To improve the service sector in Thailand, the National Science and Technology Development Agency has been working with Software Industry Promotion Agency and the Commission on Higher Education as well as IBM Thailand to build the concept of service science.

The cooperation is hoped to push Thailand towards the development of new innovative services.

The four parties recently signed a memorandum of understanding to initiate collaboration on the matter. They also set up a steering committee to oversee the development of a service-science framework for Thailand.

Pansak Siriruchatapong, the director of the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) under NSTDA, who is also the chairman of the steering committee, said the framework would focus on service-science development in four key areas including training, research and development, industrial promotion and collaboration as well as policy and strategy development.

As the service sector is expected to generate more income for the country, it should be transformed from classical services, in which customers have to come to get a service from the providers, to a new modern idea in which services will respond to customers' needs efficiently, he said.

He added that service provision is in a transformation stage. As services in the future would become more innovative and could serve customers' needs and predict customers' requirements in advance to bring proper service to them, it also required staff who understand not only technology but also social science and business.

Realising this, the steering committee has set a plan to train at least 3,000 persons in the next three years.

Eight universities - Chulalongkorn University, Thammasart University, Asian Institute of Technology, Silapakorn University, Rangsit University, Mahanakorn University, Sripratum University and Rattana Bundit University - are involved in the training. They plan to develop a science service, management and engineering (SSME) curriculum and start the course this year.

SSME is a new multi-disciplinary research and academic effort that integrates aspects of established fields such as computer science, operations research, engineering, management sciences, business strategy, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences.

The trained people, Pansak said, would be a foundation for the country to build service science in the future.

As the project is also in collaboration with IBM Thailand, the graduates are expected to feed to IBM as well.

IBM, which initiated the concept of service science, predicts that it requires around 50,000 service personnel in the next ten years, so the company has worked with the governments of several countries address this need.

Pansak said the plan was intended to not only train people to serve the market but also encourage them to spin off to start their own businesses.

As service science can support all industry sectors, it will help each sector improve their provision of services. Target sectors that can benefit from service science include IT, tourism, medical and healthcare, telecommunications, finance and banking, and education, for example.

To improve the service sector to compete with other countries, Pansak said research activities on service science were needed. Nectec also plans to study new technology development areas to serve the emerging service science concept.

Research areas may include exploitation of current technology and creating the new technology needed to improve service productivity and develop new businesses, modelling of services, methodologies and tools for dynamic pricing services using information from various sources, risk management, operation research and optimisation, and integration of service-science knowledge, for example.

To put more focus on service-science development, the committee also plans to push service science as a part of the national development agenda.

"We plan to ask for the inclusion of service science in the next national ICT development plan, which is being developed now. This is to create a concrete mechanism to make further development in the area," he said.

The development of service science is hoped to create more added value for the country's service sector. In developed countries, service accounts for more than 50 per cent of the country's GDP, but in Thailand the proportion is only 30 to 40 per cent.

Pansak said the development of service science would help increase revenue proportion for the service sector in the future.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation