Service design – a matter for international security

The UK service design consultancy live|work is working with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) to design better community security services for humanitarian and development organisations. A news article on their site provides more background on this pioneering application of service design to security related operations in the UN.:

“UNIDIR’s Security Needs Assessment Protocol project is developing a “programme design service”. The service will provide critical, and ethnographically informed security knowledge to the UN and other organisations that are working to rebuild post-conflict societies, or assist with development and humanitarian activities around the world.” […]

“Shifting the focus from the implementation of top-down policy instructions to bottom-up “user focused” service design requires a fundamental, and often radical re-imaging of the UN’s work at the community level.”

Another background article on the live|work site, entitled Data is the New Oil part 1: Business Information, Ben Reason and Jeremy Walker show how it is services that will make business information indispensable to organisations.

“We need to refine the data into services. And these services need to meet the needs and issues of the businesses that information providers hope to sell to. The issue is that, whilst the geek in all of us gets very excited about raw data, business customers are more interested in the immediate challenges that they face. These challenges will be things like effective marketing campaigns, back office productivity or asset management etc. Data owners need to think about how to use their data to help fix their customers’ challenges rather than focusing on the number of data sets they can sell.”