The Role of BPM in Services Technology and Management

A recent 120-page report from a IBM Academic Summit in May of 2004 was titled "SERVICES SCIENCE: A NEW ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE?" The core message of the white paper is "Services has matured as a business as software once did, and there is a science underlying services that must be explored".
The key challenge for academia and industry is to determine how to define and measure innovation. The government and companies need to invest in the research and development needed to "move services out of the realm of art and into the realm of science".

This talk will discuss how business process management can take a center role in shaping the issues of technology and management under the auspices of services science. The key idea is that recent surge in academic interests and industrial investment in business process automation makes it clear that service provisioning is not only IT intensive, but also process-based. As such, there is a real opportunity for researchers and practitioners to study how to apply business process management to improve the effectiveness and quality of services in the areas of supply chain management, customer relationship management, and knowledge management.

Speaker Biography

J. Leon Zhao is Professor and Honeywell Fellow in MIS, University of Arizona. Before joining University of Arizona, he taught at HKUST and William & Mary and worked as Staff Scientist in LBNL and as Research Engineer in Honeywell. He has a Ph.D. from the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, a MS from University of California, Davis, and a BS from Beijining Institute of Agricutural Mechanization. His research has appeared in over 80 conference and journal articles including such topics as web services and services computing. He co-chairs the 15th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, 2005 with Services Computing as its theme and is co-editing the special issue "From Web Services to Services Computing" for Information Systems Frontier.

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