Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview IV. Working Group on PA Reform in CEE&CA Author(s) David Špaček Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic Svatava Nunvarova Title Quality management and citizens satisfaction - selected practice of Czech public administration File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract In 1995, Milakovich stated that customers everywhere were concerned about the continued neglect of product and service quality. Production of quality that satisfies those affected becomes a key task of quality management and quality organizations according to Beam (2001), who employs what Schneider and White (2004) call the “user-based” approach towards the definition of quality separately from the philosophical and technical approach. The movement of quality is visible across public administrations in Europe. The emerging practice that some public sector organizations are now beginning to do what many businesses have been doing for a long time: guarantee satisfaction, as commented by Beam (2001) with regards to the United States, is currently apparent in Europe. Public administration represents a social, inter-sectoral and multidisciplinary phenomenon that is different from private administration in a certain respect, however. Today, public administration consists of large group of institutions and vast amount of activities of societal management and coordination of the executive power. Administrative activities are exercised by a specific group of employees (civil servants) on the basis of law that prescribes and also limits the scope of managerial practices and the extent of possible competition in service delivery. In the public administration, aims of continual quality improvement’s rhetoric bring a lot of questions about quality of quality management itself which lead to specific requirements as described for example in Gaster and Squires’ negotiated concept of quality. The concept of negotiated quality is based on partnership with stakeholders, trust, accessible participation, necessary coordination and thus communication. Similar requirements are echoing in various quality management instruments which are currently discussed in public administration (EFQM and CAF, Local Agenda 21, BSC etc.). Notwithstanding the scepticism of some literature on user satisfaction and its measurement (e.g. Bouckaert and Van de Walle, 2003; Lowery, Lyond and DeHoog, 1990; Kelly, 2003), the author of the paper believes that citizens’ satisfaction and its measurement has its role in public administration. The evaluation of needs and their satisfaction may reduce possible contextual collision as described by Heeks (2004) with regard to e-government systems. His definition may be applicable more generally as follows: government systems have elements of context inscribed into them - elements direct from the designer’s context or elements misperceived from the users’ context that are mismatched to the actual elements found in the users’ context. The proposed paper will discuss selected approaches to quality management in the Czech public administration. It will focus particularly on introduction of practices of selected instruments which have been promoted by the Ministry of Interior (i.e. central authority responsible for quality promotion in Czech public administration) and used intensively mainly by regions or municipalities in order to increase the citizens’ satisfaction. The research, the partial results of which are proposed for presentation and elaboration in the paper, is carried out within the framework of the project of the Czech Science Foundation no. 402/07/1486 “Measurement of Citizens´ Satisfaction with Public Sector Services as Integral Part of Quality Management in Public Sector Organizations”.
