‘‘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.

This unparalleled segment growth is changing the way companies organise themselves, creating a ripple effect in industries and universities that are closely tied to these organisations. For instance, historically, most scientific research has been geared to supporting and assisting manufacturing, which was once a dominant force in the world economy. Now that economies are shifting, industrial and academic research facilities need to apply more scientific rigour to the practices of services, such as finding better ways to use mathematical optimisation to increase productivity and efficiency on demand.

Unfortunately, this shift to focusing on services has created a skills gap, especially in the area of high value services, which requires people who are knowledgeable about business and information technology, as well as the human factors that go into a successful services operation. Many leading universities have begun exploring and investing in this area, working in tandem with thought leaders in the business world.