Meet the service designer: Varun Malhotra

A guest editor for this issue of Touchpoint, Varun Malhotra is a Principal with Changeis (www.changeis.com), a Washington, D.C. based management consulting firm that focuses on the public sector. Through engagements with large US government agencies, he has championed service design techniques as an effective way of engaging stakeholders and aligning strategy to operations. Here, Jesse Grimes speaks with Varun to hear his thoughts and experiences on the theme of citizen-centred government.

Through your consulting work in Washington, you have an insight and influence in how some techniques borrowed from the field of service design are being used in US government. From your perspective, can you tell us more about the role and use of service design in the areas in which you work?

Indeed Jesse. First, I want to take an opportunity to acknowledge you, Birgit, Claire, and many others behind Touchpoint for the excellent work you are doing to highlight the importance of this profession. It has been a great experience to collaborate on this edition and I hope our readers get a lot of value from it.

To answer your question about the role and use of service design in our space, I think it is absolutely necessary and honestly a key differentiator for us (did I say that out too loud!). We are in a perfect storm, with increasing requirements and a challenging fiscal situation. In almost all parts of the government, from healthcare to air traffic control, the need for personalised, mobile, and on-demand services is rising, while the budgetary pressures are so severe that ‘sequestration’ or automatic spending cuts have been instituted. For me, a key component of the solution is service design thinking.

Inevitably, our customers are primarily focused on gaining efficiencies, while enhancing their service offerings. In these cases we have resorted to service design thinking, tools, and techniques to create effective solutions. For example, we are engaged in helping transform the supply chain that supports the US aviation infrastructure. There is a tremendous amount that goes into operating over 66,000 facilities that enable air traffic control and we use service design techniques such as affinity diagrams, simulations, stakeholder maps, shadowing, etc. to develop effective strategies.

We are also seeing a growing trend towards functional realignments in the public sector through the establishment of centres of excellence or "shared services" organisations, and an important aspect to keep in mind is the applicable use of service design both with an organisation's external customers and its internal customers.

Can you tell us some more about the work you're doing with the Innovategov.org platform?

InnovateGov is our platform to foster innovation in the public sector. It is a corporate social responsibility effort for our company, Changeis, where we have provided the seed funding and are continuing the initial set of editorial work. The goal is to create a space to share thought leadership from across disciplines and industries that inform public sector managers about best practices that can be applied towards enabling more efficient and effective governments. We think innovation is not only about creating something new, but also finding creative and cross-disciplinary solutions based on existing practices and applications.

I think that service design is absolutely necessary and honestly a key differentiator for us

For those interested in contributing and collaborating with us, please feel free to contact us or visit the site at www.innovategov.org.

Compared to smaller countries with government-focused service design issues, the sheer size of the US government must make it difficult to implement any real change in service provision. What advice do you have for those trying to bring about change and make government more citizencentred?

The key piece of insight is to know who the customer is and making sure their expectations are met.

Lastly, you've had a chance to see examples of service design-led initiatives from outside the USA, from the many contributions we've had to this issue of Touchpoint. What have you learned that you'll take with you and apply to your ongoing work?

Overall, I have been impressed with the quality of content in the journal and took something away from each. I learned a lot and have already begun to incorporate some ideas into our current work. The use of experience mapping and developing citizen communities to drive service design are just some of my key takeaways.

Varun Malhotra is a founder and principal at Changeis Inc, where he oversees all aspects of strategy and service delivery operations for the company, and consults with senior management across Changeis’ government clients. Varun holds a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from Georgetown University and lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia, USA.