An intriguing read with a solid plot and a sting in the tail
The initial impression of Ahead of the Game is that the blueprint simply restates the well-worn e-government ambitions of delivering better and simpler services, playing nicely with other governments and external parties, reducing red tape, and opening the door for consultation and access to public sector data. Beyond these worthy ambitions, however, lies some deeper thinking about the public sector condition which is more intriguing.
An impressively wide range of initiatives are proposed to strengthen the horizontal dimensions of policy development and leadership. These include stronger external policy linkages, revising and embedding Australian public sector (APS) values, clarifying executive roles and responsibilities, revising legislation and employment arrangements, managing talent on an APS-wide basis, and creating an “APS 200” senior leadership forum. These initiatives will be complemented by strengthening the workforce planning, management, and development roles of the Australian Public Service Commission - in effect, creating an APS “corporate HR” function.
Finally, a set of initiatives is proposed to shift agency performance management beyond the current agency-by-agency output focus. These include periodic reviews of agency capabilities and operating efficiency, the creation of shared outcomes across agencies, and new governance arrangements. The sting in the tail is a recommendation that smaller agencies pursue shared services arrangements for corporate services to improve efficiency.
An ambitious reform blueprint indeed, but is the government up to the challenge?
Governments need to stop expecting public servants to “suspend gravity”
It is almost 50 years since Alfred D. Chandler, Jnr. taught us that enterprises should align their administrative structures with their strategies. In practice, what has happened over the past decade in the APS, as in many Westminster-style governments, is that strategy and structure have fallen progressively out of alignment. Administrative structures set up for an agency-by-agency output focus have fallen increasingly out of step with strategies aimed at pursuing holistic citizen-centric outcomes and more coordinated whole-of-government management of inputs.
Misalignment of strategy and structure is hard on workers. It puts an organization at cross-purposes with itself, and creates ambiguities and contradictions that frustrate action. Anyone involved in whole-of-government initiatives, cross-cutting service delivery programs, and e-government projects has been on the front line of these frustrations.
Executives tasked with these initiatives sometimes use metaphors such as “one-hand clapping” and being asked to “suspend gravity” to describe the misalignment of their mission with that of the devolved and disparate administrative structures of their agencies. In part, these metaphors just illustrate the challenges of change in any large organization. But a more fundamental difficulty for front-line executives is the apparent duplicity of the central agencies, which are too often the architects of both the citizen-centric outcome strategies and the devolved output-centric administrative arrangements that frustrate strategy implementation.
“One-hand clapping” is an expression of disappointment that the organization is not willing or able to sustain citizen-centric initiatives once the passion of individual executives is exhausted. “Suspending gravity” is the act of being asked by government to do something that the government itself has made virtually impossible.
In this context, Ahead of the Game is a welcome - if long overdue - acknowledgement that administrative structures need to catch up with strategy realities. It recognizes, as Chandler did in the early 1960s, that the subtle nuances of structure matter. Organizations are more than the sum of their parts - or rather, governments are more than the sum of their outputs. As the late Australian industrialist Richard Pratt was fond of saying, “if we keep on doing what we've always done, we'll keep on getting what we always got”. It's time for the APS to get ahead of the game.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Steve Hodgkinson
Quelle/Source: Ovum, 01.04.2010
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
