A Model Curriculum for Undergraduate Program in IT SSME

Introduction

In today’s knowledge-intensive economy, the service sector and service innovation for business and society represent the fastest growing portion of the world economy. This comes out from both the annual income reports of innovative companies that report on growing service revenues, as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) statistics of nations. Governments and businesses need to make service innovation a priority, because it contributes more than 50% of World GDP economy (Soubbotina & Sheram, 2000) and revenue and profit growth also increasingly depend on service innovation.

In the US economy, the service sector accounts for more than 75% of the economy (Wei, Chen, & Zhu, 2010). According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2010, 112 million (78.8%) people were employed in a service sector industry, compared to 30 million in the other sectors. By 2020, this number is expected to increase, with 79.9% of total work force in the service sector. Employment of IT professionals and business services is expected to jump to 14.2%, growing by over 3.9 million jobs (BLS, 2013). The same scenario for the European Union, in 2009, workforce employed in services accounts for more than 65% of total employment (EU, 2013). Table 1 shows the top industrialized economies that are shifting from the goods-producing sector toward the service-providing sector in recent decades (Data were compiled from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Spohrer & Maglio, 2008) and Table 2 shows the lead of service sector jobs over agriculture and industry jobs in most world regions during the period between 2000 and 2011 (Data were compiled from International Labor Organization (ILO, 2012)).