Editorial Pointers

With so much focus on vanishing IT employment options over the last decade, whether victims of outsourcing or outmoding, there are in fact more career opportunities than ever throughout the global economy that are critical to propelling its future. In fact there are more career possibilities than there are skilled experts to fill them. Closing this gap will take the combined effort of universities, businesses, IT, engineering, and government, among others.

Technology, particularly the Internet, has helped transform a product-based economy to a service-based global marketplace, dramatically changing the way all businesses operate and the tools—and talent—required to compete. The interdisciplinary arena of services science embraces many of these fields to unite research efforts for developing and delivering services, as well as helping IT curricula to better prepare students for a thriving future in the services-based business world.

This month’s special section reflects the range of disciplines involved in delivering services. The articles explore the latest advances and challenges in creating, designing, and building business applications. They also call on researchers to address the desperate need for services-enriched curricula to best serve the ambitions of future generations. Guest editors Jim Spohrer and Doug Riecken of IBM—a pioneering force in services science—contend that globalization, automation, Internet growth, and the componentization of business are driving the emergence of service-value networks at a pace never before seen in history. We hope the stories further stimulate the dialogue among the disciplines.

Also in this issue, Avison et al. present three case studies concerning IT projects with devastating outcomes but that produced rich insight and lessons in the failures. All shared one element: Top management who failed to appreciate or comprehend the scope of the project or the value of the IT they had paid for. Hoffman et al. propose a trust model and related metrics that are not only immediately useful, but will retain their value over the years as technology changes.

Bekkering and Shim examine how some widely held misconceptions about eye contact may be hindering the acceptance and adoption of videoconferencing technology. And Bolloju and Leung identify a set of avoidable errors commonly committed by novice systems analysts when developing UML artifacts.

And in "Viewpoint," Peter Wegner and Dina Goldin contend it’s time to reexamine the problem-solving paradigm in CS, as well as the wider world, at a fundamental level.

Diane Crawford
Editor