|
BRISTOL, UK, December 6, 2005 – HP today announced
the launch of the Centre for Systems and Services Sciences,
a multi-institution initiative that intends to help develop
IT-based services on a more predictable and scientific basis
than has been the case in the past.
The Centre – or CS3 – will bring together leading
service organisations and universities from across Europe
to deliver pre-competitive research, consortium brokerage,
standards and journal publications.
CS3’s inaugural meeting is being held at HP Laboratories
Bristol. As well as HP, industry participants include Accenture,
BT, Cap Gemini, IBM, Qinetiq and Vodafone. Academic institutions
include the universities of Bath, Cambridge, Manchester,
Oxford and Warwick, EPFL (Switzerland), INSEAD (France),
the London School of Economics and Humboldt University,
Berlin.
The workshop has been initiated by HP Laboratories, which
has been developing and is using new approaches that treat
IT Services delivery as complicated systems-engineering
tasks. The analytical methods developed by researchers at
HP Laboratories enable them to define the appropriate IT
systems for HP customers in large IT outsourcing deals.
But the researchers know that a more coordinated and scientific
approach across industry and academia will deliver benefits
for all.
Large-scale, multi-million dollar IT service contracts
involve highly complex systems that bring together a wide
range of technologies, disciplines, people and processes,
often from multiple companies and usually over several years,
from concept to delivery.
Because of their complexity these projects are often poorly
understood, even by the specialist practitioners who have
created them. As coverage of some recent high-profile IT
procurement failures have illustrated, when problems do
emerge rectification is difficult to plan and deliver, leading
to financial penalties to the vendors and poor customer
satisfaction.
The area of services sciences is relatively new, encompassing
disciplines as diverse as anthropology, engineering, economics
and pure mathematics. And it is an area ripe for study and
the development of cross-industry standards to build on
and enhance today’s expertise. CS3 will bring a distinctive
systems engineering perspective to this discipline.
As a result HP has invited academic and industrial colleagues
to the inaugural meeting of CS3 to launch a joint industrial
and academic partnership that will work on developing the
research agenda and lobbying processes to make advances
in services sciences.
Keynote presenters at the inaugural meeting will be Dick
Lampman, HP Senior Vice-President for Research and Director
of HP Laboratories; Jim Spohrer, Director of Services Research,
IBM Almaden Laboratories; and Martin Illsley, of Accenture
Research Laboratories.
Dick Lampman explained: “The IT industry in general
needs more understanding of how large, complex, multi-technology,
multi-discipline systems are designed and operate when all
the components are in place. By developing standards across
the industry and sound techniques, customers and every IT
Services company will benefit.“
As economies mature and move towards greater reliance on
the services sector for growth in GDP we see tremendous
opportunity for companies such as HP in the growth of our
IT Services business.”
Lampman explained that there is a need to bring disciplines
together in a constructive and creative way. And there is
a need for practitioners trained at university level in
a specific new discipline of systems and services science,
an amalgam of existing diverse subjects such as psychology,
mathematics and engineering.
Richard Taylor, of the Open Analytics research group at
HP Laboratories Bristol, said: “The primary purpose
of the centre will be to advance the development and integration
of the sciences that underpin the successful analysis, design
and control of complex systems characterised by the requirements
of services.”
He explained that the centre will:
• Organise regular hybrid industrial-government-academic
research meetings and colloquia;
• Publish advances in the area of systems and services sciences
through a refereed journal;
• Identify and encourage pre- and near-competitive research;
•
Act as a ‘dating agency’ to bring together
academic, government and industrial members in
partnerships;
• Establish systems and services science as a recognised
research discipline.
• Establish and champion standards in systems analysis, specification,
development and management in process and training;
• Validate expertise and competence in systems and services
sciences;
• Act as a repository for sample and standard problem sets
and research results
CS3 has a Web site with information about the inaugural meeting and future activities at http://www.services-sciences.org/
|
Printable version
