Some of the heaviest hitters in the civil service, politics and academia will gather at UCC next weekend for a conference, Management of Government in the New Millennium, which concerns the Strategic Management Initiative. For those of us who don't know about SMI, Prof Neil Collins explain s that it brings private-sector practices into the public sector. It involves things like setting a timetable for answering telephone calls, paying cheques or acknowledging complaints; like civil servants giving their names and like establishing methods of measuring output, i.e. determining how a private company can deal with paperwork quicker than a named government department.
Collins says SMI was initially a generic concept for new public management and it is now operating in certain quarters, most noticeably the Revenue, but far less so in Justice and Foreign Affairs. The New Zealand ambassador, Paul East, introduced the reforms when he was minister for public services at a time when his country was suffering financially from EU market advances, and he will open the Cork conference. Collins says it was important to have a venue outside Dublin so civil servants couldn't just drop in and out and be distracted by other business.
Freedom of Information is something on which politicians and civil servants are now highly focused (many embarrassing disclosures later), but things like measuring output are a different matter. Speakers next Friday and Saturday include Frank Murray, secretary general to the Government, Prof David Gwynn Morgan of the Law Reform Commission, Patrick Waldron of Bank of Ireland, the Ombudsman, Kevin Murphy, Minister for Education, Micheal Martin, Sean O Riordain of the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants, Denis Hodson of the Revenue Commissioners and Anne Counihan of the National Treasury Management Agency. Sessions will be chaired by Sean Cromien, former secretary of the Department of Finance, Michael McLoone, Donegal county manager, Ruairi Quinn TD and others.