Collecting data for service design in public offices: a case study

Service design has to do with making services meet the user's needs. Service design can be used to improve an existing service or to create a new one. We conducted a study aimed to further the concept of service design through an investigation of the situation of teachers and workers at one of the State Secretariats of Education in Mexico regarding the management of administrative procedures. The complexity of a procedure depends on many factors, such as time to obtain a resolution, trips to the management offices, varied requirements, physical documentation, and process clarity. Commonly, governments are asked to provide these procedures more efficiently. In order to make progress towards our goal, we applied 6500 surveys to teachers of elementary education levels of the Secretariat. We detected difficulties related to the lack of communication bridges, the lack of tools to facilitate the process of starting a procedure, the high costs for the management of procedures, and the performance of the Secretariat in this field.