IBM

IBM recently came out with a research report titled “Beyond Advertising: Choosing a Strategic Path to the Digital Customer ,” By Saul Berman, Bill Battino and Karen Feldman. The report covers familiar ground for marketers, but should still be an interesting read, because it is chock full of survey data and puts numbers to many trends currently taking shape.

These reports are also interesting in that they provide insight into what IBM is thinking in terms of its role in the industry. Naturally, IBM is quite excited about the explosion of analytics in advertising. IBM seems to have great plans to help advertisers move to that brave new world “beyond advertising” with new data management, analytics, and targeting tools. While impartial and objective in tone, these research reports represent a key component of IBMs marketing strategy. Most marketers don't think much of academic papers, but they are well worth the investment when you are selling complex and expensive services to a select and highly educated group.

The report seeks to show that “the senario of the future is consumer centricity,” i.e. highly targeted and relevant advertising delivered in the format most appealing to the consumer. The key factors preventing the industry from achieving consumer centricity according to the report are the following:

• New format uncertainty - Particularly in the new economic environment, there are questions about the growth of new formats like advanced TV and mobile
• Fragmentation - Large number of suppliers in new advertising formats, and there is no agreement on format specifications.
• Siloed operating models - There is limited cross-platform integration of campaign support tools, processes or organizations to enable the selling, tracking or delivery of integrated, “know-me messaging.”
• Data glut - Enormous amounts of information exist, but are difficult to access given the lack of consistency in data structures, metrics or analytics.

These are certainly major problems. No matter how much we wish it were otherwise, the big ad agencies are just not that tech savvy. Traditional industry titans are being blindsided by technology and innovative business models. However, just when we were starting to feel really bad for Madison Avenue, the report suggests “Four capabilities to enable consumer-centric marketing”:

It's not often that one gets to found a new academic discipline. However, this is exactly what IBM is trying to do with a push to create a unified curriculum and degree program for Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) at major universities around the world.

There is a lot of academic verbiage surrounding the discipline. However, service science essentially brings together the traditional business department and computer department to study how people and technologies interact in large organizations to deliver value.

Service science is interesting to me on a number of levels.

First of all, I'm someone who has always walked the line between business manager and computer geek. When you inhabit both these worlds it is rather obvious that business people and computer people tend not to understand each other. This is something that has to change if any business is going to thrive on a global scale in the modern marketplace.

Second, service science captures the paradigm shift that is happening in the tech sector from a product based business model to a service based model. The huge success of open-source software and fiercely competitive new hardware manufacturers emerging across Asia continue to chip away at the profitability of the standard make it, pack it, and ship it approach.

Companies that focus on providing consulting services, software, and hardware as an integrated solution will be able to turn existing threats into opportunities for collaboration and growth. Delivering exceptional integrated information technology services on a global scale is clearly what will differentiate the leading tech companies of the future.

Third, this is the first time I’ve run across a well-conceived academic discipline that is essentially owned by a particular company. IBM is the top result when I google “service science” and most of the other results are from organizations somehow affiliated with IBM. Indeed, the current third result is a Wikipedia entry, which credits IBM with inventing the term Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME). IBM quite literally owns service science at the moment.

As a marketing professional, I am quite impressed with the type of big picture thinking that IBM is displaying here. They didn’t just create a website, buy some advertising, send out a press release, and contact "thought leaders" in business and computing. No, they put in the work to carve out a whole new academic discipline, at least that’s the impression one gets. Nice work IBM.

I'm currently looking at MBA programs with a strong focus on technology and international business. I'll be exploring service science further in the coming months.