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Central Government, Technology

Increasing Government Effectiveness

19 January 2010

Dr Kiran Garimella will be presenting on ‘Increasing service Levels and Driving Transparency’ at FutureGov Forum Singapore, 26-27 February, The Regent Singapore. Please follow this link to download a copy of the full agenda.

The Process-Driven Approach for Increasing Government Effectiveness
by Dr Kiran Garimella, Software AG

New Thinking for a New Decade

How do you respond to growing pressure to improve efficiency, facilitate real-time information sharing and transform your agency operations in a business climate fuelled by business optimism? As analysts are predicting a V-shaped rebound for Asia in 2010, government agencies are now confronted with citizens demanding better services while businesses demand less bureaucracy and more efficiency.

However, caution is in order. It is difficult to predict if the recovery will happen or not, or if it does whether it will be sustainable or not. “Reduced costs,” “visibility,” “control,” “accountability,” and “transparency” remain important watchwords. Now is the right time to adopt the philosophy, methodology, and technology strategy that will be robust and work in different economic scenarios.

Changing priorities
The more technologically-advanced governments are changing their focus from the basic provision of services to the offering of optimized public services and to meet the requirements for increased visibility. To achieve this, agencies must re-engineer their operations by implementing smarter, quicker processes enabled by information technology and by leveraging the use of internal data and information.

On a higher level, the increasing internationalization of the world and common topics on national political agendas – like border control, tax evasion, terrorism, money laundering – require the cooperation and collaboration among public sector agencies and with the private sector. Initiatives like the FEA in the United States, the European Interoperability Framework in the European Union, and the Government Interoperability Frameworks for Asia Pacific countries aim at leveraging technology to facilitate information sharing, reduce redundancy, enable integration, and support citizen-centric government.

Start thinking in a new way
Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” Solving new challenges, or even familiar challenges in the context of an accelerated pace and globalization, demands a new way of thinking. It calls for a new view of business processes that will allow government agencies to automate and integrate existing processes and make better use of available resources in the most easy and cost-effective way in order to be more efficient. Process Management is that new paradigm: it is a philosophy, a methodology, and a set of tools and techniques that unlocks value in your existing processes and helps you create new, optimized ones.

The power of BPM
BPM ensures clear insight into how your agency is operating and the ability to make changes quickly – without risk. The goal of Business Process Management (BPM) is to expose the behavior of cross-functional, cross-departmental processes, and to help in designing complete, optimal processes. Ultimately, it will help you reduce complexity for your agency and shields complexity from stakeholders. At the end of the day, the ultimate measure of your agency’s success is the delivery of services as expected, in the most efficient manner possible, while increasing oversight and meeting all regulatory requirements. The BPM framework helps you focus on projects that decrease human intervention, eliminate waste, increase capacity, reduce cycle time, eliminate variance, ensure compliance, and manage agency risk.

BPM lays the foundation by integrating the four types or levels of enterprise architecture: the ‘business’ architecture (which connect high level goals to operational metrics), the management architecture (which provides the control mechanism), the process architecture (which provides optimality across various types of boundaries), and technology architecture (which is the enabler).

The prevalent organizational structures (whether in the public or private sector) are command-and-control oriented: they exist for the convenience of the employees and not for the convenience of the customer. The philosophy of BPM is dimensionally orthogonal to traditional organizational structures because it focuses on end-to-end processes as the customer or citizen sees it and experiences it.

By moving to the new paradigm of BPM, government agencies can demonstrate better return on tax dollars, focus on efficient delivery of services to citizens, and provide better systemic visibility to policy makers, citizen advocacy groups, and public executives.

Summary
Government agencies have no choice but to deal with operational processes. However, they do have a choice of how to improve and manage them. They can implement business processes through passive technological osmosis that leads to a patchwork of processes that are imperfectly pieced together with point solutions, manual labor, and expensive ERP systems; or they can employ a reasoned, disciplined, and innovative approach that confers significant competitive advantages. The adoption of BPM is easy because it offers many alternative points of entry. It couples ease of implementation with low cost and low risk. BPM has the best risk-reward profile compared to traditional approaches to projects, process improvements, enterprise architecture, and agency management.

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