IESS 1.0
Just back from the First International Conference on Exploring Services Sciences at the University of Geneva, and my head is buzzing with questions – proof that it was a good conference. A truly multi-disciplinary event, with computer and social scientists mixing with marketing and corporate strategy folks. Mostly academic this year, but there is a real desire to widen it to include more practitioners next year, and there is an exciting initiative to break the traditional distance between paper authors, reviewers and readers by making this an interactive exchange over an extended period, rather than the “all or nothing” ways of most conference paper submissions.
All of the conference slides are available here, and you can get an instant feel for the range of topics covered by flicking through the tag clouds of all the papers presented. My own paper presented my work on service architecture reviews, and the prezi I used to give the talk is publicly available here.
A somewhat prickly moment on day 1 provided plenty to talk about, with a dispute over the definition of “service” and whether it necessarily contains a degree of co-creation. I think we could have spent the entire conference debating the definition of “service”!
And is there really such a thing as “services science”? Perhaps not, on the same basis as the physical sciences, but we can surely pool knowledge to improve our understanding of how to design and operate services, just as we continue to (struggle to) do with software.
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