1. Designing
future
services,
today
Designing services to be relevant
in a changing world

2. 2
Citizens’ expectations of services have risen. The
demands and considerations faced by service
designers would seem like a fantasy compared with
their counterparts in the 1950s, when people regularly
accepted without question the services made available
to them. This has now been replaced by a market-driven
culture in which people have more varied lifestyles and
needs. Today’s citizens expect many of the same services
from the public sector as the private sector—choice,
convenience and the capacity for services to adapt over
time to meet changing requirements.
People are better informed than ever. With the technology
and platforms available to them, young entrepreneurs
are illustrating remarkable ingenuity in the development
of applications and programs to supply people with
live information. The growth in use of affordable
mobile phones and tablet computers linked to wireless
networks outside the home, and the implications of their
use by ‘Generation Y’ users, is a major difference for
policy makers and service designers that grew up in
different eras with more stable and predictable service
requirements.
Who would have predicted, twenty years ago, that people
would use multiple devices to achieve the same task?
Yet 90% of today’s generation use multiple screens
sequentially to accomplish a task over time, and 98%
of people will move between devices on the same day1
.
Different technology platforms are picked and dropped like
a set of hand tools. Behavioural changes such as this are
occurring with increasing pace and can be unpredictable.
Keeping up with the speed of change presents many
challenges for those employed to plan services and invest
in infrastructure. Processes that were introduced ten years
ago are not suited to cope with today’s needs and may
indeed be irrelevant to most users.
The service users
of today
1
Oliver Weidlich, The Six C’s of Cross Channel UX, Mobile Experience, 2012
A new blueprint for service design

3. 3
Service delivery as we knew it has passed into history in
the blink of an eye and we have entered the era where
services are in a constant state of revolution, with the
status quo continuously challenged by technology, live
information and citizens’ expectations. Many organisations
are catching up, but are they reacting to the change of
today or yesterday?
Service design is the new frontier where traditional models
of service delivery, technology and customer service need
to be proactive and not reactive. Services need to mould
and adapt to the changing behaviours of the citizens; they
need to be flexible, adaptable and accessible to customer
needs.
Services need to be designed for the future, today.
Image by TheeErin on Flickr
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/theeerin/369424730/) 3

4. 4
In 1876, the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office,
Sir William Preece was asked about the increasing
use of telephones as a form of communication. Preece
responded, “The Americans have need of the telephone,
but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
Fifty years later, the Post Office introduced the famous
red telephone booth, connecting millions of Britons with
family, friends and foreigners alike with the dial of a few
numbers. The lesson here is that the way in which change
occurs can be unpredictable, even for those best placed
to predict it.
The past century has seen an incredible pace of change
in technology and communications. A myriad of channels
and options have been used and then disused. The next
one hundred years is likely to produce more paradigm
shifts and at a quicker pace that would seem possible
now. New forms of engagement take little time at all
to become global communication mediums, disrupting
the status quo and changing the way communities and
individuals interact.
These revolutionary advances are helping to create a
new breed of businesses that challenge every aspect of
existing models. These continuously shift the landscape,
challenging traditions and providing opportunities for those
willing to compete on innovative revenue and cost models.
Traditionally, Western multinationals have innovated and
developed leading services to sell to the world. However
strategic thinkers like Vijay Govindarajan have suggested
that the impact of developing nations increasing their
capacities to develop new products and services,
then selling them across in the opposite direction—so
called ‘reverse innovation’—could pose even greater
revolutionary change2
. Market-breakers in the East will
become market-makers in the West.
Technology and communications –
accelerating the pace of change
2
Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, Reverse Innovation: Create Far From
Home, Win Everywhere, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
Image: Statista, 2013, with data sourced from McKinsey Global Institute.
The rapid rise of social media
Time to reach 50 million users worldwide (in years)

5. 5
Disruptive mediums are often led by service pioneers—
the innovators and early adopters that enable fads to go
mainstream. These people are typically mobile, highly
technologically adept and at the forefront of the innovation
curve. Market-breakers and market-makers such as
Google and Facebook innovate and deploy new services
and models in market at speed. If they are not already
doing so, established business leaders should be looking
over their shoulders for new and disruptive forms of
competition.
In the hotel market, Airbnb disrupted the status quo
by introducing a product that turns spare rooms into a
worldwide bed-and-breakfast chain; privately-owned
properties became unique hotel experiences. Since it
was launched in 2008, Airbnb has entered 192 countries,
processed over 10 million bookings and listed 300,000
properties across 33,000 cities. Airbnb estimates that it
has made over 848 million social connections, enabling
its owners to refer to the company as more than a service,
but a community marketplace.
Airbnb succeeded by building a reputation for
transparency and trust that allowed customers to feel
comfortable about staying in a stranger’s home.
It facilitated social connections which prove the notion
that people will buy products and services from those they
trust.
A strong technology base and a good product allowed
Airbnb to grow into a company that has changed the way
people look at hotel services. Crucially, the company was
able to design a blueprint for success by understanding
the individual. The company’s CEO, Brian Chesky said:
“We start with the perfect experience and then work
backward. That’s how we’re going to continue to be
successful.”
Who is leading the constant
revolution?
Image: Android: An Exercise in Ship It - Airbnb Engineering. 2013. Available
at: http://nerds.airbnb.com/android-2-0/. [Accessed 02 August 2013].

6. Designing for a
60 second world
Organisations involved with public
service delivery are faced with significant
challenges. Service designers must plan
services for 5 –10 year timelines, or longer,
and often in the knowledge that these
services will not be delivered for a number
of years due to infrastructure constraints.
Yet the pace of the outside world presents
service designers with a critical question:
how can we expect these services to remain
viable in such a dynamic 60 second world?
Recent Serco research suggests that some
organisations that deliver crucial services
to the public are ill-suited to innovate
and improve their offerings to citizens.
Aside from constraints relating to policy,
infrastructure and finances, a key issue lies
in the design stage of these services. There
is a lack of confidence in what may be called
the ‘traditional service blueprint’—a one
dimensional approach to service design that
does not take into account future changes in
behaviour.
Are organisations designing their ICT
systems from a user perspective or through
the limits of the technologies available to
them? For service designers, there is a
simple question: are they spending the
majority of their time designing a process or
a service? If the answer is the former, then
something needs to change.
Encouragingly, leading organisations are
exhibiting a desire to change and reinvent
the concept of service design, and a new
approach is now emerging.
Graphic: What happens online in 60 seconds?
Qmee. 2013. Available at: http://blog.qmee.com/
qmee-online-in-60-seconds/.
[Accessed 02 August 2013].
What happens online
in 60 seconds?
6

7. 7
WHY? Truly innovative
services come
from understanding
unanticipated issues, rather
than just the issues you’re
already planning for.
WHY? We must challenge
ourselves to define a
genuinely new approach in
order to delight customers
and create loyalty to the
service.
WHY? A design without a
plan is no use to anybody,
and balancing the two is
critical. Remember to make
it easy for your employees
to embrace change.
WHY? Platforms can
accelerate the benefits
of change—so make
sure they are flexible and
adaptable for the future.
HOW? Get to know what
really challenges citizens.
Ask difficult questions
and listen carefully to the
answers.
HOW? Re-imagine the
service blueprint based on
findings.
Think: How can our service
help people in new ways?
HOW? In tandem with
design, investigate how
your new service blueprint
could be seamlessly
delivered. Test and tweak.
HOW? Use the most
suitable platforms to deliver
change—but align
technology with strategy,
commercial drivers, people
and processes.
A new look at the
service design process

8. 8
To implement a good citizen experience in a commercially viable
way, we need to shift the way we look at services—where citizens
are viewed as customers, with diverse desires and needs. There is
an array of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies that
can be applied in order to gain insights about the preferences and
motivations of people who use specific services; yet understanding
does not always have to be done through expensive market
research.
The rise of new communication channels like social media gives
new opportunities to gain insights into how people feel. Many years
ago an unhappy customer may have written a letter of complaint and
waited weeks to receive a reply; now people can get their problems
resolved much quicker through an online forum or platform such as
Facebook or Twitter. Whilst this exposure to new channels and touch
points generates new challenges to respond to, it also provides
opportunities to gather a wealth of data about what drives and
motivates, or detracts and deters citizens.
citizens
UNDERSTAND
1 2 3 4

9. 9
what the service should look like
Based on the insights generated in step one, new
ideas can be sketched out in the form of journey
blueprints across various touch points.
These blueprints should be used to inform service
design; but they are not the answer in themselves.
Service design is a multi-faceted continuum of
functions informed by various inputs. It is a complex
process that takes time, patience and careful
consideration of key factors.
In a transformation project, the complexity is
exacerbated because current delivery considerations
often conflict with desired and future needs.
Particular conflicts can stall service enhancements;
however the intelligent designer should be assured
that resolutions are within their power and reassured
that reductions in the costs of service justify the
difficulties associated with moving to new operating
environments. In more complex projects, a clear and
unambiguous view of what needs to be undertaken is
therefore critical.
At right, we set out a helicopter view of the key
elements for consideration by service designers.
DESIGN
1 2 3 4

10. Good companies accept change; great companies
understand how to deliver it. In one recent case study,
a railway company invested to expand their sales
channels into mobile phones. One challenge was that
the company kept opening new channels without closing
any old ones, leading to a significant organisational effort
being expounded on ever-increasing channels.
The organisation did not consider the implications of
delivery during the design process.
In tandem with design, we need to understand delivery—
balancing the two is critical. Implementation should not
negatively impact existing service delivery standards.
Plans must be developed to cope with change, including
contingencies where necessary. Transition periods must
be clearly thought through and account for the adverse
effects that change programs inevitably produce.
In particular, organisations must look after the people
who they depend on to deliver the services. They are,
after all, the ones we depend on to deal with citizens,
and to gather information and analyse it. Without
them, service designers cannot effectively plan without
understanding how employees will deliver those services
and manage engagement with service users.
Before, during and after the design process, employees
will extract critical information from citizen behaviour
and use it to inform how services can be reconfigured
or replaced to produce better outcomes. Organisations
must therefore provide their employees with excellent
infrastructure and technology platforms to engage
people. Everyone needs a good set of tools.
There are three principles which designers should follow
when planning change. When undertaken together, they
strengthen the chance of success.
10
for change
PREPARE
• Foster a culture of openness
Implement feedback mechanisms that enable good
information flows to better inform decision-making
• Engage employees in the details
Engage a wide set of stakeholders from across the
organisation who can give an accurate reflection of
delivery concerns
• Build a collaborative governance framework
Create a formalised governance framework that
builds confidence and emphasises collaboration,
from executive level right through to delivery
1 2 3 4

11. platforms to deliver
Service designers are able to use an ever-increasing array
of platforms with which to deliver change. For service-
oriented organisations, the single biggest platform area is
technology. It should be viewed as an enabling function
that gathers and collates information, allowing users to map
trends and better understand citizen requirements; however
it should also be understood through the prism of usability
and flexibility in delivery. An over-reliance on technology
without an understanding of how it is being applied can lead
to weakness in the long term operation of an organisation.
Dynamic platforms can be utilised to deliver better services,
enable innovation and keep track of interactions;
yet service designers should be wary of inherent challenges
that exist in the delivery of technology platforms. On too
many occasions technology is seen as a silver bullet in
addressing structural reform issues. Surveys have reported
that more than 30% of technology failures are as a result of
poor planning3
.
There are numerous examples of large systems being
procured outside of proper planning and controls
associated with people and processes. Without clear
strategic direction, and an understanding of how the
systems will facilitate change at a detailed level, service
implementation can fail. In the worst cases, procurement
costs have doubled or tripled at implementation phase
because the natural limitations of the systems being
procured were misunderstood from the outset. The
consequences of mistakes at this stage can be profound;
affecting finances, operations and reputation. When
undertaken outside of a cohesive service design process,
technology can reduce a company’s ability to compete.
Successful projects have clear vision, strategy, commercial
drivers, and clarity around the value that is intended to be
derived. When undertaken in conjunction with changes in
people and processes—and critically an understanding
of user needs—technology projects can be seen as
wider transformation projects, helping an organisation to
overcome key challenges and realign its operations to
deliver better services.
Service designers should see technology as an evolving
function that changes as the needs and behaviours of
services users change. Future needs can be difficult
to forecast, yet those companies that are built to meet
the future are those that best succeed. For service
designers, different platforms can be excellent options for
delivering change. Success lies in the planning stages—
understanding what the citizen wants, designing the service
around that, then building a plan to prepare for change.
UTILISE
11
3
For more information see http://www.galorath.com/wp/software-project-failure-costs-billions-better-estimation-planning-can-help.php
1 2 3 4

12. ‘NYC 311’ is celebrated as a leading example of how to take a vision and
deliver it. New York’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg wanted to offer New
Yorkers convenience in how they use their services through an effective,
efficient and appropriate new government service which not only engaged
the public, but brought together the different services provided by the City of
New York under one all-purpose facility. All New Yorkers would have to do is
call 311.
This new service design and technology initiative became one of his biggest
achievements as mayor. It has now been running for 10 years and cities
around the world have looked to this case study to improve their own service
design for their communities and citizens. We have since seen excellent new
platforms delivered by organisations such as Service Ontario and Service
Canada.
In the creation of a digital roadmap for New York, the public now has easy
access to government services and information whilst maintaining high
levels of customer service. 311 also provides service designers with an
insight into ways to improve government through accurate, consistent
measurement and analysis of service delivery citywide. 311 has received
more than 158 million calls and logged around 7 million visits on its website
to date since 2003.
Case study:
NYC 311
Image: Sunrise across 34th Street, Manhattan, by Joiseyshowaa on
Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/30201239@N00/3116951494/)
12

13. 13
Case study:
Glasgow Digital City
Glasgow City Council is the largest council in Scotland,
serving 600,000 citizens. It is a Council with a vision – to
grow the local economy and improve the lives of its citizens.
In January 2013, the Council was announced the winning
contender in the UK Government Technology Strategy
Board’s ‘Future Cities Demonstrator’ competition. The
Council won the £24m Future Cities grant to showcase
how UK cities can make the most of new technologies by
integrating and connecting city systems. The Council is now
developing the Glasgow Digital City Management System
that will enable monitoring of city systems from traffic
lights, CCTV, journey planning and public services. It will
integrate city systems and data across multiple agencies for
the delivery of improved and responsive city services, and
assist in wider engagement with Glaswegians.
The City Dashboard will be the common city operational
management platform detailing a consistent view of how
Glasgow functions as a city. Information will be pulled
through in the form of ‘widgets’ from the Glasgow Integrated
Operations Centre, as well as from service areas such as
transport, street lighting, energy efficiency and active travel
spatial analysis.
This will help to inform the design and delivery of
infrastructure for sustainable modes of public transport and
travel services. The City Dashboard will enable monitoring
footfall and retail demand to see which parts of Glasgow
are doing well and also which areas need more support.
For example, it will allow members of the public to plan a
shopping outing by judging where is busiest or quietest in
the city.
Serco will support this initiative through our joint venture
with the Council, called ‘ACCESS’, to deliver architectural
assurance, procurement of IT and services and programme
management of the Operations Centre. The ACCESS
contract has created a corporate centre of excellence for the
delivery of ICT and property services to develop a number
of transformational vehicles that will support service reform
in line with the Council’s key objectives. The Glasgow Digital
City model provides the world’s leading cities a roadmap on
the engagement of citizens in a digitally enabled world. In
the months and years to come, many cities will break out
of their traditional service models to provide citizens with
access to relevant and timely information on living in their
communities.
Image: The armadillo sleeps, by O Palsson on Flickr
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/45713725@N00/7823504818/)
13

14. 14
In conclusion:
A new blueprint for service design
The ways in which people engage and communicate
with their services have not remained stagnant; they are
constantly changing. Direct communication with citizens
can be made within seconds through an increasing
variety of mediums. Whilst this does present challenges
for established businesses, a greater amount of
information should enable service delivery organisations
to better plan the services they provide. Indeed,
policy-makers and service designers should be
ambitious in their visions. The benefits of success
outweigh the dangers of complacency.
Although the future is uncertain, we can be assured of
one thing: whilst people will articulate their views and
make their voices heard in an increasing variety of ways,
it is up to organisations to react, or risk being left behind.
The application of the new blueprint for service design
we have articulated should prepare service designers,
and ensure they are designing services fit for the future,
and practicable today.

15. 1515

16. Why did we write this document?
There has been a major shift in how people interact with the
services they use, and we want to help your organisation to
adapt to meet those changes. We understand the nature of
change and what it means for citizens, employees and
organisations.
At Serco, our people are delivering critical front-line and back
office services for millions of people in Australia and across
the world. Our commitment is to bring service to life.
We can help citizens receive better services, and ensure
change is delivered in a cost-effective and efficient way.
For more discussion, debate and thought leadership, go to
http://www.serco-ap.com.au/our-insights/
or get in touch with us at
thoughtleadership@serco-ap.com.au
Compiled August 2013