Organizations that miss a key inflection point or disruption in their industry quickly find themselves at a disadvantage. Drawing from IBM's own history, I show how continuous innovation in products, and more recently services, is a necessity in order to stay competitive in the modern technology landscape. Investing in services research builds strong product ecosystems, relationships with customers, efficient organizations, and raises the quality of life in modern societies. I investigate two promising areas for research: a) Services quality and optimizing services organizations around a factory model, and, b) how we can redesign our daily work environment for higher efficiency and job satisfaction.
Dr. Nikos Anerousis is a Senior Manager at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center, responsible for a research program on service automation technologies. Prior to joining IBM in 2003, he was the co-founder and CTO of Voicemate, a venture-backed startup company that pioneered voice publishing technology for the financial markets. He started his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories (subsequently AT&T Labs-Research) as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff. He has also served as adjunct faculty at the department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Nikos has published extensively in the area of networks and distributed systems management and is a frequent attendee of IM, NOMS, and CNSM.
