Strengthening public service excellence

Text of the address by Public Administration and Home Affairs Minister W.D.J. Seneviratne at the Commonwealth Conference and Ministers’ Forum on Public Administration, October 24 -26, 2012, New Delhi

I take this opportunity to thank the Commonwealth for organising a dialogue on a very pertinent subject of ‘Public service fit for the future’ at a time when we are witnessing unprecedented challenges and changes in public administration across the globe.

The world is looming with numerous challenges such as environmental degradation, climate change, clamour for food security, sustainable supply of energy, provision of health and educational facilities, provision of livelihoods for all, business and economic development in an era of fierce international competition, widespread corruption, overcoming the global abject poverty and better life for the people to cite a few. In the year 2000, 189 member countries of the United Nations made solemn commitments to achieve eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and show improvements in reduction in global poverty, hunger, illiteracy and inequality. Public administration plays a pivotal role in the realisation of these challenges which is an inescapable responsibility of all governments. Sri Lanka has her own share of these vulnerabilities and extremities.

One of the major priorities of the national agenda of Sri Lanka is achieving MDGs by 2015. The ‘Mahinda Chinthana: 10 year development framework’ clearly specifies the government’s commitment towards that goal. Thus improving the living standards of the people, raise economic and social empowerment at community level and ultimately bring about sustainable social and economic development of the country. In order to achieve the targets more fully we need to do a great deal in re-organizing and re-orientating the public sector, with a clear focus on social development, more effective pro-poor strategies, improving the national and regional level quality of public sector human resources in order to achieve the MDGs.

Infrastructure development work

Sri Lanka is heading towards a new development era after thirty years of devastating civil war. The immediate challenge for Sri Lanka is to reconstruct the areas devastated by the civil war and re-establish the government machinery, such as District Secretariats, Divisional Secretariats, Provincial Councils, local government institutions and other agencies, as we are successfully meeting the resettlement obligations and gaining normalcy in those areas in order to help people in those areas to come back to normal life. The government of Sri Lanka has undertaken gigantic infrastructure development work in the North and East in order to bring back social and economic development in those areas with the investment of enormous resources. We are very successful in establishing good governance and in re-establishing government machinery in the North and East and the task before us is to develop human resources by equipping them with necessary knowledge and skills and improve professionalism in public officers.

Challenges to the public sector and obviously the public servants who face them are contextual specific, but not without some commonalities across the borders, as our cultures have very similar features. President Mahinda Rajapaksa in his policy statement ‘Vision for the Future’ has given the top priority to lay foundation for economic development characterized in independent, resilient and disciplined economy with a strong growth focus, operating in keeping with international standards. The target has been set to achieve the per capita exceeding US $ 4,000 over the next six years, in order to place the country in the rank of middle income nations while maintaining a continuous growth rate of 8 percent per annum. The greatest expectations are to equally share the benefits of the growing economic prosperity among all sections of the people and to lay foundation for sustained development. Thus, Sri Lanka has a positive expectation to transform Sri Lanka into a dynamic global hub of Naval, Aviation, Commercial, Energy and Knowledge, to exploit the economic prospects as a key link between the East and West.

Most of all, the government is concerned with the benefits the people would get out of massive infrastructure development. Many impressive programmes have been introduced to combat poverty as eradicating poverty is one of the critical challenges we face. In keeping with those objectives Sri Lanka has launched pro-poor programmes, such as Gama Neguma (rural road improvement), Gemi Diriya (livelihood improvement programme), Divi Neguma (to improve household economy) and provincial development programmes in order to take the development to the grass-root level.

Good governance

With those future challenges are in view, the President envisages to develop the Public Service within a framework of social democratic values and function in the best interest of the general public. The President emphasizes that the state institutions should be people friendly, efficient and effective. The government believes in public sector driven development where the public sector is in the driving seat so that priority is given to strengthen the public sector.

Developing strong leadership and adequate human resources in the public sector is crucial to achieve those targets. An effective public service with strong leadership and adequate skilled human resources are essential ingredients in creating an enabling environment to achieve the development goals.

In view of delivering on the priorities and objectives discussed in the foregoing sections the public service has to play a critical role in implementing work programmes in response to social and economic demands, by developing an excellent public service capable not only for innovative policy formulation and strategies, but also delivering services by implementing development programmes and projects in an excellent manner. These new challenges call for skilled, dedicated and self-motivated public officers at every level who can channel their energies and enthusiasm to achieve national outcomes. This can only be achieved through empowerment of public servants and creation of a culture characterized in organisational learning, continuous improvement in obtaining new competencies and skills inspired to action by a shared vision. Sri Lanka has realized the critical importance of building a new generation of excellent leaders in key strategic positions who can steer the institutions and people towards the proclaimed goals.

We need to have a public sector which possesses ‘the quality of being outstanding or extremely good’. Public service excellence will just not happen; it has to be achieved by working diligently. Public service excellence is about increasing the services to an outstanding position by being more efficient and effective in everything we do. Excellence means not only improving service delivery, but also improving in good governance, such as transparency, accountability, and responsiveness in public service.

As our recent experience suggests, I think some of the necessary ingredients to achieve excellence in public sector are appropriate public sector reforms and allow decentralisation of service delivery to the door step of service recipients, innovative use of new technology including ICT to facilitate the service delivery, development of entrepreneurial leadership, results orientation, competitive benchmarking, encouraging innovative capabilities at all employee level, empowerment of employees and employee involvement in team working and problem solving leading to productivity and quality improvement, recruitment of highly qualified personnel to the public sector and giving them cutting edge training, capacity building of employees through providing necessary hard and soft skills and thus allowing employee development in order to achieve very high level of professionalism in what they are doing and thus create motivated and committed employees. I believe success of the public sector lies largely on the capabilities of senior public sector leadership.

There is a high degree of consensus that prevailing public sector institutions are in need of fundamental reforms. Sri Lanka has made several experimentations in reforms to the public sector since 1990s and has gathered much experience through trials. The Administrative Reform Committee (ARC) was established in 2004 to formulate a programme of administrative reforms with the objective of making the government administrative machinery a citizen centric, efficient and effective instrument of governance and improving the good governance. Initiatives have been made to eliminate duplication of functions and adding functions necessary for fulfilling organisational missions. ARC has also taken initiatives in 2005 to improve the work processes of government agencies, improve the physical environment of their work places to create an environment conducive to work and started a courtesy drive in order to provide a more acceptable and pleasant service to clients as well as to foster harmonious working relationships internally. The ARC has appointed a Committee in 2004 to identify problems relating to the district and divisional administration and to make recommendations to improve capacity building of those institutions. In 2007 the National Administrative Reforms Council (NARC) was established by the President to support implementing the guidelines proclaimed in Mahinda Chinthana Idiri Dekma (Vision for the Future).

Training programmes

To achieve excellence in public service delivery through development of core public sector ‘competencies’, Sri Lanka Institute of Development Administration (SLIDA), the premier public sector training institution, has initiated training programmes for the officers of the Sri Lanka Administrative Service (SLAS) to improve core leadership skills and competencies. Foreign training programmes for leadership development for SLAS officers are arranged annually on continuous basis by SLIDA. Through the international exposure the senior public officers have learned best practices and made innovative changes in their organizations to improve service delivery. Public Sector Training Institute of the Ministry of Public administration and Home Affairs also conduct training programmes for skill development in various disciplines for non-staff grade public officers and the Public Sector Training Institutes (PSTI) of Provincial Councils too conduct similar programmes for Provincial public officers.

Use of new technology is the key government transformational tool that supports the delivery of a superior service to the citizens. Under the E-Government programme a single government portal that crosses ministerial and agencies and links to all other public websites has been created. This initiative has increased participation of citizens in government decisions and actions and improved accountability of politicians and civil servants. Under the E-Governance intervention, the Ministry of Public Administration and Home Affairs deals with the challenges relating in to the Public Administration and District Administration as the central institution in the public service. Thus, use of IT has tremendously boosted the efficiency of public service in Sri Lanka. E-Sri Lanka programme was launched in 2005 to find ways to use IT to lay the foundations to support economic growth, and ensure equal access to benefits of development as 77 percent of the population lives in rural areas. The rapid increase of IT literacy and connectivity across the country ensures citizens are benefited from the initiative. E-Sri Lanka has contributed towards speeding up public service delivery and the government’s re-engineering process. It has also supported the knowledge–based economy, the vision of the President. Under this programme Chief Innovation Officers have been appointed to facilitate the implementation of E-Sri Lanka.

The Citizens’ Charter was introduced to improve good governance and improve responsiveness of local and government institutions and Divisional Secretariats to the citizen demands at the grass-root level. It is a method of strengthening and the enforcement of existing legitimate rights and obligatory functions leading to promote natural trust and partnership. Initially, District Secretariats were encouraged to provide a people’s friendly public service to the people eliminating corruption and malpractices by creating a process for promoting participatory good governance. The Ministry of Public Administration and Home Affairs then introduced the Citizens’ Charter for all Divisional Secretariats. By now Ministries, Departments such as Pensions Department and local government institutions have developed Citizen Charters to expedite services and protect the rights of people.

Improvement of productivity in the public sector is sine – qua – non to ensure public sector excellence. These have enabled to meet the expectations proclaimed in the Citizen charters of respective institutions. Our organizations follow the best in case examples of Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Korea and Thailand. Due to the productivity competitions and the Management Development Competitions conducted by the Ministry of Public Administration and Home Affairs and the National Productivity Secretariat, by now all the Ministries, District and Divisional Secretariats have created a very good working environments pleasant to work and pleasant to be visited. Due to the Five Ss and productivity improvement programmes, efficiency of District and Divisional Secretariats has tremendously increased. Some of the District and Divisional Secretariats have gone extra miles to achieve ISO 9000 quality standards. These initiatives have tremendously contributed to create an excellent public service appreciated by the service recipients. These are a few examples in a nut shell to emphasise what need to be done to ensure public sector excellence. There is still lot to be done and I hope in Commonwealth we will be able to share our experience and best practices so as to enable all of us to create a better world for our people and better world for all of us.