Project Findings

The primary objectives of our project were to identify the most significant themes that are central to the study of services, and to document and disseminate the critical knowledge and skill sets needed by service professionals, in response to the growing dominance of the service sector. Secondly, based on this evidence, we aimed to develop market-relevant, inter-disciplinary curriculum modules to assist in training a new generation of postgraduate students. The first part of the project was carried out through focus group meetings with seasoned service industry professionals (drawn from companies such as Cisco, IBM, Accenture, among others), recent graduates working in the service sector, and academic researchers engaged in service-related research and teaching. Three such focus groups were held in three different cities and a report that framed the information gathered from the meetings on the key knowledge and skills required in the contemporary service workplace and the challenges faced by the industry due to recent technological developments such as web 2.0, cloud computing, service oriented architecture. A variety of natural language processing and other techniques were used to extract and classify the key concepts that emerged in the discussions and these were reduced to eight topical areas. These are: (1) service system fundamentals; (2) service management; (3) service systems engineering; (4) service technologies; (5) business process modeling: (6) knowledge management systems; (7) customer relationship management; and (8) modern organisations. Detailed course descriptions and some teaching materials for each of these themes were developed by suitable discipline-based experts drawn from the four universities. In addition, the concept of a service foundry was developed and implemented, which aims to deliver an open, collaborative, and continuously evolving virtual space for students to learn important SOA/BPM concepts, to provide hands-on experience with service-oriented software engineering, and opportunities to practise their skills using real world examples.