Service design

Eight ideas for tackling peak demand in public services

A neat example of lateral thinking (and of the power of data) in government service design – can we make services more efficient by spreading demand and so lowering the expense of peak capacity?

As the post itself acknowledges, that won’t magic away the demand pressures on public services, but it does illustrate the value of what we might call second level optimisation – one above trying to maximise efficiency of the current way of doing things, and one below a more radical reconceptualisation of the service as a whole. All three are necessary, but the one in the middle is perhaps the one most easily overlooked.

Eddie Copeland – Nesta