Improving Service Delivery with Research

Greetings from National ICT Australia (NICTA) in Canberra, where James Gibson has organized a asked workshop on “Inventing the Future of Service Driven Enterprises" with the Service Science Society. One point to be clarified is that the "services" being discussed here are those such as: climate services, green services, financial services, health services and water management services. Some of these will be delivered via a computer server, but most will involve personnel and equipment, not just a web based "service".

I did a quick search and could only find 11 formal research papers on "Service Driven Enterprise", out of the 54,000 documents on-line on the topic. In my postgraduate course "ICT Sustainability", I have one weekly module on "Enterprise Architecture".

The services which interest me are education and research supervision. As with many other services, these have been delivered as a craft based on techniques developed by trial and error and could benefit by a systematic analysis of what the customer wants and needs and how this could be effectively delivered.

In his presentation Mr Peter Alexander, brought up the issue of the role of innovation in government. This sparked an interesting discussion of the role of the public and private sectors. Peter mentioned the book "Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets" by Costas Markides at the LSE. Perhaps these techniques could be applied to the public service. The ACT Government is currently sponsoring "Innovation ACT" to teach university students how to take an idea and make it a product.

Workshop:Inventing the Future of Service Driven Enterprises

Date: Friday, August 31, 9:00am – 5:15pm ...

Canberra

Workshop Description

The Service Science Society invites you to a workshop where we argue that current difficulties in large IT and modernisation projects are not solvable with continuous improvement. A transformative approach is required, driven by a vision to invent the future, created through action, and informed by directed research. We present some fundamental architectural concepts which we believe will contribute to this transformation, and which differentiate it from previous failed attempts. To achieve the transformation we need impact through capability building and directed research to support the transition to Service Driven Enterprises. The approach extends to the design and building of custom cloud execution engines, tools and methods. This requires a different business model and research approach than generally used in Australia. Finally, we argue that this change is coming, and a panel considers how we can act now in order to place Australia at the forefront of enabling Service Driven Enterprises.

Agenda

• 9:00am – 9:15am Introduction - Prof Aditya Ghose, University of Wollongong
• 9:15am – 9:45pm Necessity for major change - Prof Aditya Ghose, University of Wollongong
• 9:45am – 10:15am Challenges in Delivery of Government Products and Services – Mr Peter Alexander, Treasury
• 10:15am – 10:45am What Desirable Characteristics do we look for - Bridging the Creativity to Engineering Gap – Mr Chris Thorne, ATO
• 10:45am – 11:15am Morning Tea (provided)
• 11:15am – 11:45am What Desirable Characteristics do we look for - Enterprise Architecture - where are we now? - Dr Saul Caganoff - Sixtree
• 12:45pm – 12:30pm Inventing the Service Driven Enterprise - Transformative Change Needed - Mr James Gibson*, ANU
• 12:30pm – 1:10pm Lunch (provided)
• 1:10pm – 2:10pm Discussion Session: Understanding the Service Driven Enterprise What is an SDE and what’s needed to build it? - Dr Liam O'Brien*
• 2:10pm – 2:40pm Building Service Driven Enterprise Capability - Building the capability for timely innovation, engineering and capability development to support SDE client transitions - Dr Clive Boughton*, Software Improvements
• 2:40pm – 3:10pm The Business Case for Change - Mr Pascal Rabbath, S-3 Consulting
• 3:10pm – 3:40pm Services Research and Direction at CSIRO - Dr Darrell Williamson, CSIRO
• 3:40pm – 4:00pm Afternoon Tea (provided)
• 4:00pm – 5:10pm Panel - Achieving the Future - What practical actions should we take? What are the next steps? Chair: Dr Mike Sargent, M.A.Sargent & Associates Panellists: TBD (representatives from government, industry and academia)
• 5:10pm – 5:15pm Workshop Wrap-up and Close - Prof Aditya Ghose, University of Wollongong

Registration Required