Efficiency vs Efficacy Driven Service Portfolio Management in a Public Administration (Invited Paper)

The paper discusses a framework for managing the ICT-enabled planning of the service production process in a Public Administration (PA). PAs deliver a vast amount of services to citizens, each characterized by a production cost and a customer value. The production cost is the effort needed for the service production, it is influenced by several factors, e.g. By the degree of reuse in the service production process among services that are related by similarities. The customer value of services is usually measured as the trade off between benefits the service provides to customers and sacrifices customers have to deal with. In this paper we deal with a typical problem a PA must face in planning the service production process, namely to decide whether to privilege for a given budget efficiency (maximization of the number of services produced within the budget) or else efficacy (maximization of the overall customer value of services produced within the budget). The framework proposed in the paper is made up of (i) a model for the representation of a repository of services, (ii) a model for the definition of a service portfolio, and (iii) different approaches to be used in decision making for the achievement of efficiency vs. efficacy service production objectives. Two real life case studies are discussed to provide evidence of the impacts of the proposed framework.