18 February 2016
Stephen Osborne was a keynote speaker at this major annual Conference on public service delivery in Scotland. Organised by Mackay Hannah, this annual event is aimed at senior managers and leaders in public service organisations as well as key policy makers and politicians. The conference this year was focused upon achieving excellence in public service delivery.
Professor Osborne’s keynote focused upon the implications of treating public services as ‘services’ and upon using service theory to understand how to promote excellence in public service delivery. He argued that public service reform approaches of the last thirty years have been flawed in their understanding of the nature of public service delivery and this has led to their ultimate failure. They have tried to treat public services as products rather than services – yet a major body of research and experience talks directly to the ‘service’ component of public services.
At the centre of his presentation was the SERVICE Model for underpinning excellence in public services delivery, developed by Professor Osborne and his colleagues. At the heart of this model is a critique of the attempts of the last thirty years to reform public services delivery as if they were manufacturing firms. Instead it emphases the need to manage public service organisations as service firms and and to focus on the need to do-create value with their users and customers.
The model argues for public serve management to focus on seven dimensions in order to achieve service excellence: a service orientation, engaging with sustainable and resilient organisational management, investing in relationships, co-creating value with service users, open and collaborative innovation, understanding the centrality of co-production to public service delivery, and using user experience to promote effective public service reform.