IBMのサービス・サイエンス～Researchとethnography(仮説生成的なアプローチ)

『IBMのサービスサイエンス：shiba blog』での澤田さんのコメントが意外な方向に展開している。澤田さん、興味深い情報提供ありがとうございます。

どうしてIBMがサービス・サイエンスに行き着いたのかを探っていくと、、、

面白いのは、「サービス・サイエンス」を推進するために外部からＨｉｒｅしたのが、ビジネス・エスノグラフィー（民族誌）の専門家JEANETTE BLOMBERGであったなど、話題がさらに展開しそうです。因みにJEANETTE BLOMBERGの研究分野を検索していたら、なんとＳｈｉｂａさんの１０月８日のＥｎｔｒｙのＭｉｎｄ－Ｒｅａｄｉｎｇ　Ｓｋｉｌｌｓ　ｆｏｒ　Ｂｕｓｉｎｅｓｓにぶち当たりました。

サービス・サイエンスとethnography(民族誌学、仮説生成的なアプローチ)やcognitive science（認知科学)の関係が出てくるようだ。まずは、澤田さんが紹介されたIBM Researchの裏話（OEM Product-Services Institute - Newsletters: 『OEMs Focusing R&D On Product Services』）に目を通してみる。ポイントになりそうな箇所をメモしておく。

?There is no product in the IBM company that does not start in research, with minor exceptions,? says Paul Horn, a solid-state physicist who has run IBM Research since 1996.

狭義のサービスと広義のサービス

But what, exactly, are services? Within IBM, the word is used in two ways. First, ?services? is one of the company?s three broad product categories (the other two being physical products and software). Most pure services are sold by IBM?s 180,000 consultants and range from wholesale IT outsourcing to training, human-capital management, and the On Demand Innovation Services effort, a broad (that is, vague) effort to make widely disparate systems communicate more effectively, and in real time. These services sales often follow product sales and sometimes drive more product sales.
The term ?services? is also used by people at IBM to mean any work that helps improve a product or a process. The product could be a piece of hardware or software; the process could be the way consultants present data to clients. But whether services are thought of as discrete products or product enhancers, IBM sees them as critical to its future.

Research at a Crossroads

Rust says, that as the economy in general shifts away from goods, companies will need to pursue services research. He notes that even General Electric, an industrial giant, now thinks of itself as a services company. And he believes that IBM?s approach to services research will ripple through the rest of the industrial world, both because it has a highly regarded research lab and because it has made the hard transition from being primarily a goods company to being primarily a services company.

Then everything changed. IBM?s tentative approach to supporting services ended in July 2002, when it announced that it was planning to buy PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. By the end of 2003, the two companies? first full year of merged operations, close to half of IBM?s revenues were coming from services. In contrast, services accounted for less than 15 percent of R&D spending. ?So did that mean Lou Gerstner, then the CEO, could say, ?Do I need only half the R&D spending??? Horn recalls wondering. ?Those things get you thinking.?

?Services Is a People Business?

Maglio and Barrett were proposing work that would be much different from what IBM, with its roots in hard science, was used to doing. But they found a willing ear, and a champion, in Jim Spohrer, then the chief technology officer of IBM?s venture capital unit. After a series of discussions starting in July 2002, around the time IBM announced the PricewaterhouseCoopers deal, Spohrer agreed to take the idea first to Robert Morris, head of the Almaden research lab, and ultimately to Horn. He nixed the human--sciences part of the pitch; instead, he proposed using the new approach to help Horn solve his biggest problem: determining how to help the services business. When Spohrer brought the idea to Horn, he described services as a ?human business that needed human research.?

About half of those 90 researchers are now engaged in services work at any one time, either traveling with consultants or working on projects that will help consultants. Dietrich says that IBM?s expectations for its research arm have changed gradually but dramatically in the 20 years she has worked there. ?It used to be that you got asked, ?Have you got anything into products??? she says. But an analogous question about services is harder to answer. Development work on services tends to wind up as part of a process, not a product. Discrete product features are easy to point to; the parts of a process are broader, and mushier.

Does All This Work Increase Profitability?

Two and a half years after starting to pursue services science, IBM can point to some successes. The company has a fixed procedure for measuring what it calls ?accomplishments,? and Horn estimates that about 15 percent of the accomplishments by research now involve services. Research has had 250 direct consulting engagements since 2002. And in the fourth quarter of 2004, it spawned two new practice areas, WebFountain and the Center for Business Optimization.

The push now is to do more, faster. No one at IBM Research thinks the division is getting enough done　on the services side. Over the past year, IBM has started referring to its research work as ?services science,? but there are people even in the services group who can?t say those words with a straight face. Nathan added ?services? to his title only in September, when Horn decided he wanted the research department to accelerate its services efforts.

Services have clearly been good business for IBM. Less clear is whether services research is good business; it?s too new an area for us to know for sure. But there are encouraging signs: IBM?s On Demand Innovation Services program, which basically farms out the talents of the research staff, last year generated more than $300 million in revenues. That might seem an insignificant portion of a $46 billion service business. But it more than triples the revenues from the year before. Growth like that is hard to ignore?and could be a sign of more to come.

#関連リンク
EPIC（Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference） 2005のJEANETTE BLOMBERGのアブストラクト
どこで『Mind-Reading Skills for Businesses：shiba blog』に繋がるか、まだわかりません。。。

The Coming of Age of Hybrids: Notes on Ethnographic Praxis
(JEANETTE BLOMBERG)
It has been nearly 15 years since Donna Haraway wrote in Simians, Cyborgs and Women that, "In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse and in daily practice we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras." While Haraway's referent was not the community of practitioners, scholars and change agents assembled for the EPIC conference, her attention to the arrangement of material goods, human labor and social relations in processes and histories that have consequences for people's lives resonates with the themes addressed in the workshops and with concerns that bring many of us to this conference. In this talk I will explore how ethnographic praxis is constituted by a mixing of such pure categories as, virtual - real, local -global, material - social, spiritual - secular, research - design, mercantile - humanitarian, and academic - applied. I will close with a call to celebrate our hybridity - our lives on the margins and our pragmatism.

OutLogic視点ブログ：『サービス・サイエンスの可能性 - DHBR 2005.11』

ＩＢＭは全世界的に「サービス・サイエンス」という壮大な実験を試みている。これによって、これまで定性的に評価されていた領域が可視化、定量化され、戦略や施策のＲＯＩ、判然としなかった問題点などが明らかとなり、企業経営の「効果」と「効率」がますます向上していく。

OutLogic視点ブログ：『『フィールドワークの技法と実際』 - 仮説生成的なアプローチ』

■「エスノグラフィー」とは

データから立ち上げた自分の知見を、幅広い理論的パースペクティブに置く作業とともに仮説の導出過程を説得的に提示したものをエスノグラフィーといいます。

「エスノグラフィーは、自分が理解していることを読者に伝える作業で、自分のためのフィールドワークの記録ではないことを肝に銘ずべきである。」

#関連リンク追加（2006-01-25)　サービスサイエンスの動向について
シリアルイノベーション：『「サービスサイエンス」はIBMと米国の未来を担うかも』
#関連リンク追加（2006-02-05)
シリアルイノベーション：『イノベーションコンサルティングの誕生』
#関連リンク追加（2006-o2-05)　フィールド・マイニングをビジネス・インテリジェンスへ
社会人大学院で学ぶ技術経営：『ビジネスエスノグラフィーとフィールドマイニング』