Agility in public administration – is agility a possibility and where are its limits?

Abstract

Digitalization offers a variety of advantages: speed, efficiency and agility [1]. Its goal is to speed up workflow processes, to give the employees more time to focus on important work and to provide them with the opportunity to be agile in order to meet new expectations, new requirements and new trends. Besides speed and efficiency, agility is one of the most important goals because it is an answer to the requirements of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment – the so called VUCA world. [2] In the private sector the concept of agility has already proved to be an answer to rapid change and volatility but is it also a concept for Public Administration with its own special requirements of stability and continuity as well? This paper tries to answer this question and to work out the limits of the new concept considering agile methods and agile organizational elements.