It’s the new buzz in the computer world: Services Sciences, Management and Engineering (SSME) is the new emerging area. Computer scientists and researchers world over are working to put together data to provide it as an academic discipline. SSME hopes to bring together ongoing work in computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences to develop the skills required in a services-led economy.

‘‘The world is rapidly becoming a large service system and the service sector today constitutes to a major part of the GDP of most countries. However, innovation so far has focused on generating products and little innovation has taken place in the Service Sector,’’ says Professor R K Shyamasundar of IBM India Research Lab, Delhi.

The importance of the service sector has been rising significantly from the perspective of economics. This has led to technological vision and corresponding challenges of implementing and supporting service-oriented applications and infrastructure. Thus, service engineering can have a great impact on the way that enterprises perform their functions and can in turn be affected by the ways that the roles and expectations of people are connected to information technology. New standards and practical experience need to be supported by deeper and broader research.

Information services is today the major chunk of the services sector and there is a need to formalise it as an evolution in services has taken place with it becoming independent of location.

‘‘ Services today have their own properties and challenges and demand different approaches in order to add value and IBM is doing a lot of research in this area,’’ says Shyamasundar. Some key points of the research are that the world economy is experiencing the largest labour force migration in history. Driven by an environment that includes global communications, business growth and technology innovation, services now accounts for more than 50 percent of the labour force in Brazil, Russia, Japan and Germany, as well as 75 percent of the labour force in the US and the UK.

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