Public service at its best

A QUICK glance at the government pages in your local telephone directory will give you a good indication as to whether your public service is ripe for reform, according to Art Daniels.

"I always go to the phone book to see if government really cares about customers or do they care about themselves," he says.

For the Government here and the public service, the news is not good. "With this phone book you'd have to be a political scientist," he says of an Irish telephone directory. "You'd have to know how government is organised. It is all organised by ministries and departments. But it's not in Canada.

"In Canada, if you go to the phone book, it is organised by products - birth certificate, drivers' licence, health card, childcare."

In Ireland, we're still stuck with old-fashioned government. "Most governments look like that," explains Daniels. "Most governments think about themselves as departments and ministries. But government isn't about departments and ministries - it is about the citizen and products and services."

Daniels should know what he's talking about - he has 40 years' experience in managing and developing institutions and human resources in the Canadian public services. He is widely recognised as a leader in implementing public sector change initiatives and, in the course of executive appointments, he has effected tangible improvements in workforce motivation, efficiency, productivity, client satisfaction and cost efficiency.

A former assistant deputy minister in the Ontario government, he is now involved in public sector reform nationally and internationally with BearingPoint in Ireland, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Jamaica.

To some people, public sector reform and modernisation is a bit like world peace - a noble and worthwhile objective, but impossible to attain. Daniels rejects this as a cynical view, pointing to the success of Canada in managing to modernise its public services. The country has been consistently rated as having the most efficient and consumer-friendly public service in the world.

But it wasn't always like that. When Daniels started working on modernisation programmes for the civil service in Canada, he was registrar of companies. Back then, it took 16 weeks to get a business licence. Today it takes two minutes to complete a form online. Other areas of government have achieved similar results.

So how did these changes come about? By moving the civil service from having an administrative focus to a service focus, says Daniels. Easier said than done when you have a way of doing things that has been ingrained into staff over generations. "Culture is a very difficult thing to change," he concedes. "You change culture by engaging the employees and you engage the citizen both. Ask the citizens how they want to be served and what do they think of the government and where can it be improved.

"The first thing a government should do is listen before it changes. Then you talk to the staff - how do you think things can be improved? Then you take the processes and do business process re-engineering or simplify them, you take out all the stuff that is duplicated and you question at every point."

That might sound a bit too simplistic, especially here in Ireland where it is largely agreed that the latest benchmarking report may have thrown a spanner in the works when it comes to public service reform.

Resentment generated by general lack of benchmarking increases for the public sector has led to a warning from some groups that the public sector modernisation programme is dead in the water unless some new mechanism is found to encourage participation by public sector staff. Benchmarking was largely seen as the catalyst for change in the past.

However, the ordinary citizen is largely struggling to see the improvement supposedly fuelled by the previous benchmarking deal that was widely seen as overly generous to many public servants.

Daniels says benchmarking should have no immediate impact on the day-to-day changes that will be required of many civil servants.

"It's not about money," he argues. "It's about service and public service unions should be just as concerned about providing the taxpayer - the public - with what they want because that's their job. If everything you do is for better service, it's hard to argue against that."

That's not to say that there should not be some compensation for staff whose jobs change and who are given more responsibility, but this should be linked to performance, he says. "If I give more power to the front line staff where they are not just paper pushers and change their titles to customer service representatives, maybe compensation should be worth more than for a person who slits open an envelope and takes out the application and sends it to somebody else to read," he says.

"We have performance pay in Canada up to supervisory level. I'll have my base pay, my market pay but I'll get a performance reward."

The Canadian public service also has a very transparent system of reporting customer satisfaction levels which Daniels says are now outstripping private sector companies. And he says this can work in public service employees' favour.

"We can go back to the politicians and say investment in services and staff leads to higher confidence in government. We can prove it."

In Canada, the phone book is organised by products - birth certificate, driver's licence, childcare