There’s huge opportunity in improving the design and distribution of government and nonprofit services. This is doubly true for making services more digital. How do you get started? Begin with a service design workshop. Read more and download free workshop materials.
Digital Opportunity
As I’ve written in a previous post, the public sector can be a leader in digital goods and services. You can classify much of government and social sector work as providing financial and insurance services, and logistics. Those functions are highly digital and automated in other sectors of the economy, but not in the social sector. This is one opportunity where the public sector can learn from business.
Service redesign can provide big benefits. In particular, going digital makes goods and services easier and less expensive to store, revise and distribute.
Here in the U.S., efforts like the U.S. Digital Service are working to tap this digital opportunity.
Case Study: Passports in Uganda
This blog from Pollicy provides a case study of how Ugandan government officials held a service design workshop. Pollicy works with governments, civil society, NGOs and the private sector in Africa to re-design services around citizen needs and demands.
In this case, they brought together Ugandan officials and leaders from the private sector to redesign services. They focused on three issues:
- Inefficiency in public transportation
- Difficulty in obtaining a passport
- Lack of response to citizen complaints
The workshop moved through the design process of research, ideation, conceptualization, prototyping, and testing. Participants came away with viable improvements to further test and refine.
As I’ve written in a previous blog, I was pleasantly surprised when I renewed my passport by mail. It seemed obvious that someone paid attention to designing the passport renewal-by-mail service.
Conduct Your Own Service Design Workshop
You can replicate the service design process in your community.
- Use market research and systems thinking to help identify problems you want to address.
- Once you’ve identified what you want to tackle, download free service design workshop materials to help you plan and conduct your workshop.
- Promote your service design workshop, so that people will attend and participate.
- Distribute and promote the findings of your workshop to make sure they are implemented and adopted.
Need more inspiration? Check out Design without Borders, who helped facilitate the Ugandan sessions, and the Interaction Design Foundation.
Need help in getting your service design workshop off the ground? I’d be happy to help. Check out my services and contact me.
(Image courtesy of Pixabay)