Managers as Designers in the Public Services: Beyond Technomagic

Citation

Elbanna, A. (2012), "Managers as Designers in the Public Services: Beyond Technomagic", Information Technology & People, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 235-236. https://doi.org/10.1108/09593841211232721

In this book, David Wastell insightfully weaves different strands of knowledge from different disciplines to provide a convincing argument for the applicability and value of the design thinking particularly for the public sector. The first chapter of the book presents the compelling case of the Integrated Children's System in the UK that contributed to the failure of the child protection system to correctly diagnose and treat the case of a 17‐month old boy which led to his eventual brutal death. The chapter elegantly draws from different strands of IS research and surprisingly from the sociology of magic to explain that the failure of the Integrated Children System could have been avoided if the managers involved viewed their roles as designers who need to be informed by evidences provided by research and previous experiences in developing these type of systems. This chapter is enjoyable to read and could provide MSc and new PhD students with insight on the main issues in the IS field.

In the second chapter, Wastell provides a wider account of management in the public sector beyond the limited focus on IS. He argues for the need for a relevant public management theory, practical tools for managers, and “an ironic perspective”! He states: “The need for an ironic perspective is also welcome; irony is the perfect antidote to magical thinking!” p. 51. In the third chapter he critically reviews different strands of IS literature including socio‐technical design, IT/business strategic alignment, SSM, systems thinking, and user‐centred design. He argues that these well‐established theories could provide the knowledge‐base that should inform organisation design and the movement towards evidence‐based management. In the fourth chapter, he presents an extended case study of successful service redesign in the public sector. He contrasts the classic case of the failure of the London Ambulance Service computer assisted despatch system in 1992 with the successful case of Greater Manchester Ambulance Service system in 1993/1994. However this chapter analysed these interesting cases, it also provided description of SPRINT, which is a systems development methodology that was developed at Salford.

The fifth chapter is thought provoking. It brings design science, evidence‐based practice and managing‐as‐designing together to discuss how they feed into each other and the implications of this connectivity on education, research and policy. In this chapter, Wastell challenges the current state in management education and invites a profound shift in the mindset of educators and researchers. He argues that there is no point of an education system that does not produce evidence‐based practitioners. He also invites a new paradigm in education where managers are educated as researchers so they graduate as evidence‐based practitioners who can carry out research and experiments to suit the new shift to evidence‐based management. Wastell urges researchers to take the design view seriously and agreed with Van Aken (2005) that design science is the production of field‐tested and grounded “general knowledge linking an intervention or artefact with an expected outcome in a certain field of application” but these rules should not be used as instructions or recipes. Practitioners should rather translate them to suit their specific problem through designing specific variants of it. This requires research repositories that collect and disseminate the accumulated current research on topics. However, he recognises the practical difficulty of doing that considering the current publication scheme and publishing system that only accepts new ideas and theories. He proposes the Web as a possible solution to enable the accumulation of such repositories outside the traditional publishing system.

Regarding policy, Wastell sets out the case for a different approach to the development of public policy informed by design thinking. He argues that “A genuinely evidence‐based approach should be adopted, with critical and balanced appraisal of relevant research, actively guarding against confirmation bias by seeking out evidence which challenge core assumptions” (p. 162). He invites policy makers to empirically engage with issues of concern listening to professional and citizens and wittingly describe this position as “a little ethnography goes a long way!”. These ideas are thought provoking. A question remains about what sort of evidences should be used at different times and how policy makers and managers will select and use these evidences. It seems easier to find the relevant set of evidences after the fact but it might be challenging for designers to decide on the relevance of evidences before embarking on the task.

The book is enjoyable and grabbing balancing deep academic thinking with accessibility of the presentation and arguments. Wastell with his wit writing style and ability to simplify and merge many ideas constructs interesting arguments for a design approach not only to IS management practices but also for management thinking, education and scholarship. The introduction of the sociology of magic into the IS thinking provides a novel approach to understand technology determinism in practice. The book is valuable for policy makers, new IS researchers, and students who want to have a bird view of the field, its key ideas, and benefit from a comprehensive bibliography as well as for established scholars who are concerned with the state of knowledge and education in the IS field.