Public facing government services a business ecosystem perspective

Government agencies provide a wide variety of services to their constituents. Many services have a public facing component, where the agency or its authorized proxy interface directly with clients. Unlike the private sector, the design of public facing federal services is not subject to market competitive forces, which contributes to reuse of existing designs and a risk-avoidance posture towards change. In addition, there is often little formal systems engineering or process engineering conducted to evaluate current services or potential new services. Transparent and repeatable processes for developing service design options, comparing and evaluating among a suite of service options, testing and forecasting service outcomes, and measuring services for continuous improvement are often lacking in public agencies. The large scale and wide scope of government services, affecting all citizens at various life stages and social conditions while subject to persistent policy and technology change, pose significant complex system challenges to assure cost-effective performance. The contribution of this work is to present a framework and Service Systems Engineering (SSE) approach for understanding and enhancing the process of developing and deploying public facing government services, drawing from Service Science and Service Systems Engineering (SSE) methods. The results show there are few distinct public facing government services, and few classes of data exchanged in these services. These results suggest opportunities for harmonization and standardization of business processes across agencies. Service offerings can be modeled using analytical methods and computer simulation techniques such as system dynamics and agent-based modeling, allowing for a variety of “what-if” scenarios to be considered. The use of these techniques allow agency service designers to apply systems thinking to better understand options for improvements to future public facing governmen- services in a Government Services Ecosystem that includes systems-of-systems and complex systems integration challenges.