The source of an idea: Front Office – Back Office

Excellent work by the ‘squire to the giants’ about a 1978 piece on ‘service systems thinking’ which is so… unsystemic… it is amazing – and explains so much.

Service designers, using the concept of ‘front-of-house’ and ‘backstage’, take heed!

“…the less direct contact the customer has with the service system, the greater the potential of the system to operate at peak efficiency…”

Squire to the Giants

An office I’ve read a number of John Seddon’s books over the years and they are ‘sprinkled’ with critiques of a range of conventional management ‘fads and fashions’. One of his key critiques is of a particular 1978 HBR article written by a Richard B. Chase, titled ‘Where does the customer fit in a service operation?’

The article title sounds relatively innocuous, but Seddon puts it forward as having been a catalyst for the splitting up of service systems into ‘front office – back office’ functions…because it will (according to Chase) make them much more efficient.

Now, whilst (I believe that) I’ve understood Seddon’s critique of the splitting up of service systems into a myriad of (supposedly) specialised components…and the hugely damaging sub-optimisation that this has caused¹, I was never quite sure as to the level of ‘blame’² that could be levelled at Chase’s article – mainly because I…

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antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:46 am on October 29, 2018

HBR article link – https://hbr.org/1978/11/where-does-the-customer-fit-in-a-service-operation
- antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:49 am on October 29, 2018
  
  (my further comment on the original blog:
  
  ooh – he writes a re-evaluation in
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13059823_Where_Does_the_Customer_Fit_in_a_Service_Operation (and here https://docplayer.net/214746-Revisiting-where-does-the-customer-fit-in-a-service-operation.html) and a googleable pdf, but I don’t know how to extract the url)
  – do that one too? In this piece, he explicitly calls on ‘open systems theory’ and again talks about batching etc being ‘self evident(ly good)’
  
  what is interesting to me is that I do believe that there’s an important distinction between ‘high-touch’ and ‘low-touch’ services (he calls ‘pure services’, ‘mixed services’, and ‘quasi-manufacturing’), but whereas I would say they (two types of demand – customer intimacy and transactional services) are indeed very hard to manage in the same operating model – but not assuming ‘front and back office’…
  
  A more sympathetic local government read (focusing perhaps more on that key point of managing different ‘level of customer engagement services’ differently) is here https://localgovernmentutopia.com/2015/02/26/41-where-does-the-customer-fit-into-a-service-operation-a-brief-discussion-of-the-work-of-richard-b-chase/
  
  There’s a good example here of someone trying to ‘do the wrong thing righter’ in this response to that article – assuming ‘the frontline’ is a separate world of its own but trying to mitigate the damage:
  http://customerthink.com/where-does-the-employee-fit-in-a-service-operation/
  )