Our Service Science Technical Reports are intended to improve the development and understanding of services in the public and private sectors.
SSTR 0: Services Science Technical Reports - oh why, oh why?
The concinnitās report series provides brief but informative introductions to the world we are observing as service science practitioners. Our intention is to record our observations in brief documents, which are produced rapidly in response to problems (and solutions) we find interesting and challenging. We will be focused on the quality of the ideas and their rapid dissemination rather than attempting to achieve definitive and complete academic quality. We will release, up to our customer’s confidentiality requirements, all that we have time to document with the clear intention of improving the design, analysis and delivery of complex services in the public and private sectors.
SSTR 1: Lean services – translating manufacturing experience to the services industry
All systems have a natural cycle. Production line design depends on understanding what this is, what it can be with careful design, and what the benefits of such design can be. But production lines benefit from the elimination of variation, while services depend on their capability to absorb it. This paper considers what can be learnt from lean systems analysis and design and how it can be applied to service design and management.
SSTR 2: Innovating Public Sector Services, The Application of Services Science
Successful public services are critical to a successful society. Yet successful design and deployment of important services in the UK – the Tax Credit System and the Child Support Agency for example – have failed with devastating consequences for some of the users of those services. Media reports of these shortcomings have typically focussed on single. ‘simple’ causes, the reality however is that they represent a failure to coordinate diverse social, technical and process factors. Service design and management still remains a cottage industry – albeit a large cottage. This paper discusses the application of Services Science to providing the foundations of more appropriate, robust and reliable service provision.
