I met with my advisor last Thursday to discuss refinements to my research topic. During our previous meeting, he had tossed out the topic of “service science” along with a couple of papers from an issue of the IBM Systems Journal devoted to the topic. That threw a bit of a monkey wrench into my plan, as this was all new to me; in all of my research on web service composition I had not heard of this.

The good news is that after reading some of the articles and doing additional research into the topic, “service science” as used by the authors of the articles in the IBM Systems Journal is different from what I have been looking into. Those authors, along with other practitioners such as Services Science Global, Service Science, and the Service Research and Innovation Institute (among others) use service science in a way that refers to improving how service-based businesses improve their offerings. The best analogy that I can draw is to the industrial process improvements pioneered by W. Edwards Deming. Service science, in this context, refers to the study of how businesses measure the effectiveness and efficiency of services they provide to their customers. At least as of now, this does not seem to encompass the study of how to define their service offerings in a way that facilitates the composition of sservices from different providers.

All of which leads me to the output of this latest meeting, which was very productive. My advisor generally liked what I had put together as a way forward; now I need to refine it a little more and get buy-in from my committee. He also mentioned that we need to look for some more opportunities to publish on this topic. The good news is that there is very little in the services science arena that deals with my topic, so this should be a rich field to mine.