Service Models in the Public Sector — Supporting Information
Kuno Schedler and Ali Asker Guenduez (Yearbook of Swiss Administrative Sciences) · article · 2024-12-31 Reader 🖥️
Forty-five named patterns for organizing and delivering public services — most adapted from Gassmann et al.'s private-sector Business Model Navigator, some invented specifically for government — are each already in documented use by real governments worldwide, demonstrating that public-sector service delivery can be systematically redesigned using a catalogable set of reusable organizing templates rather than treated as a series of one-off administrative choices.
practical · expository — This is the Supporting Information (appendix) accompanying the main paper 'Service Models in the Public Sector' (Schedler & Guenduez, Yearbook of Swiss Administrative Sciences, 2024), not the paper's argument itself. The Reader capture mangled the title into row 2 of its first table ('2 Affiliation Your success is my success'), which triggered this extraction to verify the real topic. The SI has no argumentative prose of its own — it is a taxonomy: a reproduced 55-item private-sector business-model table, a note on the workshop card format used with experts, and a 45-entry catalog of public-sector 'service models,' each with a one-line 'operating principle' and two real-world government examples. The practical thrust (this is meant as usable guidance for redesigning public service delivery) is inherited from the abstract of the main paper, which this SI supports with evidence rather than states directly.
Structure
| Part | Role |
|---|---|
| Part A — Table SI A.1: the 55 private-sector business models of Gassmann et al. (2020), reproduced as name + one-line description (e.g. 'Affiliation — Your success is my success'). | context / baseline vocabulary |
| Part B — description of the two-sided 'service model cards' used in expert workshops (front/back format, referenced by a figure). | methodology note |
| Part C — 45 numbered service models, each with an 'operating principle' and two international real-world examples (90 examples total, spanning ~30 countries and all levels of government). | evidence |
Key terms
- Service model
A named, general pattern for how a government organizes and delivers a specific public service, defined by a one-sentence 'operating principle' and validated with real examples — a discrete, catalogable unit, not a loose description of practice. - Operating principle
A one-sentence generalized statement of a service model's underlying logic or purpose — functions like a pattern's 'Intent' in the Alexander/Gang-of-Four sense, but here purely descriptive, with no accompanying forces, trade-offs, or applicability conditions attached. - Service model card
A two-sided card (front/back) representing one service model, used as a discussion artifact in workshops with experts — evidence the researchers treated each model as a discrete, teachable, transferable unit rather than only a descriptive label in a paper.
Propositions
- explicitEach of the 45 public-sector service models identified in the study is illustrated by at least two real, documented examples of governments (national, regional, or municipal) around the world already implementing it.conf: high
- explicitA meaningful subset of the 55 private-sector business models catalogued by Gassmann et al. (2020) reappear, sometimes under the same or a near-identical name (Auction, Barter, Crowdfunding, Open source, Flat rate, Rent Instead of Buy, Revenue Sharing), as directly transferable patterns for public-sector service delivery.conf: high
- implicitNaming and cataloguing service-delivery mechanisms as discrete 'models' — each with a name, a one-line operating principle, and examples — is itself a more useful unit of analysis for organizational learning and cross-country diffusion than an unstructured description of what individual governments do.conf: medium
- implicitPractices developed for maximizing profit under competitive private-market conditions (e.g. auction mechanics, pay-what-you-want pricing, performance-based contracting) can be translated into public-sector service delivery — with its different objective function of public value, equity, and universal access — by relabeling and lightly adapting the operating principle, without needing to re-derive the underlying mechanism from scratch.conf: medium
- explicitGovernment service delivery is diverse enough in practice that a single real case — e.g. Spain's centralized organ-transplant system, or Phoenix's volunteer neighborhood patrols — can be read as an instance of a general, transferable pattern ('Orchestrator', 'Self-Service') rather than a one-off local solution specific to its country's institutions.conf: high
- implicitA catalog entry consisting of a name, a one-sentence operating principle, and two illustrative examples is treated as sufficient documentation for a service model to be considered actionable or replicable by other governments — no additional guidance (forces, trade-offs, pre-conditions for success, or failure modes) is offered or implied to be necessary.conf: high
Arguments
Public-sector organizations can deliberately choose from a defined menu of proven service models to redesign how they deliver a given service, rather than inventing delivery mechanisms from first principles each time. strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- 45 distinct, named service models have been identified.
- Each model is backed by at least two documented real-world government examples from different countries.
Implicit premises:
- A pattern observed successfully in one governmental, cultural, or legal context is presumptively transferable to another.
- Naming and standardizing a practice increases the likelihood that other governments will recognize and adopt it — diffusion follows codification.
Inferences:
- If the models are genuinely transferable, a decision framework for choosing among overlapping or competing models (e.g. 'Contracting Out' vs. 'Outsourcing', or 'Self-Service' vs. 'Object as point of sale') would be a natural next research product — yet no such framework appears anywhere in this document.
Narratives
- Spain's National Organization for Transplantation (ONT) centralizes donor identification, family liaison, and process coordination for the whole country, giving Spain the highest per-capita organ-donation rate in the world — used as the example of the 'Orchestrator' model.
→ Supports the proposition that a high-stakes, tightly regulated public function can be run successfully through a coordination-only government role rather than direct service delivery. - Bogotá's 'Bogotá Abierta' platform lets citizens like comments on policy questions and rewards the authors of the most popular comments with thematic prizes (e.g. soccer tickets for a comment on stadium security) — used as an example of 'Crowdsourcing'.
→ Supports the implicit proposition that private-sector, social-media-style engagement and reward mechanics can be imported into civic participation largely intact. - Ireland's COVID-19 credit guarantee scheme and California's small-business loan guarantee both have the state cover a majority share of private loans to businesses, independently, under the 'Guarantees' model.
→ Supports the proposition that the same abstract model (state de-risking private lending) recurs across very different welfare-state and political contexts, suggesting genuine convergent reuse rather than coincidence. - The UK's Department for International Development pays Rwanda's Ministry of Education directly based on the number of students who pass a standardized exam, under 'Payment by Results (performance-based contracting)'.
→ Extends the applicability of a private-sector performance-based-contracting logic beyond a single government serving its own citizens, into cross-border development aid.
Questions addressed
- ✅ Is there a general, reusable vocabulary for describing how governments organize and deliver public services, comparable to the business-model vocabulary already established for private firms?
Yes — the study proposes 45 named 'service models,' each with a one-line operating principle, largely adapting Gassmann et al.'s private-sector Business Model Navigator and adding government-native categories. - ✅ Are these public-sector service models merely theoretical constructs, or can they be found already operating in real governments?
Every model is paired with two documented real-world examples from different countries, establishing empirical grounding rather than pure typology. - ⭕ Given 45 partially overlapping options, how should a practitioner decide which service model fits a specific policy problem?
Gaps
- incompleteThe 45 service models are presented as a flat, unordered catalog — each with only a name, a one-sentence 'operating principle', and two examples — with no criteria (forces, trade-offs, applicability conditions, or a decision procedure) for choosing among models when several plausibly apply to the same problem (e.g. is a city building shared infrastructure better served by 'Orchestrator', 'Fractional Ownership', or 'Government as a Platform'?). This is a pattern CATALOG rather than a pattern LANGUAGE in the Alexander/Gang-of-Four sense — it lacks the connective tissue (Intent, Applicability, Consequences, forces resolved into a choice) that would make it genuinely actionable rather than merely descriptive.
Read next: This is the same 'taxonomy without a decision procedure' gap already flagged twice elsewhere in this corpus — in a 20-pattern AI agentic-loop catalog (extract-20-loop-design-patterns#g1) and in a 9-category agent-skills taxonomy (extract-claude-code-how-we-use-skills#g2) — suggesting it is a structural failure mode of catalog-style research generally, not specific to this domain. The main Schedler & Guenduez paper (not included in this SI) reportedly identifies five governmental roles — Activator, Yield Shaper, Funder, Guardian of Public Goods, Performance Designer — which might supply exactly this selection logic and would be the natural next read. - incompleteNone of the 90 examples documents a failed, reversed, or politically contested adoption of a service model — every case is presented as an apparent success. The catalog is silent on when these private-sector-derived mechanisms produce legitimacy costs, equity problems, or accountability gaps specific to government (e.g. an 'Auction' or 'Pay what you want' logic applied to a core public good could conflict with universal-access norms), so a practitioner reading this SI alone has no way to anticipate failure modes before choosing a model.
Read next: New Public Management critique literature on the marketization of public services and quasi-market legitimacy costs (e.g. work building on Christopher Hood's NPM analysis), or empirical follow-up studies tracking which of these 45 models were later abandoned or reversed. - uninformedThe SI never explicitly distinguishes which of the 45 public-sector models are direct imports from the 55-item private-sector Business Model Navigator (reproduced verbatim in Table A) versus which are genuinely public-sector-native categories with no private-sector counterpart (e.g. 'Contracting Out', 'Sanctions', 'Registrar', 'Regulator', 'Guarantees', 'Seed Money', 'Voucher', 'Waiver', 'Concession', 'Permits', 'Taxpayers' money'). Roughly a third of the 45 look novel to this study rather than adapted, but the document leaves readers to infer the split themselves rather than stating it.
Read next: The main paper's methodology section likely makes this provenance explicit — worth reading directly (Schedler & Guenduez, 'Service Models in the Public Sector,' Yearbook of Swiss Administrative Sciences, 2024) rather than inferring it from the SI's raw list.