The international community commemorates United Nations Public Service Day and the Africa Public Service Day every year on June 23.
This year’s celebrations are themed around innovating for a new era and leveraging technology for the future public service.
The primary objective of innovation in the public service is to ensure vital services are provided to people in a more timely and efficient manner. In an environment of radical changes shaped by global trends, it is only innovation and technology that can enable governments to tackle challenges in new ways, enhancing the design and delivery of public goods and services for the citizens.
Innovation and adoption of technology in the public service requires meticulous planning, leadership and stakeholder alignment. In its strategic plan covering 2019–24, the Public Service Commission has laid out a transformation road map for efficient and effective service delivery, where technology and innovation are the backbone.
With a clear strategy on innovation and adoption of technology, the public service can expect a stronger alignment between delivery and citizen needs. Technology is an enabler not only for provision of efficient and effective service delivery but also as a tool for monitoring as citizens expect improved accessibility to quality services.
The ability of the public sector to innovate and adopt technology is a critical element in driving economic development. However, strategies relating to innovation and technology in the public sector are still less developed than those targeting the private sector.
Whereas there are significant differences between the public and the private sector in terms of incentives and motivation, resource allocation, and attitudes towards risk — which are inherent in the different roles played by the two sectors in the economy — they should not hinder promotion of innovation and technology in the former.
There are potential benefits for the public sector in adapting innovation and technology as drivers of economic growth and prosperity and in delivery of citizen-centric services.
To offer citizen-centric services, the ability of public servants to identify aspirational issues key to the individual citizen is central. It is through understanding issues that affect citizens that enables public service to design better participation and engagement forums to educate them to overcome inertia towards new technologies, while making applications which are responsive to their needs.
In addition, a citizen-focused service delivery in government requires unity of purpose. By adapting a whole of government approach, we are defining innovation in public sector in three distinct facets to ensure impact in delivery.
The first element is integration of policies and processes between government agencies; the second is developing transparent public services and procedures; and the third is the use of technology to improve accessibility of services.
Together, we expect these elements to contribute towards creating improvements in outcomes and making public services easily and conveniently available to all citizens, and as a result, generating positive citizen experience.
The centrality of innovation and technology in the sector was brought to the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the Public Service Commission, within a short period of less than two years, to drastically change the way it organised its activities to meet citizens’ needs.
The commission responded admirably in this transformed environment by quickly developing new channels to deliver services to citizens. It rapidly, turned to technology and developed online platforms for its interviews, adopted online meetings and conferencing as well as working from home for some staffers without compromising service delivery standards.
The commission leveraged and continues to improve its use of technology to sustain the enhanced culture of technological innovations, which is becoming a prominent platform for service delivery across the sector.
As Africa and the world celebrates this year’s UN Public Service Day and Africa Public Service Day, public servants must not lose sight of the fact that the scale and complexity of delivering quality services makes it an ambitious and demanding enterprise that cannot succeed without leveraging on innovation and technology.
Our commitment and resolve towards creating a culture of innovation and technology is a commitment about having public organisations and systems that habitually innovate, that continually improve their quality, without having to be pushed from the outside. It is a commitment of creating a public sector that has a built-in drive to improve — what some call a -self-renewing system.
The pandemic is a wake-up call. It has clearly demonstrated that the public service must continuously redouble its efforts, be instinctively innovative and use technology to achieve the vision of being a citizen-centric public service capable of offering world class services.
The writer is the vice chairperson, Public Service Commission
