CB: Hello Ammar, thank you for your time today.
AR: Thank you Christoph. It’s great to be here.
CB: Ammar, you played a significant role within the ISSIP community since its inception. How does it feel to hand ISSIP over to Charlie Bess, our new president?
AR: I feel very confident to handing ISSIP over to someone as distinguished and well-recognized like Charlie Bess. He has been an instrumental contributor in the development of ISSIP since day one. 2013 has been a year of many achievements for us at ISSIP. We now have six major Special Interest Groups (SIGs), over 450 new members from over a dozen of companies and 100+ universities in over 40 countries joined, and we were able to influence the National Science Foundation to kick of a Smart Services Program. Not to mention our other achievements like ISSIP co-sponsored conferences and the first ISSIP Fellow award. It will be great to see Charlie taking ISSIP to the next level and to reach our target of 1000 members
CB: Looking back to your tenure, what is it that you are most proud of?
AR: Great question. When I was introduced as the ISSIP President to a service science expert at the November 2013 CSL conference, the first thing he stated was “it must have taken guts to take the President role for a new formed organization!” That being said, I’m pleasantly surprised with all the achievements. We’ve formed ISSIP with an overall Mission “To Promote Service Innovations For Our Interconnected World” with five key objectives: To promote the professional development and enhance career path opportunities of members, service innovation education and life-long learning opportunities of our members, service innovation related research and access to open data sets for all types and levels of service systems, service innovation practice, especially new tools and standards for the global community of practice and, finally, to promote service innovation policy advocacy to enhance safety, security, sustainability, resiliency, etc. of service systems. I was extremely lucky to work closely with an outstanding ISSIP team that consisted of the ISSIP board, the ISSIP executive team, our board of advisors, as well as the SIG leaders and all other members that are involved.
CB: Ammar, can you maybe give us some examples?
I’m proud to say that we’ve met or exceeded the goals that were set for 2013. For example, we significantly improved the career path opportunities by accessing and interacting with members of the community. We’ve also established mutually beneficial relationships with several other professional association and assigned formal ambassadors. ISSIP promoted the development of T-shaped professionals with both deep discipline-based problem-solving skills and broad multi-disciplinary communications skills. Right now, we’re working closely with Universities and research institutes to promote service science in business and society. As an emerging trans-discipline, service science draws on many existing academic disciplines, creating a new whole, while enhancing the parts without replacing them. ISSIP has and will continue to prompt the advancement of service innovation research by providing open access to data about service systems while at the same time maintaining privacy and security concerns. We have also evaluated service and practice-related tools and standards for modeling and transforming service systems. Specifically we have summarized the service related standards for smart homes and Machine-to-Machine solutions. And, finally, we have started looking at global and national service innovation policies and plan to develop point-of-view documents and advocacy for enhancing polices. Some aspect of this work will be addressed by the SIGs. For example, the ‘Education’ and ‘Cloud Mobility’ focus on energy management policies.
CB: Is there anything you would have done differently?
AR: I think we could have earlier tried to attract additional corporate members. Also, we should now try to focus more deeply on on common needs and the latest technologies, and social networks.
CB: What role will you now play within ISSIP?
AR: following our bylaws, I’ll continue to work closely with Charlie and ISSIP BOD. In addition, I’ll continue to lead the ‘Cloud Mobility’ or the ‘Internet of Things / Machine-to-Machine’ SIG and will also participate in the ‘Future Services’ and ‘Education’ SIGs.
CB: Let’s talk about service innovation more broadly for a moment. In your opinion, what are the challenges that service professionals face in the next few years?
AR: One of the main challenges for service professional today is the acquisition of T-shaped skills, a key requirement for service job recruitment. The vertical bar on the T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, like computer science, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas, and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own, like business, for example. Most universities today focus on a single vertical. ISSIP has developed a program focusing on the development of T-shaped persons.
CB: And how can ISSIP help to overcome these challenges?
AR: The ‘Education’ SIG is working with various universities to develop T-shaped programs in engineering and business schools. For example, we’re working with the California Center for Service Science to define the curriculum for such program. The first summit was held at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego on 9/13/2013. It marked the launch of California Center for Service Science founded by Professor Paul Maglio, UC Merced, and Professor Vish Krishna, UC San Diego.
CB: Is there anything else that you would like to add?
AR: Improving the quality-of-life of individuals and the wealth of institutions, from businesses to nations is a key objective for ISSIP. Such objective cannot be achieved without the broad participation of experts. We’re looking for volunteers to drive advances in information technology and policy support the rapid scaling of new service innovations in health, education, government, finance, hospitality, retail, communications, transportation, energy, utilities. That being said, ISSIP is looking to inspire and develop the next generation of professionals who will define and execute a successful service innovation strategy. I encourage students and processionals to join us at staging3.issip.org. And I would also like to thank everyone at ISSIP that I worked with, Jim Spohrer of IBM Research, Charlie Bess of HP, Ana Pinczuk of Cisco, Haluk Demirkan of the University of Washington and Ralph Badinelli of Virginia Tech. And, of course, Yassi Moghaddam and Jeffrey Welser on ISSIP’s executive team, and the entire board of advisors and all SIG leaders and members.
CB: Ammar, thank you for your time, and thank you for your service to ISSIP.