Tag archives for public service
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Digital Transformation in Government
The purpose of government is to serve its citizens, it should do that as efficiently and effectively as possible. The extent to which any specific government serves its people should depend very much on the needs and wishes of those people. I very much doubt that many people in the UK would disagree with that statement. Almost everyone that I have ever worked with in the public sector holds the first sentence as a core belief. You cannot work effectively for long in public service if you don't. However we seem to have gone astray a little. I think that the reasons for this is rigidity of institutions, exacerbated by thirty years of ideology that the private sector is better than the public sector. The fad for outsourcing on long-term monopoly contracts stifles change. I've seen this first hand in more than one central…
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Nineteen Years in Public Service
Nineteen years ago I started work, at Her Majesty's pleasure according to my job offer letter, as an Executive Officer with the Department of the Environment. I was a graduate entrant on the DOE's Management Development Programme and was paid an annual salary of £12,200, including London Weighting. That was quite good money at the time, the average graduate starting salary was £10,000 and in today's terms it would be about double that (using the Retail Prices Index (RPI) to update it). The expectations that I had were of relatively rapid promotion to Higher Executive Officer (HEO) after about 3 years and then skipping past Senior Executive Officer (SEO) straight to Grade 7 in about five years after getting to HEO. I also got told that I would have compulsory retirement at the age of 60 and that I would…