Performance improvement in public administrations by organizational learning

Abstract

Due to increased pressure for cost reduction and performance in public administrations and the growing requirements for optimized service quality, citizens orientation and effectiveness public administrations must improve always faster their services and organizations. They must elaborate or interpret, communicate, learn, use and continuously change and improve a lot of legal requirements, regulations, procedures, directives, forms and checklists. Thus, the management of appropriate regulations (relevant laws, directives, procedures, forms and checklists) is fundamental and key challenge for public management. Nevertheless, regulations are distributed commonly IT supported and the collaborators have great difficulty to find appropriate, actual regulations. They are hardly used as reference for solving ad hoc learning needs. In addition, change proposals, new ideas or questions are usually not related to the existing. Consequently, new regulations are often created as add-on. They can become in contradiction to the existing. Based on Foucault’s theory we structure all regulations in accordance to the ISO 9001 standard for quality management, prepare them accordingly didactical principles and publish them on an organizational learning system. This innovative work-place integrated organizational learning concept is best supported by a confidence-based open corporate culture. The results of our case studies in different medium-sized administrations suggest that the concept was useful to promote practice-oriented regulations, workplace integrated need-oriented learning and the continual performance improvement of the public administrations.