Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

made management audits – even heads of departments were not in a position to say how they
measured results. Second, Hammer and Champy pointed to challenges within the public sector
related to interdepartmental barriers that are easier to remove in a corporation than in the public
sector where different agencies are involved. Government is not a single organization; it is a
network. Improvement in one separate place may be annihilated by the old order in another. The
third challenge relates to the qualification of top leaders of public organizations – often they are
more politicians than professional managers, and running operational activities is not their strong
point. (Hammer and Champy, 1993)
Well known experts on management in the public sector, Aire Halachimi and Geert Bouchaert,in
their introductory article to the special issue of International Review of Administrative Sciences (an
issue devoted to reengineering in the public sector - No.61, 1995), also agree with the conclusion
on the applicability of BPR in the public sector, but provide a bit different perspective: ‘Public
managers are under greater stress these days that their counterparts in the private sector. Public
managers must deal not only with the challenge of providing a cost effective and friendly service,
but also with the need to defend the involvement of government in the delivery of such a service.
Last, but not least, public managers must meet growing and changing service expectations while
following a prescribed set of procedures and regulations and addressing issues such as equity,
fairness, legitimacy or the openness of government operations. …The result of this myriad
collection of pressures on public managers can make reengineering efforts in the public sector a
more involved undertaking than it is likely to be in the private sector.’ (Halachimi and Bouchaert,
1995)
Aire Halachimi summarized the attributes of reengineering in the following way (Bouchaert, 1995):
• Searching for radical improvement in business processes enabled by exploiting of the
powers of information technology.
• Breaking away from antiquated ways and processes of business operations and starting
with a clean slate.
• Viewing (and reviewing) the fundamental business processes from a cross-functional
perspective to ensure the each step in the process adds value.
• Questioning whether the process is necessary and what it is intended to achieve, given the
overall mission of the organization.
• Systematic searching for radical changes for the purpose of effecting major improvements
or breakthroughs in business processes when an incremental approach will not work any
more.
• Reducing, if not eliminating, paper documentation that enters the process at different
stages, with an attempt to capture data once, at the source.
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