McCarthy warns of need for public service innovation

The public service is "under-managed" despite criticism of the levels of administration that currently exist, according to the secretary general of the Department of the Taoiseach, Dermot McCarthy.

In a book on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for public services, published yesterday by the Institute of Public Administration (IPA), Mr McCarthy said that a management process which focused energy and resources on the tasks that mattered "may produce a public service that looks rather different to our current organisational profile".

The book, Ireland 2002 - Towards One Hundred Years of Self-Government , was presented yesterday to President Mary McAleese at the 50th anniversary celebration of the IPA in Dublin Castle.

Mr McCarthy said that standardised information conveying the cost and impact of activities and services provided by many public bodies remained deficient.

He also said that while there were many examples of "world-class" innovations and policy responses, there equally had been "many examples of issues which have been under review without conclusion for unconscionable periods and projects which have languished and have escalated in cost in the process".

Mr McCarthy said that the application of better project management skills across the full range of public service activities was vital.

The secretary general also said that the automation of processes and the application of technological solutions to reduce the need for high-cost personnel had yet to become embedded in the routine practice of public service managers.

"It may be that diseconomies of scale, as a result of the relatively small size of many public service bodies, may be inhibiting this response.

"A shared services solution applied on an ambitious scale would enable such economies to be achieved and so enable personnel resources to be applied in those areas of activity where personal skills and experience cannot be substituted with technology", he wrote.

However Mr McCarthy said that "this in turn may require us to revisit some of the traditional organisational features of the public service, not least the allocation of functions, and the barriers between the Civil Service, State bodies, the local government system, the health service and other quasi-public bodies."

© 2007 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times