Understanding Luxury Hotels as Holistic Service Systems

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Understanding Luxury Hotels as Holistic Service Systems: Kim Grange, VP Facilities, Venetian Resort Hotel Casino has an interesting job, and thinks about the Venetian as a city within a city. Holistic service systems are a type of system of systems or service network, that includes transportation, water/air, food, energy, communications, buildings, retail, finance, health, education, governance-security, etc — all interconnected and interdependent. Listen to the following video clip several times — there are some deep insights into holistic service systems here… Venetian, Las Vegas, NV USA: “A City Within A City”

1. Transportation: 100,000 visitors on a daily basis

2. Water: 46 million gallons per month

3. Food: Multiple restaurants

4. Energy: 35Megawatts/hrs electricity and 7 backup generators (equivalent of 25,000 homes or 200,000 population city)

5. Communications: 3 data centers for IT operations

6. Buildings: 3 buildings and 7000 rooms

7. Retail: 500,000 sq ft of retail

8. Finance: Casino is the heart, source of revenue that must stay running

9. Health: not mentioned in video, but must have on-site medical staff

10. Education: 2 M sq ft of convention space

11. Security… you bet, from security cameras in casinos, etc.

Governance Service Systems and Understanding California Counties

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Governance Service Systems and Understanding California Counties: I am continuing my education on the topic of California Counties, by studying the material at http://www.counties.org/default.asp?id=110. Local universities are very important to counties (most county employees graduate from local universities, and counties are often very high up on the list of largest employers in cities within counties). Counties are an especially interesting type of “formal service system entity” — a type of virtual person that can sue and be sued and own property, and with a built in mechanism for viability – the right to levy and collect taxes …. County Powers: The California Constitution authorizes a county to make and enforce local ordinances that do not conflict with general laws. A county also has the power to sue and be sued, purchase and hold land, manage or dispose of its properties, and levy and collect taxes authorized by law. Thanks to Mark Dixon (US-CA IBM) for this pointer and others.

In search of the most innovative MBA student team in the world:

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In search of the most innovative MBA student team in the world: More and more student competitions are a way to align university, industry, and government on important themes.   Singularity University is producing a lot of interesting project plans with the goal of creating projects that could change the world (http://singularityu.org/programs/graduate-studies-program/gsp-09/team-projects/) Winners of competitions may even go on to become entrepreneurs, and there are a number of programs that cities are starting to bring successful global entrepreneurs to their door, by providing them recognition for their achievements. For example, New York City and Fordham University have established a venture fellows program (http://www.nycventurefellows.org/).   Anu Basu, who is a professor of Entrepreneurship at San Jose State University (SJSU) in San Jose, CA USA, gave me some interesting pointers to local entrepreneurs, who have helped inspire some of her students to think about becoming entrepreneurs themselves:  (1) Blippy. with founder and CEO Ashvin Kumar, for social media sharing what you buy on your credit cards, and (2) Art.sy, with founder Carter Cleveland, with a focus on sharing/buying/promoting art online.    Tom Kalil, Deputy Director of Policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote a nice blog piece on the broader topic of grand challenge competitions and public-private partnerships some time ago, when he joined the Obama Administration (http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Prices-as-Incentives-for-Public-Private-Partnerships/).    More recently, Asher Spittler, who is the Director of Corporate Sponsorship for the Innovation Challenge at Idea Crossing, sent me information about the Innovation Challenge, which is the world’s largest MBA competition, producing 50+ concept plans from top MBA students and representing 10,000+ hours of MBA labor (they have had over 1,140 MBA contestants). More information at:  http://www.ideacrossing.com/ (for those who like a video clip – I recommend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLZt99Txmnk).

update 1 July – Australia, Greece, Smart and more

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Service Science in Australia: Andrew Dingjan (Australia CSIRO), who is the CSIRO Services Science Network Leader and General Manager, Business & Commercialisation, recently ran CSIRO’s first Services Science Network conference … I was able to join via telepresence, and the event website should be available soon. Hossein Zadeh (Australia RMIT) and Jay Hannon (Australia IBM) were present at the meeting. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) delivers solutions for agribusiness, energy and transport, and much more…. http://www.csiro.au/

Service Science in Greece: Christos Nikolaou (Computer Science Dept, University of Crete, Greece) helps lead the Transformation Services Lab, http://www.tsl.gr They are doing work in a number of interesting areas including web service, value nets, internet of services, etc. … Happening now is the Second Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering (SSAIE) Summer School http://www.ssaie.eu/

Also, Marianna Sigala helps lead the Service Management in Tourism at University of the Aegean, Greece, and is the  Director of Information and Publications, International Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education www.chrie.org … many times the top universities in a city help generate a lot of tourism, so tourism, universities, and cities are linked.

Fraud Detection in Service Systems: Prof. Hui Xiong (US Rutgers) and I met a ICEE 2010 in Guangzhou China several weeks ago. His research into analytic methods of detecting financial fraud may very well have applications in the domain of rooting out government corruption. Smarter cities should have lower levels of corruption and fraud, how can analytics help?

Grand Challenges of Engineering: Angus McColl (US USC) is the Executive Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering. He points out that the National Academy of Sciences Grand Challenges map well onto IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. They cover the quest for innovations that will impact many systems we depend on every day including: transportation, water/environment, food, energy/greentech, information and communication technologies (ICT), buildings, commerce, finance, healthcare, education, and cities (as system of systems with infrastructure for service provisioning).

How does HPC help universities? My intuition is that we are on the verge of needing High Performance Computing (HPC) to model cities, etc, and to do better policy planning for regional and other holistic service system entities. So I am trying to understand how High Performance Computing (HPC) helps move universities up in the rankings of global universities. Is it the access to HPC that allows them to win more government grants and fund more research, and thus attract key faculty? Is it that the HPC makes their faculty, students, and researchers more productive, and allows them to make discoveries and publish more high quality work? Looking for pointers on this topic. Here are a few basic resources to study to find universities with large HPC installations. Many times the university is linked to a government lab that has the HPC. More and more universities are making their supercomputers available to industry, as well, and it has been speculated that super-computing might be a factor in helping the US economy recover http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9121718/Can_supercomputers_help_save_the_economy_.

Top 500 Supercomputer Sites  http://www.top500.org/list/2010/06/100

Top Green500 List   http://www.green500.org/

Of course, one could also ask what are potential negative consequences of university rankings in the first place:

http://jsi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/13/2/159

the family as a service system

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The family as a key type of service system: In my AMA SERVSIG keynote one of the questions was about families as a fundamental type of service system – my talk looked at cities, universities, and businesses as more recent (in the last 10,000 years of human history) types of service systems.   Evert Gummesson, University of Stockholm Business School, gave me some pointers to the Relationships Foundation that has some public policy analysis of family-friendly government (http://www.relationshipsfoundation.org).   I recalled some interesting things I found about families, as I was thinking about them as service systems (1)  “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”.   Article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (2) “Developing a Family Mission Statement”  Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, and (3) “In the agricultural age, work-life-and-family blended seamlessly.” IBM GIO 1.0.   Also, Chuck Darrah is a professor of anthropology at SJSU, and done some interesting studies of family and work life in Silicon Valley (http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/leaders_entry.php?id=134).

updates – Japan, India

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Japan Service Science. Yuriko Sawatani, Fellow, Service Science, Management and Engineering, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) recently provided me with an update on JST’s approach to developing a theory of service systems as well as improved service system implementations.  Many proposals are currently being evaluated for funding.

Aligning universities, cities, and IBM to promote skills and entrepreneurship in India: IBM India announced 75 new university-based software skills Centres of Excellence in sixty cities across India.   “Apart from providing free training, certification and software to these colleges, IBM plans to convert the CoEs into incubation centres to bolster software skills and ensure industry-ready professionals,” Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager – Academic Initiative, Developer Works and Globalisation, IBM India/South Asia, said.  The IBM CoEs are aimed at creating a platform for the development of software skills among students and gives students the opportunity to develop business solutions.  In addition to setting up CoEs, IBM also plans to bring its Global Entrepreneurship Initiative (GEI) to some of these colleges. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6076257.cms Some of these students are likely to want to participate in the 10X Innovation Award competition (https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/innovation/x10.html)  or the Analytics Innovation Awards (https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/innovation/index.html#analytics).   (for those who like energetic Indian music and the history of IBM in India – I recommend the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB3ePgS909E).


Conferences: INFORMS, CACM, Forum on Service

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INFORMS Service Science Section: Ralph Badinelli and others continue to encourage an excellent stream of conferences and papers.   I encourage everyone to check out the newsletters at the home website (http://service-sci.section.informs.org/index.html).

CACM July 2010: Communications of the ACM 53(7) has several interesting articles for service scientists, including:

(1) Mari Sako (Oxford University, UK) Outsourcing versus shared services, (2) Wei-Lun Chang, Soe-Tsyr Yuan, Carol W. Hsu (Taiwan) Creating the experience economy in e-commerce,(3) Gonzalo Génova (University of Madrid, Spain) Is computer science truly scientific?

2011 Naples Forum on Service. Mark your calendars, because this service research and practice event is on the island of Capri June 14-17, 2011… you have to catch the jet boat in Naples, Italy though.  Evert Gummesson (University of Stockholm, Sweden) and Francesco Polese (U Cassino, Italy) and Cristina Mele (U Naples, Italy) are the organizers.   (http://www.naplesforumonservice.it/public/home.php).

this week’s short takes

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Shorts Takes:
Minni Sarkka (Aalto University Finland) recommends Service Engineering and Management http://www.sem2010.tkk.fi/index.htm
HICSS-44, Kauai, Hawaii (January 4-7, 2011) Service Science track http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_44/Minitracks44/dt-sersys.pdf
AMA SERVSIG http://www.servsig2010.org/programme.html
Portugal FEP Masters in Service Management Joao Pronenca: http://www.fep.up.pt/cursos/mestrados/mgs/DOC_10_11/GServi%C3%A7os_uk_10_net.pdf
Stefan Holmlid, Interaction & Service Design, Linköping University http://www.ida.liu.se/~ixs/
Linköping University, Sweden will host the Service Design and Innovation Conference Dec 1-3, 2010 http://www.servdes.org/
International Journal of Services, Economics and Management (IJSEM) http://www.inderscience.com/ijsem
Soe-Tsyr Yuan (Daphne), Director of Service Science Research Center (SSRC)  http://ssrc.nccu.edu.tw/
Marianna Sigala, Service Management in Tourism, U Aegean, Greece http://www.chrie.org
Marc Kohler, KSRI Service Innovation Lab, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) http://www.ksri.kit.edu


Irving Wladawsky-Berger on Innovation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEall1oYEbU&feature=channel
Economic Impact of University of Arkansas:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stdUJ0p_L0A
David Goldberg on Engineering Education: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puip-bBh4pU&feature=related
El Paso Inland Desalination Plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwqaA_5oWXQ
Community College and Future of Manufacturing (3D Printing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N2XIwNEkPI&feature=channel
Planetwork Jim Fournier: http://planetwork.eventbrite.com
Epistemological Perspectives on Simulation, Matthias Meyer, Klaus G. Troitzsch: http://www.tu-harburg.de/EPOS2010/
ICAART 2011 Agents and Artificial Intelligence – http://www.icaart.org
kristian kloeckl on senseable city laboratory | lead_real time city group http://senseable.mit.edu

Sukanya Patwardhan provided a pointer to the Society for Human Resources Management: http://annual.shrm.org/
Stuart Gannes provided a pointer to Open Science Summit http://www.opensciencesummit.com
Stuart Gannes provided a pointer to GLOBE project  http://www.globe.gov/
International Conference of Strategic Management Forum  http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/smfconf
Stephan Haeckel suggests http://www.senseandrespond.com
Stephen Perelgut recommends http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7142209.ece
Sonal Chokshi, PARC provides a pointer to Ethnography for Industry  http://bit.ly/ethnoindustry
IBM DEEP-QA (Watson) http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/15/magazine/1247468055784/how-does-watson-work.html
Future Leaders IBM Student Survey http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/ceo/ceostudy2010/futureleaders.html
Joel Leonard, Maintenance Evangelist and SKILLTV.net Host , http://www.skilltv.net/
3D Printing of homes http://www.weareacasa.com/
IBM Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Portugal http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~ibmcas/
Trilogy of Webs (Data, Identity, Services)
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_trilogy_of_webs_for_machines_mashing_it_all_together.php

COGNOS and ILOG

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My colleague in IBM Academic Initiatives, Kevin Faughnan (US IBM) informs me of the availability of both COGNOS and ILOG tools for university faculty.   We are seeing more universities starting and expanding their analytics programs, especially industry professionals returning to university (life long learning) to get the latest in advanced analytic tools and techniques.  Analytics is about getting insights from information, and there are more and more data sets available for mining and correlating.