Library

Charles Leadbeater, Jamie Bartlett & Niamh Gallagher, Making it Personal (Demos, 2008)

This report advocates a simple yet transformational approach to public services – self-directed services – which allocate people budgets so they can shape, with the advice of professionals and peers, the support they need. This participative approach delivers personalised, lasting solutions to people’s needs at lower cost than traditional, inflexible and top-down approaches, by mobilising the intelligence of thousands of service users to devise better solutions.

Stefan Holmlid, Interaction Design and Service Design: expanding a comparison of design principles (Linköpings Universitet, 2007)

Interaction design encounters service design in business innovation, e-government, and a whole range of other settings. There is a range of service settings in which interactive artefacts are used to perform service, and a set of business innovation strategies combining process innovation and interactive technology. In the meeting between these, the service perspective becomes a challenge to interaction design, and technology usage becomes a challenge to service design. For design to work in an integrated manner in such situations, designers need to have an understanding of each other’s disciplines. By comparing the design disciplines according to dimensions of a small set of areas, we will in this paper provide a basis to share understanding, create common ground and identify differentiation.

User Involvement in Public Services: Sixth Report of Session 2007–08 (House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, 2008)

This is the second of several Reports on the inquiry into Public Services: Putting People First. One of the key themes of this inquiry has been how public services could be improved by involving the people that use them in their design and delivery. This report considers various forms of user involvement in public services, from consultation with service users to stronger variants such as user control over service provision (Chapter 2). It examines some of the arguments given for making public services more responsive: that it would be more democratic, that it would improve service levels and that it would be cost-effective (Chapter 3). It also explores some of the potential implications of greater user involvement—for staff working in public services, for service users and for how public services are organised and evaluated (Chapter 4).

Sophia Parker & Joe Heapy, The Journey to the Interface: how public service design can connect users to reform (Demos, 2006)

‘Engagement and co-production will grow only out of a deeper, richer understanding of how services relate in practice to people’s everyday lives.’

Emily Thomas (ed.) Innovation by design in public services (The SOLACE Foundation Imprint, 2008)

The SOLACE Foundation Imprint (SFI) is local government’s foremost thought leadership publication addressing the most pressing and challenging issues of public policy and public management.

Design is key to the challenges of public service transformation. And those challenges are daunting. The government published the Innovation Nation white paper earlier this year, and set the scale of what lies ahead. New and revised approaches are needed which build on the exciting work underway but which connect the public into the centre of both policy and action.

Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0 (Department of Finance & Deregulation, Canberra, 2009)

Victorian Government 2.0 Action Plan (Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria, 2010)

Australian Federal Government and Victorian State Government strategies supporting ‘direct citizen engagement in conversations about government services and public policy [and] a way of working that is underpinned by collaboration, openness and engagement. ’

Advisory Group on Reform of Australian Government Administration, Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, 2010)

The Blueprint puts people at the centre of public service reform. Ultimately it is people, not systems, who produce excellence and drive change.

Angie Hart, Simon Northmore and Chloe Gerhardt, Briefing Paper: Auditing, Benchmarking and Evaluating Public Engagement (National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, 2008)

This briefing paper is written for academics, university administrators and community partners interested in monitoring and evaluating university public engagement. It provides an accessible guide to the field that can assist them in answering the questions they want to answer, in tailoring their own approach and negotiating that approach between the university and local communities. By ‘local communities’ we mean geographically defined communities, identity communities, and other collectivities that universities want to engage with.

Polina Baranova, Sue Morrison & Jean Mutton, Service Design in Higher and Further Education: a briefing paper (University of Derby, 2010)

This guide is an introduction to service design and improvement methodology and its application in Higher and Further Education. It introduces a key technique service blueprinting – which has been used successfully at the University of Derby in the Development and Review of Business Interfaces (DERBI) project to improve the transition stage from applicant to registered student, with a specific focus on the university enrolment process.

Australian Government Architecture Reference Models, (Department of Finance & Deregulation, Australian Government Information Management Office, Canberra, 2009)

The 2006 e-Government Strategy published by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) in March 2006, recognised the need for an architectural model to guide departments and agencies in cross-agency collaboration and delivery of whole-of-government services. To build on the work already undertaken in the building of interoperability frameworks, AGIMO established a whole-of-government Enterprise Architecture initiative, working with the Chief Information Officers’ Committee (CIOC) to formulate a cross-agency architecture framework.

The intent of this Australian Government Architecture (AGA) framework is to assist in the delivery of more consistent and cohesive services to citizens and support cost-effective delivery of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services by government.