All countries around the world have got a very important factor in common: a primary public service coupled with a distinctive range of employment laws. Even the traditional style of a government is just not fundamentally flawed; it has its role as an one-shop comprehensive service agency. Such classic roles generally come to bear during times of social or economic crisis, fiscal stress or extreme political changes, but lose its impetus as soon as times normalize.
Experience demonstrates that globally the phenomenon called Public Sector Reform (PSR) with the results of New Public Management (NPM) will arise at some point in time.
Then the impetus for change derives from a variety of sources which places strain on governments adapting to new problems, new capacities and new relationships between citizens and governments. The public becomes increasingly concerned about the quality of the services they receive and the options open to them.
Like all other structure changes with time, we justifiably expect an evolution in the public sector. Is that good or bad? Well, it depends.
Since I have done a significant variety of these Public Sector Reform projects and I am following the discussions and developments since several years, I have learned a number of lessons:
1. The public service is unique in its organisational, financial and social regulations.
Often instruments or ideas from the private sector are adopted without regard for the context and/or the understanding of the inherent restrictions and weakness of these instruments when applied to the public sector.
Understanding the dynamics of the public administration system is helpful before attempting to reform it: Modernising government structure requires an understanding of the nature and dynamics of the public administration system as a whole and how it operates as part of society exhibiting its unique history, culture and institutional structure.
2. Adopting a whole-of-government approach to public sector reform is necessary.
As said before understanding the public administration system is significant, but it takes a whole-of-government strategy to reform - in other words, it is essential to understand and view both public administration and governance structures as part of an interconnected whole. Government operates in an unified structural setting under a common legislation, and its performance is influenced by the relationship of different participants. Hence, to be effective, the basic framework must be set mainly because changes in part of the system will have an influence on others.
3. A number of different approaches to Public Sector Reform do exist, all afflicted with different degrees of social acceptability.
Structural Reforms are one set of measures
Structural NPM reform strategies involve breaking up a public institution through horizontal or vertical specialization while a vertical change triggers a trend in direction of much more independent departments, agencies and state-owned enterprises.
The horizontal reform factor increases the specialty of organisational units, i.e. each and every unit deals only with ownership, regulation, purchasing or internal administration and so on.
However, remember the whole-of-government strategy: a combination of these vertical and horizontal reform measures might lead to structural fragmentation and rather a reformed chaos.
Changing the organization of service provision is another measure
One idea is that if services are unable to be improved in the public sector, somebody else must provide them. This motion contains a certain degree of reasoning, in particular when it comes to providing purely operational services like utilities, transport or e.g. public works. The public service has the duty to ensure that these services are available; typically it does not say anywhere that the public service should physically do all of them. Large scale, business-like operations usually belong into the hand of the private sector, simply because public structures and regulations are typically prohibitive to cost effective services delivery. Through measures like marketization, competition and privatization many governing bodies have not only removed themselves from commercial service delivery, but have also withdrawn from its ownership.
This results in a significantly altered mode of government interventions. Has this made the public service leaner? Actually not really, but the focus has changed from service provision to regulatory functions like - pollution, health, safety, corporate governance, environmental protection, data matching, protection of minorities, global terrorism, credit control, commercial law, consumer protection, product labelling, consumption taxes, means testing, illegal migration, control of the internet, and so on. At the same time, through technological developments, government's capability to accumulate information in these areas has also improved considerably.
Even though the outsourcing of operational services makes sense in theory, one has to be very careful taking shortcuts to efficiency increases. In the particular projects I did through the years I have observed more than once that the individual - clearly ring-fenced - services can equally and efficiently be provided by the public service.
This brings me to the third significant reform measure:
Search for excellence
These kinds of mechanisms incorporate a degree a relaxation or change of the existing public service guidelines with the delegation of authority and autonomy. Three mainstream models are applied and have different results and consequences.
One model states "let the managers manage" which allows for active, visible, discretionary control of the organization by people who are free to manage; specific standards of performance; an increased emphasis on output control combined with private sector type management techniques.
The second model "makes managers manage" and uses incentives to further certain decision-making behaviour. It implies enhanced exposure to competition, contract management and market orientation (contracting out, purchaser-provider models).
A third kind of NPM reform model, joins to the two mentioned above, entails performance management, cost-cutting and budgetary discipline. The increased use of formal performance indicators shows an attempt to quantify the activities of public organizations more thoroughly, while ex post analysis and auditing are methods of linking and evaluating goals and actual results. The underlying principle is that good results are incentivized with pay and promotions while stagnation results in falling behind.
Summary and Quintessence
Coming from a Continental European background where the public service structure is not as accommodating as in some other places; it can be prohibitively costly to adjust the service conditions of public servants, let alone contemplating to contract out their functions or to retrench somebody. It is do-able, but the degree of motivation required is high.
Therefore often the combined performance management is utilized first to verify that any remedial actions are justified and at the same time avoiding haphazard activism. With the proper vision, a comprehensive understanding of the public sector and the correct performance measuring tools, it scrutinises first
. Internal performance and ways to increase efficiency, then
. Corrective structural and/or organisational measures, before looking at
. Outsourcing of underperforming sectors, as the last resort.
History and statistics demonstrate that a bottom-up strategy is socially much more acceptable and not necessarily less successful. It may take a little bit longer, but proves to be more sustainable.
Author Resource:-
During the years I've done countless "Public Sector Reform"-projects at a time when ERP-Systems weren't as sophisticated as they are these days. I put in quite some time in the interim to development and implement ERP-Systems for both the private and the public sector. Since public sector reform receives a renewed emphasis nowadays I combine two fields, i.e. what kind of information does the public sector require within the framework of New Public Management and exactly what can ERP-Systems supply in support of it. If you like to drop me a line to exchange some ideas or in case you are interested in details on Public Sector Reform and how to approach it follow the link. hostgator promo codes
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