Building Customer-Focused Organizations in British Columbia

Abstract

INTRODUCTION British Columbia is a Canadian province with a land area larger than Texas and a population roughly the size of Washington State, its immediate neighbor to the South. During the past decade, the public service of British Columbia has developed extensive experience in building customer-focused public agencies. This experience is particularly notable because it occurred during a period when the government reduced the size of the public service by one-third through a major downsizing and privatization program. Including both operating ministries (departments) and Crown corporations, there are now approximately 50,000 people employed by the Province of British Columbia's public service. The experience of those B.C. managers who have successfully built islands of service may be of special interest and assistance to those public managers currently implementing Total Quality Service (Albrecht, 1990:51) or Total Quality Management (Federal Quality Institute, 1990:1) principles within their organizations. This article will outline the process of building a customer-focused culture in five British Columbia public agencies: a central agency (Office of the Comptroller General); a central service agency (B.C. Systems Corporation); and three program delivery agencies (B.C. Pavilion Corporation, B.C. Government Agents Branch, and B.C. Parks). These five agencies were chosen to demonstrate that customer-centred corporate culture can be successfully achieved in a wide variety of government organizations, even central and central service agencies. OFFICE OF THE COMPTROLLER GENERAL The Comptroller General of British Columbia is the chief accounting officer and paymaster for government. The office produces the largest payroll system in British Columbia and controls all of the government's payments, including social assistance payments and three million annual payments to over 100,000 suppliers. The office sets financial management policies for all government departments to follow and manages the corporate internal audit function for government. In addition, the Comptroller General produces the government's annual financial statements, the Public Accounts. Until 1982 the Office of the Comptroller General was a traditional bureaucratic central agency. When a new Comptroller General was appointed in 1982, the new management team decided to embark on the long journey toward building a more client-focused agency. The O.C.B. decided to become a partner in performance with line departments rather than a bureaucratic policeman. This new vision of the organization's role was consistent with the Post-Bureaucratic Reform Paradigm of central agencies which emerged in the Minnesota State Government in the 1980s (Berzelay and Armajani, 1990:307). The first step in the transformation process was for the management team to ask: Who are our customers? and What does each customer group need from the organization? Until 1982 the organization had never thought of itself as having and had never formally identified them. The list of customers and organizational values was formalized into a 1983 mission statement which identified government departments, Treasury Board (the Cabinet-level committee responsible for financial matters), suppliers, and taxpayers as some of the organization's major customers. The mission statement committed the organization to excellence in service, in financial control and defined what this meant in action terms. The mission statement also defined the people-centerd organizational culture that the O.C.G. would strive to achieve. An early initiative to improve service involved setting customer-driven service standards for payment processing. Service agreements were negotiated by the Office of Comptroller General with each line department. These service agreements set out mutually-agreed standards for timely processing of vouchers. …

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