KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 21 (Bernama) — Employees in the Civil Service sector are encouraged to cultivate design thinking approach in order to give the best services to the people.
Chief Executive Officer of Malaysia Innovation Agency (AIM), Mark Rozario, said it is the human-centred approach to innovation that employs multidisciplinary teams, flexible environments and a creative process to generate user-focused products, services or experiences.
“They (civil service employees) have to put themselves in the rakyat (people’s) shoes and ask ‘if I were them, what do I want?’, then come out with some ideas and test them with what we call rapid prototyping,” he said.
He said this to Bernama when met after making a presentation at the plenary session of the three-day Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management (CAPAM) 2014 biennial conference at the Putrajaya International Convention Centre here which ends Tuesday.
He explained that AIM through its Genovasi initiative, provided young professionals and graduates a chance to become Innovation Ambassadors, who will be catalysts for change to spread the concepts, best practices and applications of innovations in both public and private sector.
Rozario said that Genovasi is currently running two design thinking programmes: a three-day boot camp called The Design Thinking Bootcamp and the Innovation Ambassador Development Programme (IADP), which has part-time and full-time options.
“For the public sector, we are trying to get more ministries to embrace design thinking approach. Although it’s just a small step, but if all civil service employees embrace the approach, it will make a big difference,” he said.
He added that some ministries and agencies have introduced the approach in their programmes for public administration recruits.
“The Public Works Department is fully embracing design thinking. As for now, we can only recruit 1,000 people a year to go through this proramme and we’ll be working our way to all 36 ministries,” he said.
About 1,500 delegates from 53 countries attended the CAPAM biennial conference themed ‘Public Service Transformation: A New Conversation’organised in collaboration with the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) and the Commonwealth Secretariat.
–BERNAMA
