a triarchy press publication
Managers as Designers in the Public Services: Beyond Technomagic by David Wastell
Date: 7th September 2011
No. of Pages: 220
Book type: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-908009-31-9
List Price: £25.00
Offer Price: £19.50
Kindle Versions: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com
Epub Version: available here
Public services under pressure
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.
Applying Design Thinking to IT in public services
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.
Click here to read the contents 
Contents
Design Matters for Public Managers
- Paradise lost: tales from the trenches
- The strange history of the ICS: a cautionary tale
- Theoretical interlude
- Paradise regained: there is an alternative
- Technomagic
- The sociology of magic
- Magical thinking and the ICS
- Design - the rescue remedy
Managing, Designing and Public Sector Reform
- Historical prologue
- (Re)enter the manager-as-designer
- The reform of public services
- New Public Management
- NPM and managerialism: RIP?
- Managing to improve public services
- Public Sector Reform: designing services for public value
- Design in the Big Society
- Grass-roots innovation
- A case study from the trenches
- Theoretical coda: design as bricolage, leaders as tricksters
The Knowledge-Base of Design
- Evidence-based management - the very idea!
- Examples: Goal setting theory and IT strategic alignment
- Sociotechnical design
- Principles of sociotechnical design
- Two examples of STSD
- Post-script: STSD and the ICS
- Soft Systems Methodology
- Systems thinking - Senge and Seddon
- Borrowing from software engineering: user-centred design
- Homo Faber and the abundance of technique
Design in Action
- IT - commodity or competitive weapon?
- Business Process Reengineering
- BPR in the public sector
- Redesigning public services: A tale of two cities
- A brief history of the GMAS computer project
- Evaluation
- Comparisons with LAS: management lessons
- Epilogue
- SPRINT: a design and innovation methodology
- General precepts - best practice for design
- An overview of SPRINT
- Case Studies
- Innovation at Salford: a curate's egg
- Small is beautiful
Implications for Education, Research and Policy
- Learning design and building organisational capacity
- Implications for Management Education and Research
- Teaching EBM
- Implications for Reform: Policy by Design
- Magic in the Risk Society: the Vetting and Barring debacle
- Reform as learning
- Reforming reform
- Beyond technomagic - reprise
- Make kitsch the enemy
Bibliography
Appendix 1
- A conversation with a CIO on alignment
Appendix 2
- Methodological potpourri
- The Viable Systems Model
- VSM in action: a case study
- Scenario-based design
- Agile Software Development with Scrum
Appendix 3
- SPRINT Accreditation and the Practicum
Appendix 4
- Binary Diagnostic Tests and Bayes Theorem
- Bayes Theorem
- Index
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.
Readership
Managers as Designers in the Public Services is written for public sector managers, for policy makers and for researchers and academics equally.
It will also appeal to any student of business with an interest in the public sector and is particularly relevant to MBA programmes as well as Masters and Diploma courses in Management and Business Studies and Information Systems.
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