Why do we need a Service Science Initiative?
High value services – their conception, design, delivery and management – are essential to modern economies. Innovations in technology and manufacturing, although valuable, cannot achieve their full commercial potential without careful consideration of how, where and when they will be used. Services give these technologies context and enable them to deliver value. In the public sector, services affect all of our lives. Their effective design and delivery can transform health care, businesses, the judiciary and social services. Failures can be, and often are, devastating to individuals and the economy.
Despite the importance of services, they are typically poorly understood and all too frequently fail to deliver value.
Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) is changing that. By establishing both an academic and a practical discipline that integrates the skills – social, economic, mathematical and engineering – necessary to understand and manage complex services, it is driving what is an (admittedly large) cottage industry towards the equivalent of our last industrial revolution.
The Service Science Initiative is being established to meet the challenges of this revolution, to act as a focal point for service science disciplines in the UK (and eventually more broadly across Europe), to develop standards and education, to drive best practice in public sector services design and delivery and to act as the catalyst for the broad development of services that amplify industrial investment.
Services represent 66% of the Welsh economy, representing £25 Billion out of £43 Billion GVA in Wales. On a per head basis the Welsh GVA at £14,396 significantly trails the £19,082 of England. In the post-industrial world, increasing this figure is only likely to be achieved by creating and retaining high value service jobs. Numerically the service sector in Wales currently supports 561,000 out of a total employment base of 794,000; increasing the efficiency of the workers – both in the public sector (30% representing a spend of £14 Billion) and the private sector – is fundamental to Wales’ future economic well being. For Wales in particular, with its dominant SME sector, the formation of an efficient ecosystem of service providers is essential for a strong economic future.