Summary Page

On November 17 & 18, 2004, IBM hosted an inquiry to explore "services science" at its Almaden Research Center that attracted a wonderful, multidisciplinary crowd of original thinkers from academia, government, and the corporate sphere as well as IBM itself.

Services (the wrong name but the only one we've got for products that are created and consumed at the same time) account for 80% of the GDP. Having grown up in an era when industrial-age thinking was top dog, government and management are in denial that the service sector is meaningful. There is no agreement on metrics or best practices, and few have studied how to make services more effective. The session at Almaden was designed as a wake-up call and an invitation to join a nascent community of practice.

I blogged the event as it happened. This record is incomplete and I plan to add to it. IBM will be posting many of the presentations and resources, so I don't replicate them here. Your suggestions and corrections are most welcome. This is my real-time interpretation of what was being said; consider it totally unofficial.

Agenda | Breakout Sessions | Blog entries 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

IBM's Almaden Researh Center sits atop a beautiful
piece of rugged, open parkland south of San Jose.


The Lab (white arrow) houses more that 400 IBM researchers,
more than half of them Ph.D-level scientists and engineers.


This is where the relational database, SQL, and the
little red Trackpoint on my ThinkPad were invented.

This was a fine event. I love it when I head to bed, knowing that I'll awake the next morning full of new insights ""the boys in the backroom" have come up with.