In the 21st century, the service industry is at the center of the industrial structure. The service industry, however, has not had an academic discipline that corresponds to engineering in the manufacturing industry. In 2003, IBM proposed to create a new discipline called services science, management and engineering (SSME). This is a multidisciplinary area in which information sciences, operations research (OR), management engineering, social sciences, and other areas overlap. IBM Research - Tokyo is leading this new, exciting field as a pioneer in services science in Japan.
Competency fields
Services Software Engineering
Services Software Engineering (SSE) promotes the use of innovative software engineering practices for the creation of large and complex IT services. By utilizing data and text analytics methods, the symptoms of project problems and their defect patterns are visualized. Our research projects include analysis methods for project artifacts and management information, how to prevent project problems by more quickly recognizing the symptoms of troubled projects, and ways to recommend appropriate recovery actions based on the diagnostic results from project artifacts (such as documentation and source code).
Service Software Engineering (SSE)
Cloud Computing
The next generation of cloud computing technologies such as virtual cloud integration and cloud management for sensors are being studied and developed for emerging business needs. Virtual cloud integration provides unified cloud management services (e.g. provisioning, monitoring and metering) for customers who are using clouds both on their premises and in public cloud sites, by virtually integrating their cloud management platforms. Cloud management for sensors supports automation and virtualization for the physical sensor devices, and allows managing sensor devices as one of the IT resources, similar to CPUs, memory, or disks with standardized approaches.