Introduction
Innovation in the bureaucratic sector is a process consisting of turning a solution to a problem or need into a solution through a creative idea. A public administration specialist once compared running a public entity to driving a ship adrift without a rudder. And it is that, in the face of the objective of achieving competitiveness, one of the aspects that has been most highlighted as an obstacle for public management consists of ensuring that the State improves its efficiency and productivity, adding social value, enhancing the quality of the service it provides. to the community.
Beyond the improvement and efficiency that can and should be achieved on the part of the public sector, the bureaucracy faces complex challenges that seem inherent to the very nature of its functions and the role it is responsible for. Another aspect is the absence of an appropriate incentive structure that motivates officials to innovate, either because they are granted secondary benefits or because they are recognized with a better job status as a result of their contribution to innovation.
Abstract
Innovation in the sector is a bureaucratic process to convert in a solution to a problem or a need, through a creative idea. A public administration specialist ever compared lead a public entity is dealing with a drifting ship and rudderless. AND is that, in relation to the objective to achieve competitiveness, one of the aspects that more has been highlighted as an obstacle of public management is to ensure that the State would improve their efficiency and productivity, adding social value, enhancing the quality of the service it provides to the community.
Beyond the improvement and efficiency that can and should be achieved on the part of the public sector bureaucracy faces complex challenges that seem inherent to the nature of their functions and the role. Another aspect is the absence of an appropriate structure of incentives that will motivate the staff to innovate either because they are given secondary benefits or because he or she is recognized a better employment status as a result of its contribution to innovation.
Development of the topic
The conflict in public organizations that try to implement electronic government strategies (installation of ATMs that issue birth certificates, carry out driver's license changes, disqualification certificates, property payment, etc.) In the midst of a bureaucratic culture that opposes the innovation. The Weberian model was adapted to a very specific reality at the end of the 19th century where the birth of industry and the introduction of the technology of the moment in public administration, required an organizational composition of this type. The incorporation of ICT is presented as a threat to the existence of the bureaucratic model insofar as it tends to reduce costs. This is not an exclusive characteristic of the public administration, only that in the private sector the increase in production at a lower cost,increases profits, while in public administration, this cost reduction basically threatens the job stability of the civil servant who has been in the same job for many years.
The conception of the theory of bureaucracy by Max Weber at the beginning of the 20th century arose to propose a management model at a time when the world was experiencing changes as a result of the industrial revolution, and that public administration would not be alien to the evolution of the society.
The term bureaucracy comes from the combination of the French word bureau that means desk and the Latin cratos, which means power, that is, the exercise of power from the desk, but for Weber, this would translate into a rational structure where all Innovation and Electronic Government Administrative procedure would be carried out with the fulfillment of specific steps.
Weber's ideal bureaucratic model (1984, cited by Welp 2007) was characterized by:
- Division of labor united in a hierarchical line of commands: within organizations, each person who performed a task was accountable to a superior, the latter to another, and so on, that is, the existing organization chart is vertical, in the shape of a pyramid, with lines of descending command and ascending subordination rules. The status of the official: it is a staff that joins the organization due to their merits and professional training, and whose options for promotion or promotion within the institution guaranteed a job permanence. Legality and the stability of the system suppose the existence of formal and impersonal communication rules, procedures and channels that must be followed step by step, under a defined routine.
Seen in this way, the Weberian model was adapted to a very specific reality at the end of the 19th century where the birth of industry and the introduction of current technology in public administration required an organizational composition of this type. However, despite these ideal postulates and even when its presence in government management is currently evident, this model has been the target of some criticism such as the lack of flexibility and adaptation of the processes, and above all the resistance To the change.
Fountain (2005, cited by Welp 2007) maintains that the incorporation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is presented as a threat to the existence of the bureaucratic model insofar as it tends to reduce costs. This is not an exclusive characteristic of the public administration, only that in the private sector the increase in production at a lower cost increases profits, while in the public administration, this reduction in costs basically threatens the job stability of the official who has been in the same job for many years. Innovation, Bureaucracy and Electronic Government.
The growth and accelerated introduction of ICTs in the processes of society at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, where the demands and expectations of citizens become a great challenge for government agencies, is therefore about executing modifications of habits and infrastructures in government management.
Chumbita and Impala (2000, cited by Frick 2003) argue that the new public management model proposed by ICT "is transformed into a scenario of techno-ideological convergence" (Frick, 2004, p. 241), since the need to present efficient results to the community, within the institution a process of administrative reform is engaged, leading to modernization processes (Frick, 2003).
For this reason we see that electronic government, whose implementation depends exclusively on the use of ICT, is assumed by world governments as an end within their modernist and innovative actions.
Likewise, the efficient management of information enables cost reduction and simplification of public administration processes. For Frick (2003), this constitutes an element of debureaucratization of the traditional public management model (evident in the real world), where each agency has the same information as the other and the procedures are executed for long periods of time.
In practice, the bureaucratic administration system presents other characteristics such as the presence of complex problems that are disarmed into manageable and repetitive problems, each office is a particular territory of work, coordinated by a hierarchy of centralized command (Beetham 1996, cited by Frick 2003). Another centralist characteristic of the bureaucratic model is that top-down communication encounters fewer problems than upstream communication, since in many cases there are “bottlenecks” (Frick, 2003), which causes delays in tasks, errors in processes and / or information distortion.
However, the new public management (proposed by Frick, 2004) proposes new and sophisticated forms of control. Said management arises from the demands for improvements in citizen services and the influence of the management models Innovation, Bureaucracy and Electronic Government of the private sector; the role of the official is expanded as he ceases to be a decision-maker to lead and supervise the action. An operational decentralization is evident, where the redistribution of tasks implies the expansion of authority and responsibility of the personnel. However, the author clarifies that this deconcentration does not imply a total decentralization of power, rather it favors the improvement of the bureaucratic apparatus in the creation of new forms of coordination and integration of the units.
Every day it is more usual and even necessary to execute work on a network, because due to the virtuality, the size of the space is not an impediment to the execution of tasks.
From the private sector, this concept of networks has been widely used to the point of existing virtual companies where services are provided without having a physical headquarters that groups workers. In this sense, internal networks facilitate communication between the components of the organization.
There is no doubt that the incorporation of ICT drives a change in procedures and the internal distribution of power, which is why the implementation of new forms of control is necessary (Frick, 2003), as well as the establishment of knowledge networks that allow efficiency and effectiveness in the implementation of electronic government.
For this reason, the structures are horizontalized to redistribute the responsibility quotas among those who carry out the tasks; However, new forms of control based on intelligent information architectures could give rise to the birth of the infocracy as a substitute for bureaucracy (Zuurmond, 1999 cited by Frick, 2003).
Now, Rastrollo and Castillo (2004) consider that organizational structures respond to the need of companies and institutions to coordinate their activity, through Innovation, Bureaucracy and Government, which is highly necessary to implement organizational formulas capable of being flexible in crisis situations, and that contrary to what would happen in a bureaucratic model, the levels of economic and social effectiveness can be improved.
Thus, the incorporation of ICT forces to make organizational structures more flexible, given the ability to manage not only information but also knowledge in a virtual environment. This panorama is opposed to the postulates of the traditional bureaucracy in which structural rigidity and the implementation of procedures characterize the management model of the executing organization.
ICTs not only enhance the flexibility of companies but, conversely, their non-bureaucratic behavior also seem to greatly favor their implementation (Benjamín and Blunt 1992, cited by Rastrollo and Castillo, 2004). In any case, the fact that ICTs intervene in the modification of the public administration model through electronic government does not mean that the discussion leans towards technological determinism because it gives importance to the tool on the organizational form. ICTs are not change, but I know, they drive change.
Since electronic government is developed with the participation of three groups of actors, three dimensions are established in what Araya and others (2004) present in the metaphor of the screen. In front of the screen are citizens and business organizations; the screen itself is the interface between the government and the citizenry; and behind the screen, where the development of applications for the implementation of electronic services is carried out.
The Government to Government (G2G) relationship includes initiatives aimed at coordinating actions between the different institutions.
These initiatives often imply defining a framework of policies, specifications and guidelines for public agencies, so that compatibility between systems, platforms and storage media can be guaranteed.Finally, there is the Government to Employee (G2E) relationship, which is constituted as part of the object of this study. According to INEAM-OEA (2006), this type of link contemplates initiatives aimed at delivering products or services based on the demands of the human talent that works for the government, such as, for example, training of officials, job offers and promotion, as well as the establishment and dissemination of regulations and internal regulations, among others.
One way or another, this relationship could be connected to the dimension behind the screen. Araya et al. (2004) consider that within the main components of the dimension are "the organizational design… financial administration of the State and human resources within the government" (Araya and others, 2008, p. 26). Innovation, Bureaucracy and Electronic Government.
When speaking of organizational design, the modification of the internal processes that will be provided through digital means must be taken into account. It should be noted that it is not only a matter of equipping or replacing old computer equipment with faster and more powerful ones, it is a matter of readjusting the organization to the new way of providing the service. "Technology must be placed at the service of modernization of the administration, instead of designing modernization based on technology" (Porrúa, 2004, p. 2). The use of ICT contributes to the simplification and standardization of procedures; These will be more effective and efficient to the extent that human talent is trained for the changes generated in the organizational design.
Regarding this aspect, Araya and others (2004) affirm that the actions of the State should not be oriented to the search for highly specialized personnel outside the institution, on the contrary, it would be more enriching to adopt permanent training policies to carry out the organizational transformation adequate.
Obviously, the first element to bear in mind in staff training is information technology preparation, since all actions to be carried out behind the screen require ICT skills and abilities.
It should not be forgotten that e-government can produce negative collateral effects, such as widening the digital divide, large-scale consumption of resources, increased citizen expectations, and complex cultural change within the bureaucracy itself (Dinsdale et al., 2002, p. 3) The capacity objectives of the public administration should include both the availability of experts dedicated to supporting the implementation of electronic government, as well as the training of public officials to use technology in their work every day.
For López (2006), the concept of innovation is clear in the technical-productive field, however, it can provoke changes of a different nature, with degrees of novelty. Innovation, Bureaucracy and Electronic Government.
When talking about process innovation, the industry shows increases in productivity, while when talking about product innovations, these become visible to the outside and configure a range of promising possibilities, as they would imply the expansion of the industry, jobs work, product lines, among others.
For there to be innovation, Dávila (2002, cited by López, 2004) considers that the premises of a certain institutional arrangement must be questioned, within which there is some problem to be solved; A solution must be proposed as well as new premises for action generated by the actors of said organization, who will become authors and active participants in the social validation of the innovative alternative proposed, through the recognition made by others of it.
Within the Bureaucratic Sector it is therefore common to hear that the public official typically say: 'if things change or improve maybe I will no longer be so necessary'. This means that many times there is no technological innovation within the Unit since they create a routine within the department for fear of change, another generalized factor derives from the fractional management system that responds to a complex diversity of criteria (most of the time not technical) what index on the supply of inputs and other decisions.
Take as an example the appointment of personnel or their removal, or the process of purchasing supplies. From a managerial point of view, it is difficult to generate an adequate high-quality product if there is no programming and timely combination of the quantities of inputs.
An example could be the public health services in Chiapas, which sometimes face such implausible challenges as the fact that in a hospital center all the items are in stock to attend an emergency except syringes and thread for sewing, or on the contrary there is thread and other supplies but there are no doctors or nurses on duty at the moment.
Therefore, it is not an easy challenge to overcome, but it is necessary to face it in order to improve competitiveness in Chiapas. However, achieving this requires a high level of pragmatism and recognition of the complex problems that affect the public sector, most of which require a new paradigm that undoubtedly faces wide cultural resistance from governments, unions, as well as from the public sector themselves. governed.
Conclusions
Ultimately, innovating is important so that our bureaucratic sector does not remain out of date, because the rapid evolution of the environment, the demands of the community, the growing needs of society, make innovation essential as a source of better governmental position. Innovation is perhaps the most effective tool to achieve new goals, but at the same time it presents high risks, we need a good method, good management and preparation so that the bureaucratic system is accepted by society.
In general, innovation will occur when various technologies are integrated to give rise to new knowledge. Innovation, depending on its magnitude, can break the bureaucratic routine, thus speeding up the application process, an incremental improvement, albeit significant, on the current situation. To be successful, innovation must be intrinsically attractive and congruent with strategy, overcome the current bureaucratic situation, change the mindset of public officials.In addition, it must have adequate resources to make it viable and receive the enthusiastic support that the institution government needs to put the innovation into practice.
Bibliography
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