HOW TO DEFINE A MINIMUM SET OF PERFORMANCE PARAMETERS FOR EVALUATING THE
DISTANCE OF A BUREAUCRATIC ORGANISATION FROM AN OBJECT ORIENTED ONE:
THE CASE OF THE REGIONAL DECENTRALISATION WITHIN THE ITALIAN PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION.
Politecnico di Milano – Dipartimento di Economia e Produzione,
The progressive
shift from a slow and inefficient bureaucracy towards a lean and dynamic
organisation is one of the topic joining numerous interventions of the last
decade within the public sector administration all over the world.
For many years the bureaucratic
model has been widely adopted, it has been the most suited form of governance
in a "slow-paced society, in a age of hierarchy, in a society of people
who worked with their hand, not their minds", characterised by a strong
geographic communities (Osborne, 1992). Nowadays the environmental conditions
of simplicity and stability which accompanied the development and the success
of the Weber model (Hatch, 1999) has been definitely changed. Public
Administrations are now swallowed up by a dynamic context, which evolves much
more rapidly than in the past, in which the globalisation and the easy access
to the information has created a new competitive pressure on institutions. In
the same time, public organisations have to face a new demand, more
diversified, determined by more exigent citizens in term of quality and
extensive choice.
Though the administrative change has
been faced in each country at different levels and with several methods
(Klages, Löffler 1995) a common and fundamental characteristic is the presence
of two different pressures: the decentralisation and the modernisation, as
processes and procedures simplification.
In this framework, several managerial models such as Total
Quality Management (Burke, Peppard 1995) and Business Process Reengineering
(Bovaird, Hughes 1995; Halachmi, 1995) have been already experienced in the
public context without any great success; this is mainly due to the lack of an
effective evaluation of the existing performances of the public organisation
with an adequate set of indicators, helpful for determining the right
improvement path and the way for customising the private sectors managerial
models for the public one.
The aim of this paper is to bridge
the gap from the private managerial models and the public organisations
establishing a set of performances indicators useful for both defining an
improvement path within the organisation and customising the private managerial
model to be implemented in a public organisation. This paper reefers to a 4
years research of the Politecnico di Milano funded by the European Commission
within two European Projects: STEPS, EMPLOY.
This set of performances indicators
will be discussed in the light of the Italian context where, despite to the
significant improvement achieved at the legislative level, no major
organisational changes have been yet accrued at any level of the Public
Administration.
In Italy from the
legislative side in fact, after almost a decade of reforms, the two pressures
(decentralisation and modernisation) seems finally to coexists and its more
significant expression from the legislative side are the "Bassanini
Laws" (Terzi,1998), which confer on one side new functions and task to
regions and local authorities (Bassanini 1) on the other side they define
principles for streamlining control and decision processes. Particularly the
decentralisation law transfers strategic task to Regions, Provinces and
Communes, which has been performed up to now by the central level, so including
in the reform the sussidiarity principle
(in its vertical dimension) which states that "it's not due to superior
government all for which the inferior (nearer to citizens) level is enough
(Balboni, 1998).
Even if the decrees approval
represents a huge unprecedented step towards the transformation of an high
centralised organisation, far form the real need of the citizens, into a new
system which can become tool and resource for the working and the improvement
of the collective and individual life, up to now there are no evidences for the
implementation of an actual organisational-functional
decentralisation to ferry the organisation from the bureaucratic to a lean customer oriented management.
In this legislative context the
paper wants to identify end evaluate a set of performances indicators useful
for determining the positioning of a public administration in respect to a more
objective oriented and more process focused organisation, and, in
the same time, suggesting the major changes in a private sector managerial
model to be successfully implemented in a public organisation.
For this reason a sample of eight
Italian Regions. The regions are: Basilicata, Campania, Lombardia,
Puglia, Sardegna, Sicilia, Toscana, Veneto. In the Italian case particularly attention has to be given to the
Regions: besides the delegation of strategic tasks (till now performed by the
central government), it is going to be implemented the transfer of offices
regulating the local authorities financing (till now pertaining to the Ministry
of the Interior). Regions are becoming consequently a fundamental crux within
the new system, first of all putting themselves as a reference point for
provinces and communes, through the definition of programming lines in keeping
with the real territory needs, secondly they’ll become the primary joint for
the offices performed by the central level as the Defence, the Justice, the
National Economic Politics and Foreign Affairs- has been evaluated through a benchmarking analysis based on a
theoretical framework which has allowed to rationalise the fundamental
performances of the new organisational system.
The evaluation framework is built up referring to the
principles derived from the MbO (Management by Objectives) and the Management
by Process theory (Bartezzaghi, Spina, Verganti, 1999). In particular the
theoretical scheme is articulated in three different levels: every general
principle (first level) is identified by fundamental capabilities (second
level) within the public administration management; these capabilities are then
measured through comparative matrixes, which combine two different variables
(third level) drivers of every specific capability.
In order to draw generalisation from the results the sample
selection was made diversifying Regions in terms of dimension and geographical
position, besides the data collection was carried out by direct interviews both
to the management and the operative level.
The major results of the benchmarking analysis reported in
the paper are:
·
the
set of indicators aimed at identifying the distance of a public organisation
from the new organisational system (more objective
oriented and more process focused);
·
the
major problems in implementing a private managerial model into a public
organisation;
·
the
most adequate improvement path for transforming a bureaucratic organisation
into an Object Oriented one.