August 23, 2006: Service Science as an Academic Discipline (according to IBM)

A former colleague was kind enough to point me at the Web page for a Symposium on "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" hosted by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory on September 8, 2005. He also pointed out that, if one followed the link to the Japanese content, one could find a PDF version of the presentation given by James Spohrer from IBM Almaden Services Research. My colleague had not know that I had "vented" about my experience at Almaden in March of 2004 in the June 25 entry for this blog. Obviously, I was very curious to see if the story had improved at all since my last encounter with the IBM point of view. Having now reviewed the material, my personal opinion is that there is a lot more content but not a lot of improvement. Obviously, I want to elaborate on this!

Apparently, the first step in declaring a "Service Science" is to come up with a definition for it. This is the first one that was presented to the Symposium audience:

The application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (‘services’)

I have to say that I think that describing "services" as "tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" is not a bad idea. I just wish that Spohrer had taken it more seriously. The rest of the slides had a very prescriptive tone, but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that benefit would arises as a side-effect of all the recommendations being prescribed. I think this is not just silly but dangerous. My own experience has led me to the conviction that any enterprise that is serious about being a service provider must assign top priority to looking for new opportunities to provide benefits to the customer. Once you get beyond theory into the realities of practice, this priority trumps the "coproduction of value," a buzz phrase that sounded great the first time I saw it in the Harvard Business Review but has begun to grate on my nerves the more I hear it. Value is the side-effect of understanding where the benefits are, not the other way around.

So how do you understand where the benefits are? The first step is to cultivate the art of customer engagement. However, as I have already observed, our techno-centric fixations with such "solutions" as CRM have done little more than warp our ability to master this art. Thinking in terms of science, management, or engineering seems to have done little more than reduce the customer to an object with requirements to be satisfied. This is the heart of the warped thinking that results: The customer must be engaged as a subject; and, as one understands customer-as-subject, one will understand where the opportunities for benefit are. Understanding is the operative action here (and it should be treated as an action, rather than a result of analysis). This is why my entry about service on June 17 was such a desperate attempt to invoke the lessons that Habermas had to teach about a theoretical foundation for the actions that lead to achieving understanding. Furthermore, the progression from engagement to opportunities for benefit is essential a problem of interpretation. Customer engagement provides the opportunity to "interpret the customer;" but it is also necessary to "interpret the world" that constitutes the customer's context. Now, when Spohrer's presentation finally gets around to proposing a curriculum, the unhappy truth about what is on his slide is that, while all of the subject areas have to do with decision making, none of them have to do with interpreting that "world" in which the decisions have to be made! To use the language I have appropriated from Kenneth Burke, to think of decision making as a strictly scientific problem and to ignore the role that dramatistic thinking and acting plays is dangerous. It is like the blind man who thinks that feeling an elephant's leg is enough to understand the whole elephant.

At this point I should observe that one theme that plays a very heavy role in Spohrer's slides involves the word "innovation." Perhaps this obsession gets at why a research laboratory with its roots in physics and computer science (the way in which the slides introduce IBM Research) will never understand what makes service "work." Yes, innovation is a term in the equation, so to speak; but it is an auxiliary term. A service provider arrives at innovation by focusing on how to get customer engagement and benefit discovery right; and what could be more innovative than identifying an opportunity for benefit that the competition has either ignored or overlooked?

If we do want to talk about where innovation enters the picture, a good place to begin is probably a book by Alain Dumont entitled, Innover dans les service (published, alas, only in French). This is a book of case studies, so there is not much prescription here. On the other hand Dumont at least came up with an inspiring subtitle: De l'évident à l'impensable. In this language one might say that customer engagement begins by "interpreting the evident" and arrives at opportunities for benefit by following the interpretation through to the "unthinkable" (or at least the not-previously-thought). Now, since this book was published in 2001, there probably are no case studies that would still seem "unthinkable;" and, for any of these case studies, it will not be easy to reconstruct the mind-set of what was "evident" at the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, I think Dumont is on to something.

At the end of the day, any business that decides it want to make the shift from providing products to providing services is going to have to recognize that a cultural shift is prerequisite. The real problem with the IBM slides is that they offer an alternative to making that cultural shift, but it is a false alternative. You know how bad things are when you look at that list of 28 disciplines that get "mapped" on slide 8 (pictured above). Note that Education is at the very bottom of the list, yet that is probably the oldest (or second-oldest) service profession in history! I suppose I would even be so arrogant as to proclaim that anyone who does not acknowledge education as the most important service offering in history does not have the foggiest idea of what service really is!

August 11, 2006: Normal (?) Science

One of the interesting ideas to come out of the "knowledge movement" was the attempt to view an business organization as a "knowledge structure." One of the champions of this position was Bruce Kogut, who, together with his colleagues Shan and Walker, published a paper in 1993 with the intriguing title, "Knowledge in the network and the network as knowledge: Structuring of new industries." In a recent survey paper on communication networks, Peter Monge and Noshir Contractor summarized one of Kogut's key insights:

Once organizations choose partners, however, they tend to spend less time seeking other partners. As Kogut, Shan, and Walker (1993) say, "because information is determined by previous relations and in turn influences the subsequent propensity to do more relations, the structure of the network tends to replicate itself over time. The early history of cooperation tends to lock in subsequent cooperation" (p. 70). Further, they observe that "The replication of the network is a statement of the tendency of learning to decline with time. The structure of the network is a limiting constraint on how much new learning can be achieved. ...But when viewed from the perspective of the evolution of networks, there is a tendency for old lessons to be retaught" (p. 71).

This got me to thinking about the concept of "normal science" and the role it played in Thomas Kuhn's study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Here is how Kuhn characterized the concept:

In this essay, ‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. Today such achievements are recounted, though seldom in their original form, by science textbooks, elementary and advanced. These textbooks expound the body of accepted theory, illustrate many or all of its successful applications, and compare these applications with exemplary observations and experiments. Before such books became popular early in the nineteenth century and until even more recently in the newly matured sciences, many of the famous classics of science, by such writers as Aristotle, Newton and Ben Franklin, served for a time to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.

It strikes me that Kogut's characterization of an organizational network as knowledge bears a strong family resemblance to Kuhn's characterization of normal science. The kind of knowledge that Kogut seems to have in mind is knowledge of "how things are supposed to be done" in an organization; and one strategy for maintaining that organization is to replicate that knowledge. In a similar way scientific communities may be viewed as organizations; and, to the extent that any community is based on the need to distinguish a collective "self" from an "other," normal science defines the community, not by its scientific results, but by the implicit knowledge of how things are supposed to be done. Straying from the path entails leaving (or being banished from) the community. Abandoning normative standards entails abandoning the recognition of one's activities as legitimate.

This returns us to the theme of order and chaos. Organizations, both industrial and scientific, depend heavily on a sense of identity in order to "get things done." However, we are now confronted with the question of how one establishes identity (which implies some sense of stability) in a context that is becoming increasingly chaotic. Normal science, in a sense, denies that there is chaos out there (or, to invoke Henry Miller's language, denies that there is no confusion that cannot ultimately be understood). Romanticism challenges this premise and, in so doing, challenges a normative approach to science (which is why Kuhn introduces the concept of scientific revolution in the first place) and may also challenge a normative approach to business organization.

Meeting that challenge may involve returning to the theme of the opposition of faith and interpretation. At the end of the day, the decision to accept that the conduct of science or business management rests on normative standards is an act of faith. One cannot invoke scientific method to justify the conduct of normal science. Indeed, much of the reaction against Kuhn had to do with the fact that the concept of a scientific revolution could be seen as a refutation of the validity of the normative conduct of normal science, thus challenging the prevailing faith of scientists at the time Kuhn's book appeared. Similarly, our commitment to normative standards of business management is also an act of faith; and all it takes are intimations of refutation to remind us how strong that faith is in the established community of managers.

In posing interpretation as an opposition to faith, I argue that anything we confront in the world always needs to be subject to interpretation; and, because the context is always changing, we cannot assume that any interpretation is stable or enduring. All we can do is hone our interpretive skills and continue to exercise them as a safeguard against atrophy. There is no guarantee that this will solve any major problems like unemployment or war, but it should at least keep us from sleepwalking through the world that others want to make for us!

August 03, 2006: On "Climate Porn"

The BBC News Web site ran an interesting story about the Institute for Public Policy research accusing the mass media of indulging in "climate porn" in their presentation of environmental issues. (The above captioned image comes from that article.) In light of my recent attempt to address the problem of communicating the issues of global warming to the general public, this story piqued my interest. I certainly found it interesting as an attempt to analyze the ways in which the media are handling the global warming issue. On the other hand the story was also interesting for what it did not say: It did not really get into the difficulties inherent in reporting scientific results to a lay audience. This is a complex story that requires sorting out concrete evidence, interpretations of the evidence, and the extent to which conclusions can be said to be based on evidence, interpretations, or some combination of the two. That stuff just does not fit into a sound bite the way a shot of a lone polar bear floating on a small island of ice in the middle of nowhere does.

In other words, much as we would like to believe otherwise about the manipulation of mass media to warp the minds of the general public, the global warming story is just plain hard to report. Too much reasoning needs to be applied to evgen the most indisputably concrete data. Not only is the general public loath to engage in such a laborious effort (can you blame them?); but also the details of the argument are so intricate that it is easy for opponents to find plenty of nits to pick, regardless of how significant those nits may be to the overall thrust of the argument. In other words, no matter how sound and significant the argument may be, it is just too vulnerable to attack, regardless of the limited rationality of the attack.

Having said all that, I have to admit that I am not yet sure of my own position (on how to report about the environment, since I am pretty confident that there is genuine cause for alarm over global warming). I agree that there is something sensational (if not pornographic) about images and language more directed at seizing the attention than guiding it; but that has been a problem at least since Plato had Socrates complain about it in "Gorgias." Also, I dislike the strategy of fighting fire with fire, even when the fire comes from the likes of Congressman Roy Blunt, who has declared that, if he holds on to his seat in the House, he will make sure that there will be no action on global warming for the entire 110th Congress. On the other hand I also feel strongly that ignoring the climate problem (as Blunt is determined to do) is not going to make it go away and will probably make it worse. So, as the old joke goes, perhaps you really do have to whack the mule on the head with a two-by-four "in order to get his attention."

(Note: I would not presume to imply that Blunt or any other member of the Congress is a mule; as another old joke goes, that would be an insult to the mules!)

June 22, 2006: Faith and Interpretation

It occurred to me this morning that one of the reasons I have been investing so much energy in this blog is that I feel a very strong personal commitment to the practice of interpretation, and I can probably trace that commitment back to the first time I encountered a copy of the Bible that included commentary on the text. In retrospect (although I did not know it at the time) this was most likely my first exposure to hermeneutics, since, while I made no mention of this in my "Hermeneutics 101" entry, the practice of hermeneutics originated in problems concerned with the interpretation of Biblical texts. This raises an interesting irony, which I would like to explore briefly.

It goes back to a throw-away line delivered during last summer's San Francisco Mime Troupe production, Doing Good. One of the characters is a retired CIA agent who had considered going back to his old job but decided that "faith-based intelligence is not for me." As you might imagine, this got a good laugh from the audience; but, as I think back on it, it feels as if there is now a sense of opposition between interpretation (which is the primary work of intelligence analysts and hopefully is also a required skill for field agents) and faith. The age in which an appreciation of a religious text comes from the scrupulous examination of all the different things it might mean seems to have given way, in many circles, to the conviction that interpretation is irrelevant because the text has only a single, absolute meaning; and that meaning is given to you by some authority or, in a clutch, by your own devout sense of right and wrong.

Thus, I am confronted with evidence of a vociferous (if not strong) body of opinion that has written off one of the intellectual skills I most value as irrelevant! How seriously should I take this judgment? I would still prefer to subscribe to the more liberal attitude that reasonable people may differ and continue to explore the nooks and crannies of this deep-felt passion; but, as this note has probably demonstrated, I now seem to be exercising that skill in the interpretation of the actions and events I observe in the world at large, rather than confining myself to texts!

June 11, 2006: Hermeneutics 101

Having provided introductory outlines to phenomenology and Habermas' theory of communicative action, I figure I ought to do the same for hermeneutics, since I feel that this is another non-technical discipline that offers some critical "survival skills" for the Internet age. I must confess that I was led into this one by a conversation I had with a friend at PARC who made the pronouncement that it was time for us to stop wasting time on concepts that really had nothing to contribute, like hermeneutics. So if this particular introduction reads something like an apology, then that can be attributed to my personal past history!

Actually, one of the difficulties in introducing the concept of hermeneutics is that it seems to have meant many different things to different people. Therefore, I should being by stating up front that my own primary influence comes from the writings of Paul Ricœur, whose book on metaphor I discovered on a business trip to Basel and has had me hooked ever since. What has most interested me about Ricœur is that he took the traditional view of hermeneutics, as the study of methods for interpreting texts, and generalized it to the interpretation of meaningful actions. This puts him on the same field of interest as Habermas, who has had his own prolonged debate with Gadamer over hermeneutics. John Thompson's Critical Hermeneutics focuses explicitly in the intellectual relationship between Ricœur's phenomenological stance and Habermas' foundation in social theory (anchoring them both in Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy). This is what I mean when I say that any attempt to get a sense of the nature of hermeneutics quickly leads you into a vast Web of opposing opinions!

Ricœur's approach is basically a dialectical one. He begins with the exploration of two opposing concepts: explanation and understanding. From his point of view, "explanation" means "structural explanation," a syntactic perspective that can be generalized beyond the sentence to the broader scale of a paragraph or an entire work (if not an entire corpus). "Understanding," on the other hand, is concerned with interpretation and thus involves a semantic perspective. The opposition comes from the fact that, often, you cannot determine the syntactic structure of the text unless you know what it is trying to say; and you cannot interpret the text without knowing how it has been structured. (This was discovered "in the trenches" when Terry Winograd was doing his pioneering doctoral research on a computer system that understood natural language.) Ricœur proposed that hermenutic interpretation could only succeed through a Hegelian (Fichtean?) style synthesis of these two concepts, dealing with explanation and understanding as interrelated processes, each of which informs the other (which is one of the most important features of Winograd's SHRDLU system). This is why I clipped in the above diagram (which I discovered through an A9 image search, back when A9 was still using Google for image searches).

Why is this important? The primary reason is that computer science (or information technology) still tends to assume that intepretation is concerned strictly with the denotation of symbol structures, which is fine if you are writing a compiler or a system that interprets database queries but (as Winograd discovered) starts to break down when you more from formal languages to natural ones. So this takes us back to the debate over what we can realistically expect from the Semantic Web and whether or not we can call it "semantic" in any way that makes sense the the real world of how we all use the Internet (i.e. the world in which the Internet is used by ordinary people trying to get things done, for business or pleasure, as opposed to computer science students or professionals).

It is nice to see that Ricœur seems to have had a healthy appreciation of the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce on the interpretation of symbol structures. It is nice to reflect that, in one of his early essays ("Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities"), Peirce came up with the wonderful observation that "men and words reciprocally educate each other." I think this gets to the heart of the synthesis upon which Ricœur's approach to hermeneutics is based, and I think we can do worse than live by that insight.