Services Sciences and Network Centric Warfare

On Wednesday I talked on Podcasting for Network Centric Warfare. at the ANU. I argued that civilian university research on how to collect information and coordinate the work people do, is applicable to the military.

John Ridge, Executive Director of the ACS Foundation, said that this reminded him of IBM's "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" concept:

"Services sciences, Management and Engineering 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."

IBM argue that just as research has previously been used to help manufacturing processes, it can be applied to the service industry. In a way this is a civilian version of the military's "Network Centric Warfare". The military is moving from the mechanistic linking of "engagement systems" to "sensors" and now talking of how to allow people to act more effectively.

"Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" was first called "Services Science" at an IBM conference in May 2004. It doesn't seem to have gained much attention outside IBM and a few US Universities.

A web search only found 500 references to it (126 IBM references, 38 from US universities, 4 from UK Universities, 4 from Australia). Google Scholar had 11 references, with most from IBM publications. One non-IBM published paper is from the Communications of the ACM: "Service systems, service scientists, SSME, and innovation" by Maglio, Srinivasan, Kreulen and Spohrer (all from IBM).

There appear to be no books yet on SSME, or at least I couldn't find any on Amazon.