Bobby King
Case study: Service design for government AI
I worked with data scientists and a delivery team to impelement AI across a public sector body.
The brief
The Department of Business and Trade is a forward-looking government body. They have invested heavily in data and AI over the past ten years.
The AI department had collated ideas from across the organisation but they had limited resources to prioritise them and give the best ones to delivery teams to build.
What I did
Mapped the AI lab service and reviewed service outcomes
I created an 'inside out' service diagram for the AI lab. I based my approach on work done by a business analyst but created stages from a DBT staff member's point of view.
Working with the service design lead, I drew up a provisional plan for the next quarter for the AI teams.
I drew on Kate Tarling's The Service Organisation to use brief statements and a provisional (imperfect) plan to focus their thinking.
Experimented with continuous feedback mechanisms
For internal staff their 'front door' to the AI lab was the intranet. I worked with the performance analysis team to add surveys and to the intranet section to get continuous feedback.
Service designers are multidisciplinary: I used feedback on their application form to rewrite and reorganise their application form for new AI ideas.
They had a complicated triage process for deciding which AI ideas to take forward so I aligned this with the application form by giving them both the same five headings. I created a new intranet landing page to explain our process and used the same five headings.
The surveys we added turned out to have limited value as staff often ignored them. I issued follow-up emails to staff who had applied to the AI service. I then worked with a User Researcher to do more work with them to understand their pain points, goals and mental models.
The outcome
I left the AI Lab with service outcomes they could work towards in future and a way of continually improving their service using research.