IBMer's blog

I learned about the Frontiers in Service conference back in 2007 and I have been keeping an eye on it ever since. It is where a lot of IBMers present their Service science, management and engineering research. Sylvia Long-Tolbert also had great things to say about it back when she was a professor in the business college at the University of Toledo.

IBM colleague Jim Spohrer mentions a new book by Cheng Hsu of RPI - Service Science: Design for Scaling and Transformation - that seems to be knitting together "Web science" and "Service science" - and perhaps other things (something that I have been struggling with).

The special interest group that I helped propose for CHI 2009 was accepted. I am working with 3 IBM colleagues (Jason Blackwell, David Schwartz, Sandra Kogan) and John Sheridan.

Are "Smart Planet" and "World Usability Day" a match made in heaven or is it a silly idea to link them together?

The US ibm.com home page has a feature on Helping seniors surf the web. The video sets the stage by talking about the aging Japanese population, and then explains how IBM helped Mitsukoshi, a department store, make its web site easier to use for older people.

My employer announced the opening of the IBM Center for Social Software today. Irene Greif kicked off the "MIT day" of the IBM Academy of Technology Conference on Future User Interfaces with the news of the new center, that she will be leading. I was able to attend part of the conference remotely, but I missed Irene's talk this morning (darn real work!). Here are some more tidbits I tracked down.

Check out the July 22nd BusinessWeek: Innovation of the Week podcast:

The ibm.com US home page has a feature on Service Science this week.

(In the past, I have written about service innovation, frontiers in service and service science in politics.)

I am lucky. I am off to visit the Almaden Research Center next week for the Almaden Institute 2008 conference.

I did a little research about some of the (non-IBM) speakers to help me get the most out of the program. Here are a few links in case you want to learn more, too.