Smart Governance to Mediate Human Expectations and Systems Context Interactions

Today we need to reframe our modes of thinking about governance as an issue to reformulate and introduce a new logic – the art of governmentality (Foucault, 1977, 1978) – to illustrate how decision makers assess the role of human resources for Service Systems viability. Our perspective, based on an integrated approach, examines the governance of human expectations, an analysis that implies focusing on processes by means of which government (i.e. decision makers or policy makers) acknowledge, evaluate, measure and graduate the expectations and aims of an organization’s stakeholders. From a Service System based view (SESYbv) – derived from Service Science Management and Engineering + Design (SSME+D) and the Viable Systems Approach (VSA), our conceptual hypotheses are: Hp1) Whether governance can be considered as the result of a continuous transformation of governance structure and practices according to the new business and societal liberalism; and Hp2) Whether Service Systems are: a) a dynamic configuration of resources; b) a set of value co-creation mechanism between suitable entities; c) an application of competencies-skills-knowledge any person(s) in job or stakeholder roles; d) an adaptive internal organization responding to the dynamic external environment; d) learning and feedback to ensure mutual benefits or value co-creation outcomes; e) a complex viable structure enable to respond to environmental change, where environmental change is mostly generated by other viable systems; Then Th) Smart Mechanism of Governance (SMG) to assess skills and mediate human expectations need a conceptual re-interpretation of government as an institution (structure) as well as practice (system) according to the new deal of governance in service systems: governmentality. In fact, smart governance, based on the new art of governmentality, has to be read as the result of political and economic and technological processes characterized by network cooperation and collaboration at every level of organizations and/or society. In other words, in searching for models to adopt for smart governance, it is important to reject the top-down logic, based on despotic and individual power, and to embrace the bottom-up logic – of networks of governance (Triantafillou, 2004; Piciocchi and Bassano, 2009) –, based on shared knowledge and trust. This change of perspective, is coherent with an (SESYbv) assumption: that the viability of service systems depends on the capability of its government to create and develop mechanisms of value co-creation and to guarantee systemic equifinality, based on a continuous process of mediation of stakeholder expectations (customers, citizens, etc…). According to SESYbv, in service systems, value co-creation and equifinality imply networking cooperation and collaboration, i.e. the new deal of governance (governmentality): multilevel governance systems (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992)