Service Design: An important part of Government Transformation
Citizens often find themselves frustrated because they must navigate disconnected, inconvenient processes and systems to access government services. Employees are frustrated because they are being pulled from work to assist customers because of poorly designed services.
But how do governments design services that meet citizen’s needs and redirect resources where they belong most?
Fundamentally, agencies need to architect their service delivery end-to-end — offering services that cut across agency silos to give citizens a seamless experience.
Using a Service Design approach, that starts with people’s needs — both citizens and employees, will help government’s create a better citizen experience.
What is Service Design?
Service Design is an inherently holistic and systems-oriented approach to problem-solving. It involves planning and organizing people, process, and technology along with the infrastructure to improve quality interactions between government agencies and the citizens they serve.
Service Design:
- is rooted in design thinking, and brings a creative, human-centered process to service improvement and designing new services
- incorporates elements of strategic foresight, behavioral insights, systems thinking, and lean start-up
- helps organizations see an end-to-end, surface-to-core perspective, enabling organizations to understand services from a customer perspective.
Applying Service Design to create better experiences
Service Design uniquely considers how the “front stage” experience of the citizen, is orchestrated with the “backstage” capabilities and sequencing of the agency. This helps design teams map the immediate and supporting processes and systems. It demonstrates how these processes influence and potentially limit current capabilities and could be changed to enable potential improvements. This thoroughly accounts for and analyzes the employee, manager, stakeholder, and citizen points of view to re-imagine the end-to-end service.
By shifting the focus from delivering on-time to delivering value, Service Design makes impactful improvements to the citizen experience through an informed, deep understanding of citizens and of the current state of the service provided.
