Changing Services: Clients, Quality, and Collaboration
Michael G. Prais, Ph.D., Northern Illinois University, 1993

6. The New User Services

User services is always changing due to internal and external innovations and pressures. It is a necessity to monitor these changes. New ideas about organizations can benefit us and we must change our perspectives, values, and assumptions. The ideas of Deming and Drucker include: Productivity is primarily quality not quantity. Productivity is effectively meeting client expectations. Products provide deferred services. Service is responsive, simple, accurate, and reliable. Work must be examined by the workers throughout production to find systematic deviations from client expectations. Workers are autonomous, responsible, accountable, and contributing to the organization. Managers are responsible for changing the organization to be effective through the selection of objectives and controls and the concentration of resources. Managers require worker participation in generating alternatives for their decision making.

These new ideas should be considered by to user service organizations because have suffered the same criticisms that manufacturing industries have. I think that we do and have always ascribed to some of these ideals, but to ascribe to Deming's precept of continuous improvement, we must encourage ourselves to do more. In implementing these changes: focus on minimal changes that are specific, realistic, and observable; and plan to observe the objective and evaluate the change after a predetermined period of time.

7. References


Originally published in Proceedings of the ACM User Services Conference XXI, 1993.
Copyright Association for Computer Machinery 1993
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association of Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission.