Knowledge Base

Already the political economist and sociologist Max Weber once has pointed out that decision makers need to ensure the rationality of their decisions, by trying to balance out the best relation of means and ends.[1]

Concerning the public, a close cooperation between public administration and citizens seems essential. Through participative democracy and public involvement, a new relationship between the citizens and the administrations can be established. The publicity becomes a valued partner to identify problems, discover new thinking and propose solutions.

To improve public administration´s image, it is important to rebuild the trust in it. The citizens’ cooperation seems essential to achieve public purposes. The lack of trust can make the formulation and implementation of policies more difficult or even impossible. Relevant factors that influence citizens’ trust is the administrations´ integrity, as well as its performance.

Public sector organisations are mainly knowledge-intensive organisations, and to exploit their knowledge, effective knowledge sharing among the different departments is required. There can be great advantages if information is not only used in the own administration but is shared between hierarchies, different policy areas and levels of government. Including findings from other disciplines in respective monitoring systems (e.g. education, social, youth, and work) can create synergy and learning effects, which in turn leads to a share of benefits.

Public administration is a strictly standardised and structured environment, which makes it calculable and predictable to a certain extent. This includes, for example, a sufficient number of qualified employees. Also for the public administration employees in our focus group, this strict organisational framework seems to be important in order to complete their work and task. On the other hand, it would be desirable that this frame allows certain freedoms within it. This (limited) flexibility can be helpful in responding to unexpected developments.

The public sector is facing demographic changes and has to compete with the private sector for talents. Incentives like, for example, an adequate payment or the possibility of mobile working, seem important to retain young and qualified employees in the long term and to increase the job satisfaction of all employees. The interviewed public administration employees criticised a lack of appreciation of their work.

The head of the administration modernisation division on a regional level confirmed that one of the most important needs of public administration is cooperative working. Hierarchy is an important part in public administration but it also represents a limitation for its work. The more complex social problems become, the more complex are the governmental answers to them. Public administrations should be more open and flexible in the cooperation between different stakeholders, partners and hierarchy levels.

Standards require a certain legal basis and binding specifications. At the same time, they must be also accepted by the target group. If standards are enforced, they offer the advantage of planning and investment protection. This provides a good basis for further digitisation of processes.[1]

Probably one of the biggest needs for administration is to keep up with the technical innovation. To cope with the production of huge volumes of data is a technical problem as well as a big challenge for the staff. On the one hand, there should be established technical infrastructure for new policies and the increasing number of data, on the other hand, the staff needs to be trained and able to manage data and produce “good” data.

Concerns about insufficient security and privacy are ubiquitous when it comes to the use of new technical possibilities - especially in public management. Besides the advantages and potentials, digitisation is associated with some technical and non-technical obstacles. Data protection and information security management can help to preserve trust in government. [1]