Thinking in Services

Implementing bold policies or strategies can place enormous stress and strain on human capital and financial assets. Under pressure, when service enterprises fail to find the necessary breakthroughs, they often react by scaling down their ideas and ambitions. Risk-aversion sets in and sets up dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and disruption. There is a way to break free from that vicious cycle: Encoding policy and strategy into design, and expressing the design of a service in the form of code. Design as code can enable fast and parallel execution of policy and strategy while reducing coordination costs across sales, innovation, procurement and development teams. The book introduces a powerful design language that appeals as much to the creative professionals and programmers, as it appeals to accountants, engineers and lawyers, with the belief of raising the bar by lowering the barriers. Raising the bar on design requires multidisciplinary efforts that are easier without the usual language barriers. For that purpose, the book introduces a system and method that goes beyond blueprints and customer journey maps to broaden the appeal of service design in the minds of the strategists, economists, and budget analysts.