitioner Presentation” will be awarded at the conference.  The conference will also include a doctoral consortium organized by AMA SERVSIG, and a special issue of the INFORMS journal Service Science will invite selected papers from the conference.
 
Please submit an abstract online (http://www.im.ntu.edu.tw/frontiers2013) by Nov 20, 2012.

Important dates
Abstract submission deadline: Nov 20, 2012
Author notification: Dec 15, 2012
Conference dates: Jul 4-7, 2013
 
Please check http://www.im.ntu.edu.tw/frontiers2013 for further information and updates.
 
Special issue of Service Science
Selected papers will be recommended for a special issue of INFORMS’ Service Science journal for fast-track consideration.

For more information, contact:
 
Ming-Hui Huang
Distinguished Professor of E-Commerce
College of Management
National Taiwan University
huangmh@ntu.edu.tw

Roland T. Rust
Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing
Executive Director, Center for Excellence in Service<br>
Executive Director, Center for Complexity in Business

Department of Marketing
Robert H. Smith School of Business
3451 Van Munching Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD  20742-1815
301-405-4300 TEL
301-405-0146 FAX
rrust@rhsmith.umd.edu
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu

Human Ecology and Service System Evolution

The human ecology is made up of nested, networked service systems (Spohrer, Piciocchi, Bassano 2012).

The evolution of service systems can be viewed as a special case of meaning-creation in sociotechnical systems evolution (Spohrer & Maglio 2008); specifically…

“IV. Research Agenda  A central problem in service science is likely to be related to understanding service system evolution. After all, service innovation—our ultimate goal—creates changes to a service system, which is made up of clients and providers co-producing value, and which has direct impact on the evolution of the system. One measure of value is as a measure of the differential between supply and demand (low supply plus high demand equals potential for high value). Specialization is one of the key mechanisms for creating value. If two entities have different abilities for achieving a goal (supply diversity), then under certain conditions they can specialize on what they do best, and create an overall increase in productivity that leads to increased profits that are then invested in new goals (demand diversity). From the provider perspective, specialization can lead to high talent, high technology, or superior environment-enabled performances for creating value. Specialization leads to the need for trusting others and coordinating activity across potentially vast networks (with or without central control). As a result, service system evolution is a special case of meaning-creation in sociotechnical system evolution in which value is one locus of meaning and design (Trist, 1981; Engelbart 1963; Simon, 1996).”

Service systems (from people to businesses to nations) can be approximated as physical-symbol-systems because human’s are a symbolic species in which our brains and language co-evolved, and businesses and nations use contracts and written law to govern their interactions.

Therefore, the “process of valuing” that service systems engage in when they create, offer, and negotiate value propositions with each other can be viewed as a type of sensemaking or process of giving meaning to experience.

Sensemaking is about co-creating meaning.  Service science is about co-creating value, and ultimately co-elevating capabilities along the way.
Finding “worthy objectives” becomes harder and harder as capabilities increase.     Should we “colonize Mars” or “end hunger” or “build starships” – or what?

People try to stay in flow (optimal experience) by balancing routine and challenge;  too much routine leads to boredom, and too much challenge leads to anxiety.

Parents try to keep their “learners/children” in the zone of proximal development.

Businesses try to remain ambidextrous organizations that can balance exploitation (profitable routine) and exploration (innovation options), which is a type of organizational learning.

Some even see all complex learning systems as balancing on the edge of order and chaos.

In short, because people use symbols (language) to negotiate meaning (including worthy shared objectives) and to negotiate value-cocreation opportunities, service system evolution is shaped by symbols and the meaning we give them.

Knowledge (symbols in people) has the potential to create value through service – the application of knowledge for the benefit of others.   Knowledge that has the potential to create value,  but remains under-utilized or un-utilized is a type of waste.   Knowledge that is only slowly used to create value, instead of being rapidly put to work to create value is another type of waste.   Service science studies past, present, and possible future service systems, and the speed at which they can create new knowledge (meaning, co-elevation) and rapidly apply that new knowledge to co-create value.

References:
Spohrer, J, P Piciocchi, C Bassano (2012).Three Frameworks for Service Research: Exploring Multilevel Governance in Nested, Networked Systems. Service Science. 4(2) 147-160.

Spohrer, J. and Maglio, P. P. (2008) The emergence of service science: Toward systematic service innovations to accelerate co-creation of value. Production and Operations Management 17(3), 1–9.

Additional Reading
Trist on the evolution of socio-technical systems

Mumford on socio-technical system design

Bonen on complex socio-technical system behavior

Evolving better service science programs, and overcoming failure patterns

With over 500 service science related programs worldwide, there is a lot of evolving of best practices going on year over year, and there are some common failure patterns that have emerged as well…

(1) Students: Students may not recognize the program, and so enrollments are too low.  Service systems design and entrepreneurship in the title of the programs or descriptions seems to help.

(2) Faculty: Faculty may not have the necessary breadth and depth to teach all the material, and so expertise may be too low.  Teams of faculty and industry instructors is one approach to this problem.

(3) Department: Departments may view many of the courses as outside their scope, and so the course may be too narrow to create true T-shaped graduates.  Locating the program in a research center with a focus on health, retail, or some other industry sector can help.

(4) Institution:  Institutions may have funding reductions, and look to “roll-back” any recent courses that are less proven, and so funding support may be too low.  Locating the program in a well funded research center or exec education program can help.

(5) Accreditation: Getting engineering, management, social sciences, etc. accreditation of a new integrated transciplinary program can be very tough.   Linking with related programs and across other schools can help.

(6) Employers:  Employers may not recognize the degree or courses, and not hire the graduates, and so successful placements may be too low.  One approach is to offer the service science related program as a minor, so the employers can recognize a traditional major (T-shaped graduate).

So there are six ways to fail, and only one way to succeed fully – and that is to succeed on all six points above.  However, many programs do succeed on making progress on all six dimensions, and continue to improve a bit year over year.  Once there is a CAD tool for modeling global nested, networked service systems – that tool will make the textbook, and other aspects of the above easier to overcome.

Teaching Service Innovation

There are four major approaches to teaching service innovation:

 

1. Service innovation as type of design methodology

The focus is on customer-provider interactions typically and many service design methodologies exists that provide a step by step process.  There is also the notion of service design as different from product of process design innovation.   There are many discipline specific ways  or professional society specific ways of teaching students about service systems, and how to create them.

 

2. Service innovation as type of research management

The focus is on running a multidisciplinary service research group inside a for-profit corporati0n.  The innovation management approach is usually to balance five types of service innovations: (1) improve existing service offerings, (2) create new service offerings, (3) improve processes for acquiring and divesting of specific service offerings to achieve strategic objectives, such as profitability of the portfolio, (4) helping customers and suppliers improve their service research groups, (5) patents and capturing service innovation intellectual property, and (5) contributions to science and education in the broader service innovation community, including university programs.    A good book on managing service research organizations scientifically is “Reaching the Goal: How Managers Improve Service Businesses Using Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints”  by John Ricketts.

 

3. Service innovation as type of business strategy

The focus is on case studies of successful service innovations that companies have executed in the marketplace.  For example, Rolls Royce power-by-the-hour, Apple’s ipod, iphone, ipad device as a platform, or other open service innovation approaches.   The strategy of creating a platform that allows customers or users to co-create value is often emphasized, with examples like Wikipedia.

 

4. Service innovation as type of regional policy

The focus is on national service innovation policy and case studies of regions implementing policy changes that have attracted service delivery centers to locate within a region, or increased the amount of business/social-sector service innovation/entrepreneurship in a region.

 

Please add others ways of teaching service innovation to students, or improve the pointers to slides and presentations for any of the above.

 

 

A New Engineering-Challenge Discipline: Rapidly Rebuilding Societal Infrastructure

A New Engineering-Challenge Discipline: Rapidly Rebuilding Societal Infrastructure

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
Alfred North Whitehead, English mathematician

How quickly can an individual engineering student or team of students rebuild from scratch the advanced technology infrastructure of society?  From raw materials to simple tools, from simple tools and steam engines to more advanced energy systems (force multipliers), from metals and glass lenses to photography and sensors (perception multipliers), from energy systems and sensors to more precise measurement and control systems (precise production scale-up), from lithography and printing and computers and software to self-replicating machines as envisioned by John von Neumann as a real-world follow-on to the symbolic-world’s Universal Turing machines.  Highly advanced nested, networked service systems have this ability to replicate near copies of themselves at multiple scales.  Like Defoe’s Robinson Cursoe, competitors will test themselves and discover accelerated alternative pathways that might have emerged if history had unfolded differently.  On the way to self-replicating 3D printers, competitors will explore new pathways and combinations of technology and discover new innovation recipes from the same or new sets of ingredients.

The first part of the engineering design challenge is to estimate the quantity and purity of raw materials that will fit in one standard size shipping container.  The shipping container must contain only raw materials of set purity levels, and from this competitors will compete to rapidly rebuild societal infrastructure.

The second part of the engineering design challenge is to plan the intermediate steps to reach the ultimate goal.  Just like for chess games, over time patterns of effective opening plays will emerge.  What is the best sequence of intermediate technologies, and scaffolding technologies to get to self-replicating machines and universal 3D printers?

Finally, let the competition begin!  Competitors open their shipping containers on standard size lots and go, start, begin the challenge of rebuilding societal infrastructure.   In the container, the teams are allowed camping gear and basic supplies – but cannot use these materials in the rebuild challenge, only to provide for their basic personal needs as they compete. They are allowed smart phones for accessing information and people outside the competition area.

In early versions of the challenge, the starting shipping container can contain a few “cheats” to help the games be more interesting to watch and speedy to the conclusion.  Overtime, the cheats will be removed as more creative patterns that can avoid the cheats are discovered.  Many variations of this game can be imagined. For example, one quite different version aired on TV as a reality TV show called The Colony and it was complete with IBM Fellow John Cohn.

I expect many others have thought about doing this before from RepRap to Maker subculture.
Are you interested in making this latest “imagination challenge”, learning platform real?
Then please contact me on Twitter @JimSpohrer.

 

 Other related quotes on the importance of learning to rapidly rebuild infrastructure:

“The problem was the problem. MacCready realized that what needed to be solved was not, in fact, human-powered flight. That was a red herring. The problem was the process itself. And a negative side effect was the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding of how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: How can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months? And he did.”

Fastcodesign on Gossamer Albatross main lesson

“This was something I had to do, not just dream about it, but do it… I suppose too I was here to test myself.  Not that I had never done it before, but this time it to be a more thorough and lasting examination. What was I capable of that I didn’t know yet?”
Richard Proenneke, American naturalist
Quote from: Alone in the Wilderness

Additional Comments




Comment 20240201: Student project: Discuss the relationship between this proposal and Assembly Theory


CFP: Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Service (GECON 2012)

GECON 2012Call For Papers

The 9th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems,
and Services

November 27–28, 2012, Berlin, Germany

Call for Papers :
http://www.gecon-conference.org/gecon2012/Call_for_Papers_GECON2012.pdf
Main page : http://www.gecon-conference.org/gecon2012

Important Dates
– Paper Registration Deadline: August 1st, 2012
– Paper Submission Deadline: August 12th, 2012
– Notification of Paper Acceptance: September 23rd, 2012
– Camera Ready Paper Deadline: October 7th, 2012

Scope
The way in which IT resources and services are being provisioned is
currently in flux. Advances in distributed systems technology have
allowed for the provisioning of services on an unprecedented scale and
with increasing flexibility. At the same time, business and academia
have started to embrace a model wherein third-party services that can be
acquired with minimal service provider interaction, replace or
complement those that are managed internally. Organizations have only
started to grasp the economic implications of this evolution.

As a global market for infrastructure, platform and software services
emerges, the need to understand and deal with these implications is
quickly growing. In addition, a multitude of new challenges arise. These
are inherently multidisciplinary and relate to aspects such as the
operation and structure of the service market, the alignment of cost,
revenue and quality-related objectives when taking on a service consumer
or provider role, and the creation of innovative business models and
value chains. These challenges emerge in other service domains as well,
for example in the coordinated operation of the next generation
electricity grids that are characterized by distributed generation
facilities and new consumption patterns.

GECON invites researchers and practitioners from academia and industry
to present and discuss economics-related issues and solutions associated
with these developments and challenges. Contributed work can comprise
extensions to existing technologies, successful deployments of
technologies, economic analysis, and theoretical concepts. The purpose
of this event is to gather original work and build a strong
multidisciplinary community in this increasingly important area of a
future information economy.

Researchers and practitioners are invited to present final results or
work in progress. The topics of interest are:
– Market mechanisms, models and bidding languages
– Decision support for providers, service selection and procurement
– Revenue and energy-aware resource management and scheduling
– Pricing schemes and revenue models
– Capacity planning and resource allocation
– Service placement in Clouds and service composition
– Automated trading and bidding support tools
– Cloud federation and brokers
– Incentive design and strategic behavior
– Development of sustainable infrastructures
– Economic modeling of networks, systems, software, and data
– Business models and strategies
– Service value chains and value networks
– Metering, accounting, and billing
– Negotiation, enforcement and monitoring of SLAs
– Trust and reputation in inter-domain Clouds
– Security and risk management
– Performance monitoring and prediction
– Reports and analysis on operational markets and testbeds
– Techno-economic analysis
– Standardization and legal aspects
– Governance structures and regulatory mechanisms for Clouds
– Cost modeling, cost-benefit analysis
– Cost of fault-tolerance mechanisms
– Smart Grids
– IaaS, SaaS, PaaS
– Services Science
– Data center organization

Publication and Submission Guidelines
– Original, high-quality papers and works in progress, which are not
currently under review by another conference, will be considered.
– Submitted papers should not exceed 14 pages in Springer LNCS format
(including references and appendices). For further details, visit the
GECON 2012 Web page.
– Manuscripts will be reviewed based on technical merit, originality,
and relevance. Past acceptance rates have been below 33%.
– Paper submissions are managed electronically through the EasyChair
Website (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gecon2012)
– The proceedings will be published by Springer LNCS.
– As in the previous two editions, extended versions of 8-12 accepted
papers will be invited for publication by Elsevier in a special issue of
the Journal of Future Generation Computing Systems. For papers targeting
pure business and economic aspects within the conference, a post
publication track in a special issue of the Springer Electronic Markets
journal is intended (final approval is pending).

Conference Chairs
Jörn Altmann (Seoul National University, Korea)
Matthias Hovestadt (TU Berlin, Germany)
Omer F. Rana (Cardiff University, UK)
Kurt Vanmechelen (University of Antwerp, Belgium)

Steering Committee
Jörn Altmann (Seoul National University, South-Korea)
Kurt Vanmechelen (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Rajkumar Buyya (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Junseok Hwang (Seoul National University, South-Korea)
Hing-Yan Lee (National Grid Office, Singapore)
Jysoo Lee (Kisti, South-Korea)
Steven Miller (Singapore Management University, Singapore)
Dirk Neumann (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Omer F. Rana (Cardiff University, UK)
Daniel Veit (University of Mannheim, Germany)

Program Committee
The list of program committee members can be found at
http://gecon2012.gecon.info/committees.html

GECON History
GECON 2012 follows the very successful previous editions
(http://www.gecon-conference.org), where high-quality technical papers
have been presented.


====================================================
Dr. Kurt Vanmechelen
Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Sciences
Group CoMP (Computational Modelling and Programming)
University of Antwerp
Middelheimlaan 1
2020 Antwerpen, Belgium
G2.14

Phone : 0032 3 265 3477
Mail : kurt.vanmechelen@ua.ac.be
====================================================

ICSSS 2012 CFP

Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to submit a paper to ICSSS 2012.
============================================================================
2012 2nd International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2012)
November 1-2, 2012, San Degio, CA, USA
Website: http://www.icsss-conf.com/
============================================================================
2012 2nd International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2012) will be held on November 1-2, San Degio, CA, USA. The goal of this Conference is to bring together the researchers from academia and industry as well as practitioners to share ideas, problems and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of Social Sciences and Society.

All accepted papers will be published in Advances in Education Research Journal (ISSN: 2160-1070), which will be indexed by CPCI-SSH (ISSHP).

ICSSS 2011 Proceedings has been indexed by CPCI-SSH (ISSHP).

Paper Submission Due:August 25, 2012
Contact Email: icsss2012@163.com
For detailed information, please see http://www.icsss-conf.com/

Service System Analytics

Service Systems Analytics

Dianne Fodell (twitter @difodell) is helping to link thinking about analytics and service systems. She sent me these pointers:

A Faculty Consortium for sharing course materials, data sets and best practices (please encourage faculty to join):  http://www.AnalyticsConnection.org

The Academic Initiative BAO Portal (this is primary external site for faculty):
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/bao/index.html

Analytic Zone (primarily Cognos Insights – a community site for users):
https://www.analyticszone.com/homepage/web/displayHomePage.action

Also, since smarter cities and smarter universities are holistic service systems that deliver whole service…. Academic Initiative has real-world tools and educational materials to apply… and this could be relevant to creating a “whole new engineer” (twitter @bigbeacon)

This is of course very much conceptually related to design as well – and real-world-design challenges.
http://www.realworlddesignchallenge.org/
http://www.moremarbles.com/
http://www.kaggle.com/
http://studentcompetitions.com/
http://www.skild.com/
http://smartercitieschallenge.org/
http://www.cityforward.org/
thinking cities video
http://www.itbriefcase.net/videos
http://ibmsmartcamp.com/

Those interested in connecting service science, smarter planet (especially smarter cities and smarter universities), and analytics/cloud computing/cybersecurity – can also find more at (twitter @JimSpohrer) and http://www.slideshare.net.spohrer

 

Essentials of Service Marketing 2nd Edition

From Jochen Wirtz

 

Dear Colleagues & Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to inform you that Essentials of Services Marketing, 2nd edition has been published!

ü  For undergraduate services marketing courses.

ü  Streamlined coverage of service marketing topics with an exciting global outlook

ü  With its visual learning aids and clear language, students read less to learn more

ü  Full-color learning cues, graphics and diagrams to capture student attention and help them visualize key concepts.


I hope you will enjoy this text!

Jochen 

Conference: Service Systems at AHFE 2012 (San Francisco, July 21-25)

Conference: Service Systems at AHFE 2012 (San Francisco, July 21-25)

Please join if possible – 1400 registrants from 51 countries.

You are cordially invited to participate in the 4th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics 2012 and its affiliated conferences, jointly held under one management and one registration, including:

1st International Conference on Human Side of Service Engineering

2nd International Conference on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare

2nd International Conference on Cross-Cultural Decision Making: Focus 2012

2nd International Conference on Applied Digital Human Modeling

1st International Conference on Affective and Pleasurable Design

1st International Conference on Human Factors in Transportation

and 14th International Conference on Human Aspects of Advanced Manufacturing: Manufacturing Enterprises in a Digital World

 

URL:  http://www.ahfe2012.org/