Focus on the public sector
Public service provision consistently registers as one of the foremost issues of concern for users, citizens, electors and politicians. The response of public service professionals to key challenges in the years to come will largely determine the extent to which public service organisations themselves remain the dominant providers of health, education and the various forms of social welfare services — or whether they are challenged and even in some areas supplanted by commercial, not-for-profit and charitable organisations.
The modernisation agenda
The first challenge — increasingly evident in recent years — has been the challenge to modernise, to deliver more efficiently and effectively. The modernisation agenda to date, however, has tended to concentrate on efficiency, on cost-effectiveness and on productivity measures, rather than on the effectiveness required to meet the needs and desires of an increasingly diverse and demanding set of users, citizens and stakeholders.
We believe that there is a second stage of the modernisation agenda still to come — namely, multiculturalisation. There is increasingly a recognition amongst politicians, policy makers and regulators that it is impossible to genuinely modernise services without multiculturalising them. Effectively, this means ensuring that the multiple cultures ‘out there’ (whether based on race, faith, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexuality or class) are reflected ‘in here’ — in the way the organisation operates, in its understanding of its clients' needs, in the very nature and composition of the organisation itself. The multiculturalisation of public organisations requires not only internal culture change but further, more radical shifts in the nature and shape of service provision.
Choice versus equity
The second related key challenge facing public service professionals is the newly emerging agenda of public service ‘choice’. Are there fundamental conflicts between equity and choice, or can choice in fact deliver more equity? Is choice constrained by capacity? Or can it generate new and more appropriate capacity? While the debates roll on, public service managers are likely to be at the forefront of thinking, experimentation and implementation of new models of public service choice. Understanding the nature of the new agenda, operationalising it, assessing the real impacts and managing the dilemmas will inevitably form a major facet of their role over the foreseeable future.
What Focus can do
Focus aims to assist public service managers and professionals with these central challenges and dilemmas. We can provide support in working through and conceptualising the new agendas. We can assist in formulating strategy, in its implementation and in its evaluation.
More than that, we can move organisations ahead of the curve. We can work with them on issues central to their effectiveness, specifically establishing their legitimacy with key stakeholders, so that not only are they responding to challenges generated elsewhere but also are leading the field and exemplars of good practice.
