
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 20, 1993                   TAG: 9304200413
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BUSINESSLIKE

WHEN PRESIDENT Clinton last month appointed a task force to perform a "performance audit" of the federal bureaucracy, he said it isn't enough simply to cut spending. The government, and especially the system of incentives that drive bureaucracies, need to be reorganized. To become more efficient, to improve service, they must be - to use the term that's become a rage - "reinvented."

The administration is modeling this effort, headed by Vice President Al Gore, on a successful performance-audit of state government begun by Texas a couple of years ago. Not only were significant savings found there, but layers of management were sliced, more decision-making power was given to front-line employees, teams were formed across departmental lines, and greater attention was paid to the needs of customers - that is, taxpayers and consumers of government services.

If some of this sounds akin to quality-improvement ideas floating around the business world nowadays, that's not surprising. The Texas review was itself modeled on insights and methods arising from the private sector.

In this same vein, the Clinton administration ought to study, and in some respects emulate, what Prime Minister John Major is doing with the British civil service. It's another example of business-reform techniques transferred successfully to government.

Major, to be sure, is not a highly popular politician in England these days. In many ways he hasn't been a very good prime minister. What's more, Clinton, a Democrat, and Major, a Conservative, have different outlooks on the uses of government.

Never mind. Major's opinion-poll ratings aren't based on his efforts to make public agencies more businesslike. And "reinvention" transcends old labels of left and right.

Major has opened more government work to competitive bidding. He has also reorganized more than two-thirds of Britain's 500,000 civil servants into smaller, more focused agencies. Notes the Journal of Commerce: "Many of those agencies are managed by corporate-style chief executives who run their own budgets and are accountable for results."

They're also trying to get in better touch with customers. The Conservative government has developed an instrument called "citizens charters." They not only set performance targets for public workers; they also offer citizens the right to seek compensation when they get bad service.

If the Gore task force does borrow some of these ideas, it will do so with the benefit of Britain's experience with them. In that nation, reinvention is beyond the talking and studying stage; Major is getting on with reforms.

It is premature, of course, to judge the work of the just-formed Gore task force. When the time does arrive to make judgments, they should be based on the quality not so much of the performance audit itself, as of the results produced by the measures that are implemented.

That, as businesspeople might say, is the bottom line.

by CNB