Around the world, public services are under pressure from all directions: required to be cheaper, more efficient, more effective, less wasteful, more 'joined-up', more in touch with people's needs, leaner, less bureaucratic ...
Whether public services are seen as Beauty (in Scandinavia, say) or The Beast (by the US Tea Party, for example), they face increased demands and reduced resources almost everywhere. Inevitably, one solution that has been turned to has been IT. (This is particularly true of local government, the health and education sectors, and the emergency services, which have invested heavily in IT 'solutions'.) New computer systems - often alongside merged back office functions, economies of scale and outsourcing - are regularly expected to offer a better and faster service at lower cost.
Imposed IT solutions often make things worse. David Wastell calls our continuing (and unwarranted) faith in imposed, computer-based solutions 'technomagic'. In Managers as Designers in the Public Services, he draws startling parallels between our expectations of IT solutions in the public sector and the expectations of Melanesian canoe-builders who use bunches of grass to drive heaviness and slowness out of their boats. He then uses detailed examples and case studies from the UK and USA to show just how misplaced has been our reliance on IT-based 'solutions' to public sector problems. But this book is much more than an informed and devastating critique of the UK's Integrated Children's System, US educational reform and the high-profile failure of the London Ambulance Service.
David Wastell goes on to develop and apply the principles of Systems Thinking and Design Thinking to show how we need a 'design revolution' in the public services. Rather than monitoring, measuring and controlling, public sector managers need to see themselves as designers, whose job it is to reshape work systems and the whole workplace. He then uses two further case studies to give concrete examples of Design Thinking in action, with highly positive outcomes from design-based approaches to IT innovation.
About the author
David Wastell is Professor of Information Systems at Nottingham University Business School, UK. He began his academic career as a psycho-physiologist, attaching electrodes to people's heads to measure the brain's performance (which he compares to using performance indicators to measure organisational effectiveness).
After moving to the Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge University, his interests in technology and work developed during an extended period at Manchester University, first in the Medical School and then in Computer Science. He was appointed Professor of the Information Society at Salford University in 2000 where he helped establish a leading international research group specializing in information systems. Subsequently he moved to UMIST, before transferring to Nottingham in 2005.
Professor Wastell's current interests are in public sector reform, innovation and design, and cognitive ergonomics. He is secretary of an international working group (IFIP WG8.6) which specializes in research on technology transfer and innovation, he has extensive public sector consultancy experience and was co-author of the SPRINT methodology, which provides a framework for service re-engineering and change management, and is widely used in the local government community.
Whether public services are seen as Beauty (in Scandinavia, say) or The Beast (by the US Tea Party, for example), they face increased demands and reduced resources almost everywhere. Inevitably, one solution that has been turned to has been IT. (This is particularly true of local government, the health and education sectors, and the emergency services, which have invested heavily in IT 'solutions'.) New computer systems - often alongside merged back office functions, economies of scale and outsourcing - are regularly expected to offer a better and faster service at lower cost.
Imposed IT solutions often make things worse. David Wastell calls our continuing (and unwarranted) faith in imposed, computer-based solutions 'technomagic'. In Managers as Designers in the Public Services, he draws startling parallels between our expectations of IT solutions in the public sector and the expectations of Melanesian canoe-builders who use bunches of grass to drive heaviness and slowness out of their boats. He then uses detailed examples and case studies from the UK and USA to show just how misplaced has been our reliance on IT-based 'solutions' to public sector problems. But this book is much more than an informed and devastating critique of the UK's Integrated Children's System, US educational reform and the high-profile failure of the London Ambulance Service.
David Wastell goes on to develop and apply the principles of Systems Thinking and Design Thinking to show how we need a 'design revolution' in the public services. Rather than monitoring, measuring and controlling, public sector managers need to see themselves as designers, whose job it is to reshape work systems and the whole workplace. He then uses two further case studies to give concrete examples of Design Thinking in action, with highly positive outcomes from design-based approaches to IT innovation.
About the author
David Wastell is Professor of Information Systems at Nottingham University Business School, UK. He began his academic career as a psycho-physiologist, attaching electrodes to people's heads to measure the brain's performance (which he compares to using performance indicators to measure organisational effectiveness).
After moving to the Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge University, his interests in technology and work developed during an extended period at Manchester University, first in the Medical School and then in Computer Science. He was appointed Professor of the Information Society at Salford University in 2000 where he helped establish a leading international research group specializing in information systems. Subsequently he moved to UMIST, before transferring to Nottingham in 2005.
Professor Wastell's current interests are in public sector reform, innovation and design, and cognitive ergonomics. He is secretary of an international working group (IFIP WG8.6) which specializes in research on technology transfer and innovation, he has extensive public sector consultancy experience and was co-author of the SPRINT methodology, which provides a framework for service re-engineering and change management, and is widely used in the local government community.
