Editorial

Citation

Heap, J. (2003), "Editorial", Work Study, Vol. 52 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2003.07952gaa.001

Editorial

Work Study takes pride in ensuring that its coverage is appropriate to both public and private sectors. That might be a strange statement to make – after all, productivity is productivity, isn't it? Why should the sector in which productivity improvement is applied make a difference?

Why indeed? But we all know that it does. The methodologies and techniques used, and the ways in which they are applied, differ. Of course they overlap – but there are significant differences. The first point to be made is that in the public sector there is often a political imperative to particular initiatives. For example, though the private sector is almost certainly well ahead in the application of IT, it reached that position through a considered evaluation of the value of investment in relation to the anticipated gains – and those gains relate primarily to the effects on "the bottom line".

In the public sector, there is no equivalent "bottom line". Yet, of course, IT has a role to play in modernising the public sector. In steps the government with its "eGovernment" initiative. Now local authorities throughout the UK have targets to meet to show that they are complying with the terms of the initiative. Of course the underlying motivation for the initiative is to improve the services offered to citizens – a worthy aim. However, how does one judge the appropriate level of investment when there is no bottom-line figure to create "the reality check"?

I do not know enough about the eGovernment initiative and its progress to make a judgment on "success" (although I would be very happy to receive a paper for publication!). However, this is simply the latest in a long line of initiatives designed to improve the quality or productivity of public sector services. (Remember compulsory competitive tendering? Best value?) All have borrowed from private sector practice but have had to be designed to meet the specific needs of the public sector.

What worries me is that I cannot remember seeing any evaluation reports of these previous initiatives. I do not mean the "political" evaluations that define success by what has been achieved. I mean an evaluation that attempts to compare achievements with anticipated or desired (even planned) results. I would also like to see such an evaluation conducted by a neutral person – preferably a scholar. These initiatives have consumed an awful lot of resources (mostly measurable, I would think) and were designed to produce results that could themselves be measured. So, a simple quantitative assessment could have been undertaken and then been tempered by qualitative views.

This would have allowed us (society) to learn from each of these and to refine the process of adopting and adapting what generally start as private sector methodologies. As it is, we seem to be in great danger of making the same mistakes on multiple occasions. That is not good private or public sector practice.

John Heap