Public Administration Reforms: EU Enlargement and Transitional Countries -

Developments and Challenges

UNIDEM CAMPUS Seminar on “Civil Service: the Authority Serving the Public or the Public Serving

the Authority”, Trieste, 22-26 November 2004

 Klaus Lenk

University of Oldenburg

D 26111 Oldenburg, Germany

Lenk@uni-oldenburg.de

http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/verwaltungswissenschaft

 

 

 

Main Lessons

• There is no one best way of administrative reform, even though the public administrations of EU Member states are getting more similar

• E-government is now becoming the most important driver for administrative reform, helping to attain goals of “good governance”.

• A good management of change is crucial for reform success

Reform Goals

• Efficiency was the dominant goal of New Public Management

• „Good Governance“ criteria suggest a wider range of goals. They include:– Democratic decision-making about public affairs– Effectiveness in executing the political will– Transparency to enhance legitimacy– Accountability– Capacity building for providing resilience– ...and also efficiency

No „One Best Way“

• OECD Policy Brief on Public Sector Modernisation, October 2003, p.6: The mistaken perception that countries share a common problem is often accompanied by the idea that there is a [range] of solutions available, any or all of which will be beneficial. This misconception, peddled under the label of “best practice”, has had tragic consequences in some developing countries

Developing Strategies for Reform

• Start from where you stand

• Build a vision

• Promote cooperation among all actors concerned

• Take contextual factors into account when making choices

• Assess the costs of reform steps

Visions

• Visions are the outcome of long processes of strategic reflection

• Strategic thinking was generally absent in reform countries which hoped to adopt blueprints from abroad

• National experiences are important for finding the right way, even if reform goals are identical to those of other countries

A Spirit of Cooperation

• New innovative networks of reform-minded people will have to emerge, if reform is not to remain lettre morte

• Protecting one’s “turf” is an understandable reaction, especially in times of momentous change

• But this reaction is extremely dangerous for reform success

• Promoting cooperation requires cultural changes which take time

• The role of consultants from outside can be very beneficial here

Assessing the Costs of Reform

• The costs of reform are often difficult to assess, and they frequently outrun initial estimations.

• New technical devices and new organisational arrangements can be assessed fairly well. But the costs of providing training to the staff are difficult to assess

E-Government as Main Driver for a Renewed Public Sector

The potential of E-Government unfolds in four steps, starting at the level of operative work. Hence the difficulties of institution-centred reforms to come to grips with changes of the public sector, which are „enabled“ by Information Technology

These four steps concern:

• Business processes

• Institutional choice

• Networked production of administrative output

• Fragmentation and integration at the macro level

E-Government is not just a Fashion

• Information technology opens up new opportunities for designing production processes and institutions in the public sector

• The present E-Government hype did not yet live up to these chances and the related challenges. But increasingly– The enabling potential of IT is taken seriously– E-Government is losing ist character as a technological

fix– National governments develop visions in the light ot

this enabling potential about their future institutional shape

„Enabling Factors“

• New man-machine relationships in doing administrative work, including a partial automation of many processes

• Re-use of information for other purposes than for which it was originally collected

• Bridging time and space

• Working in parallel instead of in sequential structures

Business Processes

• IT enables new ways of working and communicating, which gradually impose themselves in clerical work

• The changed modes of working do not affect organisational structures and management directly, but via the business processes and daily work routines

• The ubiquity of information affords new arrangements of work in space, thus creating room for loosening the firm ties of public administration to a given territory, wherever this seems desirable

Institutional Choice

• Information technology is not only „enabling“ new types of business processes; harnessed to human activity it constitutes a new (socio-technical) mode of production

• This calls for a changed organisational and institutional framework for many activities in the public sector. Information technology can be used to re-inforce existing structures, but this effect dominates only at early stages of development

• After having gained some experience with E-Government, actors become increasingly aware of an enlarged set of institutional choices which were not available to them before

Networked Production of Administrative Output

• Among these new types of institutions are production networks: several units collaborate to produce a service in forms of „virtual organisation“

• In such networks, public, commercial and non profit organisations may cooperate closely, e.g. by splitting up business processes among them, according to their specific competences

• Yet it is still an open question to which extent production networks will be more efficient than traditional hierarchical structures

Fragmentation and Cooperation

• Since virtual (networked) organisations are supposed to be more efficient than traditional ones, a simultaneous tendency toward more fragmentation of administrative production units and cooperation among them is gaining ground

• The basic institutional structures of public administration which in Germany remained unchanged since Napoleon are increasingly being questioned

• At the same time there is a growing recognition that effectiveness and efficiency are not the only values which characterise „good governance“. Legitimacy, resilience and accountability become more important as criteria for designing government institutions

Service to Citizens and to the Economy

• One-stop „single-window“ administration is possble in many ways

• Often, the wrong priorities have been set in „advanced“ countries

• Rankings do not always measure true success, since specific national factors are not taken into account

Integrated eGovernment An emerging architecture of ePublic Services:

• Spatial and organisational separation of service production and delivery

• Service delivery in Front Offices (both virtual and physical)

• Service production in Back Offices

• Seamless connections allowing „single-window“ service

• Enrichment of Front Offices with additional functions (commercial services, eDemocracy)

An Integration Architecture

target group 1

targetgroup n

Mid-office

Assisted Local Serv.

Call Center

personalised Portal

Assisted Selfservice

Portal for Intermediary

Enduser-Portal

Back-office 1

Back-office n

SCM - WorkflowRoundtable collaboration

Process-driven integration

Common Repositories„Land, People, Economy“

Resource-driven integration

Customer-drivenintegration

The Shape of the Public Administration of Tomorrow

• The predominant role of territory for structuring jurisdictions and their action draws to an end, except where a strong physical presence is required: institutional change may follow sooner or later

• A farewell to the Napoleonic structure of the executive branch of government?

• New roles for local and regional government

Change Management

• Implementation remains the Achilles heel of administrative reforms

• Launching reform initiatives often brings political advantages to actors which thereby establish a reputation of reform-mindedness. It is much more difficult to carry such reforms through.

• Behavioural and cultural change is often crucial

• Timely information of staff and the public about reform goals and steps

• Routinisation is the most critical stage of a reform process.

Conclusion

• Training of administrators and inducing cultural change with empathy are particularly important

• Senior managers and politicians need to acquire knowledge about

– strategies and tools for reform, including e-government

– recurring pitfalls and “stumbling stones” of innovation processes in the public sector

– the contextual factors which decide about success and failure in their respective countries