Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.

- Archives - 2004-06-13 2004-06-20 2004-06-27 2004-08-29 2004-09-05 2004-09-12 2004-09-19 2004-10-10 2004-10-24 2004-11-07 2004-11-28 2004-12-05 2004-12-12 2004-12-26 2005-01-30 2005-02-06 2005-03-06 2005-03-13 2005-03-20 2005-04-03 2005-04-10 2005-04-17 2005-04-24 2005-05-01 2005-05-08 2005-05-15 2005-05-29 2005-06-05 2005-06-12 2005-06-19 2005-06-26 2005-07-10 2005-07-17 2005-07-31 2005-08-28 2005-10-09 2005-10-16 2005-10-23 2005-11-13 2005-11-27 2005-12-04 2005-12-18 2006-01-08 2006-02-05 2006-02-12 2006-02-19 2006-03-05 2006-03-12 2006-03-26 2006-04-23 2006-04-30 2006-07-16 2006-07-30 2006-08-06 2006-09-03 2006-10-08 2006-10-22 2006-10-29 2006-11-26 2006-12-10 2007-01-28 2007-02-04 2007-02-11 2007-03-11 2007-03-25 2007-04-08 2007-06-03 2007-06-10 2007-06-17 2007-07-01 2007-07-08 2007-08-19 2007-09-30 2007-10-07 2007-10-21 2007-11-04 2007-11-11 2007-11-18 2007-11-25 2008-01-27 2008-02-03 2008-02-10 2008-02-17 2008-02-24 2008-03-09 2008-04-06 2008-05-18 2008-05-25 2008-06-01 2008-06-08 2008-07-13 2008-08-10 2008-08-24 2008-08-31 2008-09-07 2008-10-05 2008-12-28 2009-05-10 2010-04-25


Blog Feed

Recent Items
 
TiddlyWiki: Ohmygosh, I'm in Love.
 
3I: Individualized Interactive Instruction
 
Three Defects We Can Do Without: Memory Leaks, Buf...
 
Windows Genuine Advantage: So, did I fail the test...
 
Hark, Is That a Pattern I See Before Me?
 
NSS2: All Things to All People through Perfect Sof...
 
Are You A Problem Witch or a Solution Witch?
 
How Do You Know Your Discarded Disk Is Unreadable?...
 
Uh, lemme see, I'm gonna hack my router and expose...
 
Flaws in Genuine Software Still Exploitable in Tru...

  

visits to Orcmid's Lair pages

The nfoCentrale Blog Conclave
 
Millennia Antica: The Kiln Sitter's Diary
 
nfoWorks: Pursuing Harmony
 
Numbering Peano
 
Orcmid's Lair
 
Orcmid's Live Hideout
 
Prof. von Clueless in the Blunder Dome
 
Spanner Wingnut's Muddleware Lab (experimental)

nfoCentrale Associated Sites
 
DMA: The Document Management Alliance
 
DMware: Document Management Interoperability Exchange
 
Millennia Antica Pottery
 
The Miser Project
 
nfoCentrale: the Anchor Site
 
nfoWare: Information Processing Technology
 
nfoWorks: Tools for Document Interoperability
 
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability
 
ODMA Interoperability Exchange
 
Orcmid's Lair
 
TROST: Open-System Trustworthiness

 

Service Research: Focusing on Requirements for Technology, not the Technology

ACM News Service: Research in Development.  A possible new angle on addressing the problem-space vs. solution-space situation comes to mind as I look at the the discussion of service economies and exploration of services science described in this blurb.  Michael Fitzgerald's May 2005 Technology Review article may not remain on-line for long, so it is worth snagging for its deeper and important context. 

IBM provides mammoth research investments and there is a shift expected in the subject matter, reflecting changes in the business of IBM and other major corporations shifts strongly to a service orientation:

• Until the packaged software business was “unbundled” from mainframe tie-ins in 1965 (with software often either tightly-bundled or freely distributed among user communities) as the result of an IBM-US consent decree, there was little interest in software as intellectual property: the copyright office did not accept software and software was considered basically un-patentable.  This was also the beginning of a tilt in the company’s research from hardware-focused toward software-focused.  This began the computer-science era for IBM Research.
• Now the business of IBM is dominated by services (illustrated by the 2002 acquisition of PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting), reflecting a tilt in the overall economy as well.  One might now look to IBM’s research capacity as poised to delineate service science in the way it fostered computer science before.
• The recognition of a hardware-software-services continuum is leading to some re-prioritizing of IBM research.  Because IBM has succeeded in shifting its business from boxes to services, it and other companies are very interested in whether there is a contribution that can be made in service science.
• One difficulty in identifying benefits of service-research investment stems from how development work on services tends to wind up as part of a process, not a product.

It is becoming startling for me to see how much of what I dig into around trustworthiness of computing systems lies in the delivery of services and the use of technology as instruments of the larger business operation and the mission-related services of the business.  Although this article is not about trustworthiness as such, pretty much all service business has a trust dimension, and I am interested in what can be found in this area.

Resources Identified in the Article:

• Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland School of Business
• Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
• Elements of service business found in the IBM Autonomic Computing initiative
• Work of IBM cognitive scientist Paul Maglio and colleague Rob Barrett looking outside the HCI to the business: what customers do with technology, what IBM consultants understand about what customers want, how the technology effects people
• Business anthropologists such as Jeanette Blomberg are now in the picture at IBM Research, which has been looking into the coevolution of technology and business innovation and how much it involves people.  (Randy Trigg has a nice bibliography that reveals the power of an ethnographic perspective.)
• WebFountain is a set of processes for data aggregation and analysis that came out of the research into customer service departments
• The Center for Business Optimization is looking at the tightening of business operations, including refactoring for risk reduction.
• The On Demand Information Services program farms out the talent of the research staff, and it is growing revenues dramatically, even though it is a small piece of the services business thus far.

I notice that there is a strong operations research, quantitative, and analytical component in the featured offerings, and this seems to be the foundation and point of departure into services science at IBM.

This could take me pretty far afield from my developing interest in process patterns (as opposed to design patterns as they have become so narrowly construed), but I will keep one eye glancing in this direction for more concrete material.

---

[updated 2005-05-14T22:08Z: There was just one type too many and I couldn't stand it [;<).]

¶ posted by orcmid at 5/14/2005 12:45:00 PM

  <$BlogBacklinkTitle$>  

<$BlogBacklinkSnippet$>
posted by <$BlogBacklinkAuthor$> at <$BlogBacklinkDateTime$>