The following article sheds some light on the rules of the bureaucratic organization but does not provide a solution as I have done in my books on government reform: “Ten Steps To Jumpstarting Government Reform” and “Innovation in Government”.

What is Bureaucracy? by Kun Wang
Strengths of bureaucracy as seen by Max Weber?
1. A division of labor into spheres of influence
2. A definite hierarchy of official offices
3. Clear norms and rules
4. Selection to office is by technical qualification.
5. Promotion by seniority.
6. Disciplinary control over the incumbent of each office.
7. Better than feudal/traditional forms where people got appointed by favoritism or bribes.
Weaknesses of bureaucracy?
1. Becomes an Iron Cage of Control (as Weber saw it)
OTHER DYSFUNCTIONS SINCE WEBER
2. Red Tape from all the rules and sign offs
3. Hard to change this form
4. Divisions of labor compartmentalize attention and response.
5. Hierarchy can mean silos (e.g. must go up and down chains of command to get things done).
6. Certain irrationalities result.

What is legal authority?
According to Weber, there are three types of legitimate authority. The validity of their claims may be respectively based on: rational authority, traditional authority, and charismatic authority. In the case of this organization, our primary concern is on rational authority.
Legally authority is based on a belief in the ‘legality’ of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority infer such rules to issue commands. Under the control of legal authority, obedience is attributed to the legally established impersonal order. It extends to the persons exercising the authority of office under it only by virtue of the formal legality of their commands and only within the scope of authority of the office.
The effectiveness of legal authority builds on the acceptance of the validity of the following mutually inter-dependent ideas.
1. That any given legal norm may be established by agreement or by imposition, on the bases of expediency or rational values or both, with a claim to obedience at least on the part of the members of the corporate group.
2. That every body of law consists essentially in a consistent system of abstract rules which have (normally) been intentionally established.
3. That thus the typical person in authority occupies an ‘office’.
4. That the person who obeys authority does so, as it is usually stated, only in his capacity as a ‘member’ of the corporate group and what he obeys is only ‘the law’.
5. In conformity with point 3, it is held that the members of the corporate group, in so far as they obey a person in authority, do not owe this obedience to him as an individual, but to the impersonal order.
Legal authority with a bureaucratic administrative staff
In a bureaucratic story-telling organization, we usually can divide rational legal authority into the following eight fundamental categories:
1. A continuous organization of official functions bound by rules.
2. A specified sphere of competence.
3. The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy; that is, each lower officer is under the control and supervision of a higher one.
4. The rules that regulate the conduct of an office may be technical rules or norms.
5. In the rational type it is a matter of principle that the members of the administrative staff should be completely separated from ownership of the means of production or administration.
6. In the rational type case, there is also a complete absence of appropriation of his official position by the incumbent.
7. Administrative acts, decisions, and rules are formulated and recorded in writing, even in cases where oral discussion is the rule or is even mandatory.
8. Legal authority can be exercised in a wide variety of different forms that will be distinguished and discussed later.
Drawn heavily on the above characteristics of legal authority in bureaucratic administrative style, Web gave ten criteria addressing how individual officials are appointed and function, in the purest type, within the whole administrative staff under the supreme authority.
1. They are personally free and subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligation.
2. They are organized in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices.
3. Each office has a clearly defined sphere of competence it the legal sense.
4. The office is filled by a free contractual relationship. Thus, in principle, there is free selection.
5. Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualification.
6. They are remunerated by fixed salaries in money, for the most part with a right to pensions.
7. The office is treated as the sole, or at least the primary, occupation of incumbent.
8. It constitutes a career. There is a system of ‘promotional’ according to seniority or to achievement, or both. Promotion is dependent on the judgment of superiors.
9. The official works entirely separated from ownership of the means of administration and without appropriation of his/her position.
10. He is subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of the office.

Remember the loss of the steel industry to the Far East and the creation of the Rust Belt in Ohio. The Rust Belt was a destroyed economy largely resulting from union pressure to prevent loss of jobs from modernization of the steel industry. The Unions failed to understand that the loss of a few jobs would have prevented the loss of an entire industry.

All economies local, state, country, and even the European Union depend on economic self interest to maintain their vitality and tax base. While many subscribe to this concept they yet support the outsourcing that undermines the economy affected. This is driven by a blind search for the cheapest labor in order to reduce costs and ignores the effects to the economy. Even state governments have allowed outsourcing of basic services such as telephone answering services to India while calculating the cost savings they missed the effects on the economy to local businesses and the tax base.

The Principle of Economic Self Interest is used by cities to compete with other cities for new businesses and government installations. It is also used at the state level for the same reasons. But somehow the understanding of this concept at the federal level has been lost and worst of all tax incentives for outsourcing have been provided to manufacturers who send jobs out of the country. The idea is simple to build the economy by providing jobs which in turn multiplies the economy through worker spending at local businesses.

This basic concept is also at the heart of the reason that the European Union has faltered. The disparity between EU economies mainly in wages and benefits has prevented further unification of the European countries. French unions recently pushed through its government a 35 hour work week. The result of this and with its national labor laws (once a French worker is hired he can not be fired for any reason except when the company goes out of business) has caused thousands of French companies to go out of business in France and start up immediately in the new eastern block countries of the EU where there are virtually no union restrictions. This has caused enough concern with Germany and France that the admission of Turkey with its low wages to the EU has been postponed.

We can win the war in Iraq by changing our military tactics. This war is very similar to that of World War I in the continued use of obsolete and ineffective tactics. In WWI soldiers would hunker down in the trenches then on command would face certain death by attacking the machine guns of the enemy. Millions died in this manner yet it was the standard military tactic of the day. The French in Algeria would patrol the villages and the country side in the day but would retreat to their fortified compounds at night laving the country to the Arab insurgents. The military tactics we are using in Iraq differ only slightly from that of the colonialists in that we have announced that we are not going to stay and control the country.

We have made many big mistakes in Iraq but the most damaging was the disbanding of the Saddam’s Iraqi army. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers suddenly had no way of making a living and were easily recruited by the insurgents to fight the American invaders. We have spent the last three years trying to correct this mistake by rebuilding the Iraqi army and police force. The war would have taken a much easier course had this not been done.

In Iraq we control only safe zones and retreat them at night leaving the Iraqi civilians unprotected. This is the same tactic used by colonialist armies before us and before them the crusaders built castle fortress that they retreated to at night. The Arabs have learned lone ago how to fight invaders through a war of insurgency. The question is why was this a surprise to us?

What are the new military tactics we can use?
There is nothing new here we just need a little innovative thinking on the part of the military. First we need to deploy hundreds of unmanned slow flying planes with night vision and weapons capability on all the major roads in Iraq. There should be enough of these to cover all of the major roadways every thirty minutes. This would spell the end of insurgents planting IEDs for the destruction of American troop sorties during the daytime. We are already using them for patrols but not in enough numbers to stop the planting of roadside bombs. We recently used these planes to follow an insurgent leading to a meeting and the bombing death of the Al Qaeda leader Al Zarqawi. With night vision enough of these planes could completely control Baghdad and other cities at night protecting Iraqi civilians.

The second innovation is in the use of bomb sniffing dogs, hundreds of them. The problem with insurgents embedded with the civilian population is that the only way of separating them from the general population is that they handle weapons, which the dogs can easily smell. All of the major civilian and military targets in Baghdad could be protected by bomb sniffing dogs. They are kind of early warning system foiling the element of surprise needed by suicide bombers.

All American patrol convoys could be lead by bomb sniffing dogs. And when it is necessary to pacify an Iraqi city hundreds of bomb sniffing dogs with GPS locators strapped to them could lead the advance of troops through the city. The dogs could be trained to find the enemy before they find our troops while helicopters and drone planes eliminate the targets identified by the dogs.

Establishing a culture of employee innovation is one of the best ways to get an efficient operation with continuous improvement. Because the employee is close to the day to day operation he can detect problems sooner and has the opportunity to come up with an innovative solution before the problem is even known to management. However in most bureaucratic organizations it’s difficult to get employees to innovate on their jobs. For three reasons employees are generally not asked to be innovative and are intimidated by the culture of the organization. The second reason is if they do have a good idea it is generally ignored due to the competitive nature found at the work place. And the third reason is little or no responsibility is delegated to the employee for making improvements to the work processes.

This problem was solved by many industrial companies in the early 1980’s by the implementation of various Japanese quality programs such as “Quality of Work Life”, “Work Improvement Teams” and “Total Quality Management”. Each of these programs organized the work force into Teams who met generally once a week to discuss how improvements could be made in the job processes. The idea is to change the culture of the organization into one where continuous improvement will be the accepted norm.

TRIZ is a Russian acronym for Inventive Problem Solving developed by Genrich S. Altshuller. He was dissatisfied with the common methods of inventiveness and examined Russian patents to discover the inventive process. In the next few years, Altshuller screened over 200,000 patents looking for inventive problems and how they were solved. Of these only 40,000 had what appeared to be an inventive solution; the rest were straight forward improvements. What he also found was that real significant innovations occurred outside of the field of expertise found in the industry.

Altshuller found that usually, inventors must resort to a trade-offs and compromise between the features and do not achieve an ideal solution. But in his study of patents many described a solution that eliminated or resolved the contradiction and required no trade-off.

To simplify “The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”.
Most problems are solved using the concept of Contradiction which is broken down into two categories Physical Contradiction and Technical Contradiction. Technical Contradiction mostly involves arriving at the best solution through compromise. Example: Automotive airbags are set to release at an optimum impact level. The release should not occur at a low safe speed but deploy quickly enough to save lives at high speed. This is an obvious tradeoff in safety you don’t want the airbag to deploy when not needed yet sensitive enough to quickly deploy when needed. Another example: Increasing the horsepower improves the performance of an automobile but it also increases fuel consumption.

Physical Contradiction usually occurs after the process of Technical Contradiction has failed to provide a satisfactory solution and are generally harder to find a solution. Example: Wide Highways are desirable for safe driving but are an expensive problem in urban areas. Another example: the frame of a truck needs to be heavy to carry heavy loads but light for fuel economy. In other words technically tweaking the problem will not arrive at a satisfactory solution.

The Following TRIZ process is from Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) found at: http://www.mazur.net/triz

“Formulate the problem: the Prism of TRIZ
Restate the problem in terms of physical contradictions. Identify problems that could occur. Could improving one technical characteristic to solve a problem cause other technical characteristics to worsen, resulting in secondary problems arising? Are there technical conflicts that might force a trade-off?

Search for Previously Well-Solved Problem
Altshuller extracted from over 1,500,000 world-wide patents these 39 standard technical characteristics that cause conflict. These are called the 39 Engineering Parameters…” “Find the contradicting engineering principles. First find the principle that needs to be changed. Then find the principle that is an undesirable secondary effect. State the standard technical conflict.

Look for Analogous Solutions and Adapt (it) to My Solution
Altshuller also extracted from the world wide patents 40 inventive principles. These are hints that will help an engineer find a highly inventive (and patentable) solution to the problem. Examples from patents are also suggested with these 40 inventive principles…” “To find which inventive principles to use, Altshuller created the Table of Contradictions… “The Table of Contradictions lists the 39 Engineering Parameters on the X-axis (undesired secondary effect) and Y-axis (feature to improve). In the intersecting cells, are listed the appropriate Inventive Principles to use for a solution.”

The 39 Engineering Parameters and the 40 Inventive Principles of TRIZ may be found at: http://www.mazur.net/triz

What Not to Do?
Continue using the 19th century bureaucratic structure of government that demands results from employees.
-Continue to think of innovation as only occurring when major projects are initiated.
-Demand improved results from all employees when they have little or no responsibility for results.

When you have successful results from goals set by government managers in many cases it is not known how the results came about. Very often it is what you are doing and what you are saying as managers that makes all the difference in results.

I remember from a management class I had some years ago about a series of experiments in the work place done at Westinghouse. In one experiment the lighting was improved by increasing the wattage in the florescent bulbs over the work tables in the Westinghouse factory. Then over the next few weeks it was noted that productivity increased significantly over what it had been before. Some weeks later the light bulbs were changed again only this time instead of increasing the wattage they decreased the wattage. The workers were told that the wattage was increased even higher. The result was again an increase in productivity. The experiments demonstrated that by just focusing managements attention on employees there can be an increase productivity.

If you consider all the general statements made in annual meets and in monthly pep talks about getting better results you would think productivity would increase significantly. What is different in this case is that the employees must be personally “touched” that is to say involved in making the improvements in productivity. When employees are not personally involved increased productivity and better results can mean next to nothing. This is primarily because of the lack of employee involvement in decisions affecting the work place they feel little or no responsibility for results.

Government today is still griped in the 19th century bureaucratic structure. What is needed is to skip the 20th century move into the into a 21st century management structure. One clear example of an organization of the 21st century is Google. Google structures all of its management activities into small focused teams of employees. It is among the most innovative companies that innovate not just for themselves but for their customers as well. Google’s search engine business started with the question “what does the customer want?” not how can we make money from the customer.
Eric Schmidt CEO of Google knows the importance of innovation. His employees are allowed to spend 20% of their day working on their own innovations knowing if the company buys in they will have the chance to develop their ideas. Google spends 70% of their efforts on the core of their business the search engine, 20% on search engine related business and 10% on unrelated customer driven innovation.

The Following is from Chapter 8 of my EBook 2.

“Chapter 8. How to Make Work Improvement Teams Successful

8.1 Replacing Bureaucracies with Total Change
Bureaucracies in many ways are like dinosaurs capable of adapting to new environmental threats yet still remaining a dinosaur. They are remarkably adaptable when it comes to protecting their self-interest. Some unnamed state governments have promoted and implemented Total Quality Management (TQM) teams. But what really happened is only lip service was given to the idea and the teams were simply added to the structure of the organization and any benefit from the implementation of TQM was lost.

TQM is the same idea as the Work Improvement Teams (WITs) which I recommend. However bureaucracies are inherently unable to process the words “Total Quality”. That is understandable since TQM came from a manufacturing environment, which focused on raising the quality of a companies products thus increasing sales and profits. TQM and WITs won’t work without getting the entire management to change their focus to process improvement and serving the public. The reason for an organization to exist is to perform one or more functions. Functions have a set of processes that can be improved by those performing the processes.

What is needed is cataclysmic change throughout the organization, which is nearly impossible in a bureaucratic organization. But change can come to bureaucracies if top management is willing to do the following: embrace the WIT concept, eliminate bureaucratic complexity, reduce the number of levels of the organization, empower all employees to be innovative and focus on the customer the public that you are serving.

By “elimination bureaucratic complexity” I mean just that throw out detailed job descriptions and endless evaluations. Instead trust peer reviews from the WITs. Don’t read any memo over two pages long and if you do get any send them back to be rewritten. Totally kill this idea of my office is bigger than yours by eliminating all offices and have only conference rooms. Where I once worked some times when a person could not be promoted because the larger office required was unavailable with out building an addition to the office.

Reducing the number of levels of management is gut wrenching for bureaucracies because their power resides in their ability to promote personnel. This must occur if it doesn’t you will know that the implementation has failed. The reason for this change is that there is nothing tangible for these extra layers of management to do except get in the way.
What you want is flat lean organization that adapts to change through innovation and continuous improvement. Develop a “loose tight” organization allow personnel the freedom to innovate while keeping tight control on the budget. Your organization should have a tough side not by top management banging their fist on the desk but through peer pressure. This will spell the end to kick backs, waste and other forms of fraud. Remember most personnel in bureaucracies know what is going on under the table but don’t say anything through fear of retaliation.

Empower all employees to be innovative. Encourage small failures because you also get small successes and by duplicating these small successes the entire organization benefits from the improvement.

Focus on the customer the people you are serving. Bureaucracies tend ignore this and have as their primary focus the organization itself and its survival. All improvements should in the end better serve your customer and the taxpayer.

8.2 Changing the Workplace Environment to get Innovation.
The primary purpose of Work Improvement Teams (WIT) is to focus all the brainpower at the work place on innovation. In a competitive environment innovation is where you save the business and the employees’ jobs. In many government bureaucracies void of competition innovation is not only unwelcome it is discouraged. Actually there is a kind of government competition but it is within the state where agencies compete for tax dollars. This is where bureaucracies hide their wastefulness while making blotted requests for increased funding. The situation here is that any innovation shown by one organization simply feeds more funds to those organizations that don’t innovate.

The problem is how to change the workplace environment across all state government agencies at the same time and yet keep the changes small enough to avoid a major failure and political embarrassment. I recommend that the governor implement a WIT test team in a workplace environment where success is most likely. When the WIT test implementation is successful he should then form a WIT Implementation Task Force for statewide implementation of WIT’s. Each agency head must support the implementation within his organization failure to do this will lead to the failure of the WIT. The governor’s WIT Implementation Task Force will travel throughout the state visiting each WIT and report weekly on the progress of statewide WITs. Successes should be published in the state’s newsletter showing support from the governor’s office. Total change comes in small successful steps the first of which is with the implementation of WITs.

Besides the innovation at the workplace there is also personal innovation aimed at reinventing oneself. State government leaders should be encouraged to attend seminars on this subject. I only mention this as a possible way of softening the implementation of the WITs and preventing the appearance that they are being crammed down managements throats.

8.3 Practices that Encourage Teamwork and Continuous Improvement.
Continuous improvement comes from teamwork and small steps in improvement in their work processes. However some practices can get in the way. One of these is performance measurement. The rule here is “what you measure is what you get”. You should never measure individual performance or its corollary pay individual incentive pay it pits employees against each other causing them to horde information about the work being done stifling continuous improvement. The converse is to always measure group productivity and reward group performance. But make sure that what you are measuring and what you are rewarding are what you want as a result. A second example is don’t measure vehicle or machine utilization they may driven or used just to collect the miles or hours to meet the standard for performance a waste of equipment and employee’s time. Also measure only a few items needed for improvement other measures can be used just for monitoring activities but don’t have too many performance measures they will be confusing and get employees working at cross purposes.

Change the role of supervisors from directing activities to becoming coaches supporting individuals and groups. Reduce or eliminate the practice of “toll gating” making personnel wait until approval is granted. Supervisors should be close enough to the work activities to grant immediate approval. They should encourage innovation and allow small failures so that a few successes can be found and adopted throughout the organization. This is a tough role change so its up to senior management staffs to provide role models. Actions speak louder than words managers can’t fool employees. They watch for patterns in the manager’s most minute actions, and are able to distrust words that mismatch deeds. This is why in being a role model for change means that the manager must truly believe in the process and his actions must demonstrate his words.

Continuous improvement may be thought of as being done in small steps and usually involves those improvements that an individual or group can change in their work processes. Innovation is generally thought of as bringing bigger and more dramatic change to work processes. This is usually through the way that an entire process is performed and can be through technological breakthrough. Innovation can also bring more disruption to the work place eliminating some jobs adding new jobs but when warranted can bring significant productivity improvement in a shorter time.

As I have stated elsewhere you should tear down office walls and put in more conference rooms just in case people want to get together to solve problems. Introduce what some call “tight coupling” between different disciplines. It all means that people talk about their problems and get them solved rather than posturing and debating and causing delay. This is also an added benefit for Work Improvement Teams (WIT) when they meet with other disciplines.

EBook 2. can be found at: http://ebooksbylrosier.blogspot.com

Restructuring FEMA for Quick Response
One of the main problems with FEMA is the slowness to get aid to hurricane survivors. Bureaucracies require authorizing paperwork (Red Tape) before anything can be done. This is necessary in the FEMA bureaucracy because control at the local level will be lost by its leaders and procedures both fiscal and otherwise will be violated. This brings every unplanned action that has to be done immediately to a halt and destroys the capability of workers in the field trying to bring relief to disaster victims. First response workers like firemen and police get around this problem through situation training drills where detailed procedures lead to automatic decisions and actions.

Problems in the field where on the spot decisions need to be made can best be solved by the implementation of Work Improvement Teams (WITs) which I have recommended. In this case the teams are made up of personnel in the field who can quickly get together to come to a consensus as to how best to solve an immediate problem. In addition where individuals are dispersed from other team members modern communications can allow consensus to be gotten without a meeting.

There may be an advantage to having team members of varying special skills to bring a knowledge base to the field with connections for access to resources. The WIT is preauthorized to make all the decisions necessary to bring immediate aid to disaster victims. Judgment as to whether the team has made the proper decision in specific instances occurs much later in a review of how improved responses can be made. The FEMA command center should not make field decisions nor should it give approval for them. These decisions are reserved for the on site WIT. The primary function of the command center is to coordinate and deliver the much needed resources to the WIT at the disaster site. Note that the decision making process is driven down to the lowest level of the FEMA organization.

This is in contrast to the FEMA bureaucracy where nearly all decisions are made on the basis of rules or higher up in the organization. The WIT structure makes for a highly effective as well as efficient organization where two to three levels of a bureaucratic organization are no longer needed in the decision making process and are eliminated. In order to reduce the Red Tape modern database management systems are also required with communications at the disaster site. These databases are especially needed to verify the identity those who are requesting aid instantly. The failure to properly identify individuals lead to immense fraud losses and much embarrassment for FEMA. Even with proper identification of those needing aid there was still problems with the delivery of the aid.

As an example in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina a local official while standing in the midst of rubble on the Gulf Coast decried on national television that “Trailers were needed for emergency housing NOW”. Adding “I don’t care what it takes just send them down here and we will decide how to use them”. FEMA has rules trailers must be hooked up for water and sewage and must be a specified height off the ground. Weeks later people were still living in the shells of there destroyed homes or in tents none of them have water and sewage connections and the trailers are still parked on mass in a field somewhere in Georgia.

Rescuing Homeland Security and Protecting America
What most Americans are afraid of is that Homeland Security is just another failed bureaucracy that wastes our tax dollars and does little to protect us. What Homeland Security needs is an organization structure which will allow for innovation and flexibility. Bureaucracies cannot and don’t produce innovation. I recommend that high level Work Improvement Teams (WITs) be implemented to remedy this problem.

Innovation is the key and here is why. For example millions has been spend on the development of machines to detect bombs. The machines we have don’t work very well and are very expensive. But the Israelis have been using bomb-sniffing dogs successfully for years. Yes we have bomb sniffing dogs but what’s new here is we don’t seam to know how important they are or how to use them. The dogs are not nailed to the floor like a machine they can find a bomb in a few minutes from a distance in a crowd of people and in a stacks of luggage. Show me a machine that can do that. What Homeland Security should do is take one of those closed military bases and begin raising and training dogs. They should train thousands of them enough for every major airport and all subway entrances. Its the cheapest protection that money can buy. Dogs can be trained to find unique chemicals they even detect cancer in humans.

The media has identified 25 nuclear storage sites at universities that are left unguarded the perfect supply depot for those wanting to make a dirty bomb. Where is our Homeland Security? The least they can do is find out what’s going on before the media delivers another blow.

Congress seams to be unable to determine the type of threat faced in various parts of the country. What we know about our terrorist enemies is that when they decide to place a bomb they even count the number of people who will be walking in the street in order to determine the most deadly time to set off the bomb. They want to kill as many Americans as they can not American cows. Wyoming got 35 dollars per person for terrorist response and New York got 5 dollars per person.

The FEMA bureaucratic blunder dubbed by the media as the “FEMA Ice Follies” apparently went on for months. Here is what happened. When hurricane Katrina was approaching a computer “told” FEMA authorities how many truckloads of ice to order for disaster relief including enough for the city of New Orleans. When 80% of New Orleans was evacuated they only needed about 40% of the ice. But instead of admitting their mistake and letting the ice melt they solved the problem by moving the trucks all over the country with their refrigerators running 24 hours a day waiting for the next hurricane. At last 250 truckloads were found in Maine many more in other states at a considerable distance from the gulf coast. To top things off FEMA paid $35 thousand for each truck load of ice which regularly costs only $6 thousand. You could dismiss this a mistake that could have been made by any organization except for the fact that bureaucracies are known for their lack of common sense. This is a direct result of a bureaucracy’s robotic behavior of rigidly following a set of rules in this case a computer printout a common occurrence found in nearly all large bureaucracies.

Its important to realize that bureaucracies squelch innovation and cover up all kinds of waste and mismanagement which the public never sees unless the media is following up on them. The bureaucracy reacts to these failures only when discovered by the public by implementing tighter rules adding more red tape.

Katrina Still a Continuing Bureaucratic Disaster after Six Months
Many of the real human problems caused by Katrina are still not solved in New Orleans. The decision about what to do with unlivable storm damaged homes was delegated to the leaders of the local neighbor hoods by mayor Ray Nagin contributing to the ongoing disaster. Now six months after the storm little has been done with unlivable homes which should have been bulldozed months ago. While in Hope Arkansas officials are asking why hundreds of FEMA manufactured homes still wait at the airport with no place to go. FEMA is ending hotel and motel payments for Katrina victims and they have no place to go. Meanwhile basic service workers have no place to live in New Orleans. The disaster continues even as Congress continues to investigate the disaster.

The underlying reasons for the bureaucratic disaster are in several areas. First the failure of leadership through the appointment of politically connected individuals such as Michael Brown to head FEMA and his chief of staff Patrick James Rhode. Brown had almost no experience in responding to disasters while Rhode had absolutely no experience what so ever and he was running the day to day activities of FEMA. Michael Chertoff head of Homeland Security a former appeals court judge who helped write anti-terrorists laws after 9-11escaped many of the criticisms leveled at brown for being out of touch with the problem. This does not speak well for Chertoff in two areas. First the beginning years of a bureaucracy must be lead by a strong leader who will guide the culture of the organization and bring it into sink with the organizations mission and second because he has demonstrated that he is not a hands-on-responder he is the very type of person that you don’t want leading Homeland Security in case of a terrorist attack.

The real bright star that emerged from this disaster was Vice-Admiral Thad Allen of the US Coast Guard which has the duel “Responding Mission” and “Service Mission”. A person with his qualities is the ideal candidate for the Head of Homeland Security. He was the take-charge leader who brought together all of the stake-holding parties Mayor Ray Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco and Lt. General Russel Honore who successfully lead the 20.000 national guard troops. Note that this was an on-the-scene team of leaders the way that all disasters need to be handled. This is not the normal way that bureaucracies are organized. You will also note that while Thad Allen was leading the recovery Michael Chertoff the person who is the head of Homeland Security was nowhere to be found this does not make me feel secure for future disasters.

Second the problems of combining of two bureaucracies with different missions is not understood by this administration and by Congress. FEMA has a “Responding Mission” much like that of fire fighters who respond to fires while Homeland Security has a “Service Mission” like the FBI and US Army. Leaders in the US Coast Guard have experience in both missions and in my opinion could be our best hope in successfully responding to any disaster. Michael Brown made a point of the differing missions before Congress but the point may have been lost in his vitriolic blaming of others and not himself.

The third failure is in the Bureaucratic organization of Homeland Security itself. The inherent nature of all bureaucracies is that they require approval (read tape) before any action can be taken at the site of the disaster. While bureaucrats wait miles away from the disaster site to give approval or disapprove to these requests. The resulting slow reaction can take weeks and even months. This the primary reason why Vice Admiral Thad Allen’s team on the scene was successful in bringing the disaster under control. It not clear that FEMA or Homeland Security or even Congress understands the critical nature of an on the scene team lead by the Homeland Security Director.

A fourth problem is in the critical need for a modern database management system for Homeland Security. These systems are the only way to reduce Red Tape by having the needed information instantly available on line. They take a couple of years to develop but are critical to the success of the agency.

National Identification Cards
The requirement for instant on the spot identification of all Americans should be a national priority. We need a national identity card that is counterfeit proof that works in conjunction with your eye or by thumb print. Fifty years ago most people who came to this country came seeking work. Now we also have gangs of killers and terrorists crossing our borders both legally and illegally and once they are in the country they have nearly complete anonymity.

There are many benefits from a national identity card. Stolen identities can be significantly reduced. It hampers the ability of those without ID cards from roaming freely within our society using false IDs to get jobs, barrow money, and collect welfare and Medicaid. Ex-convicts and sex offenders become visible. The benefits far outweigh the big brother arguments against universal IDs. The savings to business alone in the billions. Crime will also be significantly reduced. But for disaster relief with positive ID the mountains of Red Tape simply go away resulting in a significant reduction in fraud and speeds relief to legitimate victims. This can happen if modern communications and Computer Database management systems are also implemented for quickly processing the need for resources.

Border Security
Our Coast Guard and our Boarder Guard should be beefed-up to stop all illegal immigration. We should setup employment offices on the border for American employers who want to hire aliens legally. They should have temporary IDs, work permits and a job before entering the US. There is no reason to have Mexican illegal aliens dieing in our southwest desserts year after year. Our Mexican and Canadian borders could also be better patrolled using unmanned aircraft which can stay aloft for many hours with monitoring cameras both day and night.

Aliens should not have US state drivers licenses. They should use the licenses from their own country which is common practice in Europe. Having a US state drivers license defeats the reason for the National ID card and opens the way for terrorists to drive tanker trucks.

Planning for Disaster
All disaster planning should begin at the county level by determining the threats and the “needs” for the county. There should be several plans that are based on threat level for hurricanes. The force level of the hurricane should determine who is to be evacuated and how to respond to the emergency. Environmental disasters, tornadoes, wild fires should each have its own unique disaster evacuation plan.

The local county “needs” for resources and services are then coordinated directly with the state plan and finally with the Federal government for their resources thus completing the plan. Note that there are three parties to emergency planning. Local county governments drive the plan and are ultimately responsible for the plan they are the stakeholders. They bring their demographics and resource needs to the state for assistance in planning how the resources of the state should be made available. Then the combined local and state plan is merged with the required federal resources and the county plans are completed. The final step is publicizing the plan so that the public knows what resources will be available and how they are to be evacuated. The key is bottom up planning, where top down planning is either wasteful or inadequate. When an impending disaster is seen all that is needed is agreement by state, local and Federal governments on which plan to use. The particulars of the plan are then immediately broadcasted to the public.

Getting the Public on Board
This is not an easy step convincing the public to prepare for a disaster when much of the population will not even wear their car seat belts. Be careful about lumping all Americans under the label of “the public”. The fact is that we are a mix of socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Each of these groups will require a unique approach to get them to “buy in” on preparing for a disaster. How ever its done it is important that people living in hurricane zones should be made aware of evacuations plans and know how they personally are to get out of the danger zone.

There is a right approach and wrong approach for getting the public on board for evolutionary change. I offer this example, in the 1960’s the city of London converted all their street lamps to orange halogen lamps, which were better for seeing in the fog. They had one other advantage the cost of operating them was significantly less than regular street lamps. When they were first installed on the East Coast they were touted as fog lamps and communities competed to see who could covert first to the new fog lamps. On the West Coast San Diego touted the savings that the city could get from installing the orange halogen street lamps. There was an immediate public outcry people called in to talk show hosts saying “they didn’t want those damned cheap lamps in their neighborhood”. The lesson is where there are deep emotional issues you should develop an approach appropriate to each segment of the community. What causes some segments of the community to buy-in will cause others to reject the plan.

From EBook 1.
GUIDE TO REFORMING GOVERNMENT
-FIXING AMERICA’S BUREAUCRACIES
THE ROOT CAUSE OF MISERY,
WASTE AND VULNERABILITY
TO TERRORISM

It is commonly thought that IBM is one of the world’s most innovative companies. But the public has a false memory when in the 1960’s IBM executives believing that the personal computer was just a toy allowed a young entrepreneur by the name of Bill Gates to supply them with an operating system called Microsoft it was probably their biggest blunder. IBM promotes their innovation as being leading edge and indeed some of it may be but its really for the benefit of IBM and in many cases it is highly exploitive of their customers. Consider how during the 1970’s and 1980’s even into the early 1990’s IBM pursued a policy of actually controlling its customers. IBM had a representative on McDonnell Douglas’s Corporate board. During those years most McDonnell executives were not computer literate and actually deferred major decisions to IBM executives in the area of automation and in the building of their computer center. This is not all bad because McDonnell didn’t have the expertise needed for automating the company. But with this kind of power you don’t need to innovate all you need to do is keep out competitors which is exactly what they did. McDonnell was an IBM “shop”.

A small crack occurred in the 1980’s when the McDonnell Missile Systems Company bought Digital Equipment Vax computers for its manufacturing division. By this time it was obvious that the obsolete application programs coded were very expensive to maintain. These application programs were stand alone units and there was little integration and data sharing was not possible. I was with a team that proposed that broadband be installed throughout the manufacturing areas and the application programs be rewritten using a common operating system. This would allow the system to use computers from different vendors and with the SQL (Structured Query Language) all computers could be integrated and able to access data from various databases. The broadband wiring was installed in the manufacturing areas and some offices. But when the company computer programmers (all were IBM trained) refused to program the new system. The new system eventually failed to meet its deadlines and was abandoned in 1989. Because IBM lacked the technology to hook up to the Broadband system they had it removed in 1992. This should be a lesson to those in business and government who have IBM “Shops” don’t expect innovation that benefits you the customer.

Among the most innovative companies that innovate for their customers is Google. Google’s search engine business started with the question “what does the customer want?” not how can we make money from the customer.
Eric Schmidt CEO of Google knows the importance of innovation. His employees are allowed to spend 20% of their day working on their own innovations knowing if the company buys in they will have the chance to develop their ideas. Google spends 70% of their efforts on the core of their business the search engine, 20% on search engine related business and 10% on unrelated customer driven innovation. The real question for industry and government leaders who want answers on automation issues is who do you ask IBM or Google. The answer is clearly customer driven innovation companies like Google.

Another innovative customer driven company is Walmart. It uses customer driven innovative by providing customers with the opportunity to purchase low cost goods. No other company can compete with its innovative distribution system. But Walmart also has a unique marketing strategy first developed by Sam Walton. It works like this the store finds a bottom of the line product especially in consumer electronics and puts pressure on the manufacturer to sell at high volume lowest price only through Walmart. The next step up in customer perceived quality is where Walmart makes its profit on a product which may or may not be priced below that of competitors. This approach has made Walmart a leader in retail goods.

“As Congress grapples with the challenge of downsizing or eliminating bureaucracies that haven’t been critically reexamined for many decades, its Members would do well to consider some of the lessons learned by the businessmen and -women who made their companies more competitive in the 1990s. I have a somewhat unusual perspective on this issue, having spent roughly twenty years in the federal government and another twenty in the corporate world. Here, based on my own experience, are five guidelines for members of Congress:

Define the “Core” Business
We must ask whether a problem is truly a federal responsibility, or can it be handled better by voluntary organizations, local governments, or state governments. For the federal government, the four basic departments–State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury–have a solid basis for existence. The others were either more narrowly based, an afterthought, or both. These latter departments should be scrutinized for elimination, downsizing, reorganization, movement to state and local governments, or privatization.

Cut Sharply and Rapidly
Cut sharply and rapidly. Don’t wait. Whatever it is you do, the odds are overwhelming that you should have done more–rather than less–and that you should have done it sooner, rather than later. There are so many pressures in Washington, D.C. to preserve the status quo that the most frequent mistake is to make too few changes or to cut too little. Do it once. Do it well. And then let people get back to work. Don’t try to cut the dog’s tail off one inch at a time, hoping it won’t hurt as much.

Eliminate Bureaucracy
Congress should move swiftly to cut management and get personnel costs under control. It is guaranteed that there are more managers and more staff in the federal government than are needed. In less than seven months, Scott Paper Company eliminated 11,200 people, one-third of its workforce. The company cut 71 percent of the headquarters staff, 50 percent of management, and 20 percent of the hourly employees. If the national government is as overstaffed as was Scott Paper, some 140,000 government managers could be cut immediately, saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

Reorder the Organizational Chart
Probably one-half to two-thirds of the non-central departments are no longer needed in their current form. For example, the Republican proposal to close the 93-year-old Department of Commerce seems reasonable to me. That department lacks a clear sense of mission, and it duplicates the work of dozens of other departments and agencies: a sign that taxpayers could do without it in its present form. The same likely could be said for other departments, such as Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs.

Sell Unessential Assets
Why is the federal government borrowing over $200 billion a year to cover its deficit when it is sitting on billions of dollars of assets that could and should be sold to the private sector? Some twenty years ago, I chaired the Property Review Board in the Nixon Administration, which supervised the evaluation of hundreds of federal real properties for movement to their highest and best use outside of government. The resistance in both the Executive and Legislative branches was enormous. That opportunity is still there and, given the current budget situation, must be seized.

As Congress goes about the business of putting meat on the bones of the balanced budget plan passed earlier this year, it will have to make tough decisions. I recognize the difficulty of that task, having once served in the House. But I’ve learned that decisions made every day in the corporate world are sometimes even more difficult because the very survival of a company can be at stake.

The choices to be made affect real people with careers, mortgages to pay, and families to raise. But Congress oversees an enterprise facing bankruptcy, and the consequences of not acting now, swiftly and firmly, will be devastating for a far greater number of people. The right decisions made now, however tough, will help restore the long-term health of the government, our economy, and our country.

Donald H. Rumsfeld has served as a member of Congress, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, chief of staff to President Ford, and, from 1975 to 1977, Secretary of Defense. Between 1977 and 1985 he was CEO of G.D. Searle, and from 1990 to 1993 he was Chairman and CEO of General Instrument Corporation.”

Comments by Lawrence Rosier
My readers will note that this article was written before 9-11 and the mid-east wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Without getting into what has really happened in the Bush Administration in the article Rumsfeld does give advice that is typical among CEO’s in industry. His approach to determining what really needs to be done and his elimination of redundant organizations is a necessary first step and is commendable. While I agree with Rumsfeld that his advice to “Cut Sharply and Rapidly” and “eliminate Bureaucracy” will bring significant savings to the government the question becomes how much do you cut and how do you eliminate bureaucracy.

What you have here is the typical top-down approach to downsizing but I prefer the bottom-up approach through work measurement. The advantage is that while you may get some efficiency in government from the top-down approach you will be able to eliminate all the inefficient activities through the bottom-up approach. The approach I am recommending in this instance is called “Cost and Schedule” which I have discussed in detail in several of my articles. The implementation of this approach with its link to performance budgeting will bring efficiency to the organization and budgetary control. This approach is specially useful where an entrenched bureaucracy is unwilling or incapable of reforming itself.

The problem is more than just high labor costs unions are much stronger in France, Germany, Italy and some smaller states where they virtually control all employment. France is almost totally unionized not just in industry and government but farmers and students are also unionized. Last year a combined effort of the socialist and communist parties pushed through a 35 hour a week law and Frances unemployment grew as thousands of manufacturing companies closed their doors and moved to more industry friendly states in eastern Europe and Ireland. France has had employment laws for years which state that once an employee is hired for a job he cannot be laid-off or fired without bringing the matter before the courts. The result of this is that employers turn away new business rather than hire new employees because in a downturn in business they cannot layoff employees. The riots earlier this year among young unemployed mostly Arab ghetto residents were as a direct result of continuing high unemployment and little prospects. Recently France has been threatened with nationwide strikes to prevent a new law from taking effect that would provide a trial period of two years for employers to evaluate a young person under the age of twenty six before making them a permanent part of their organization. The French working public and students are determined to prevent the implementation of the new law which they see as a crack leading to the repeal of France’s labor laws. As more and more manufacturing jobs are lost the French nation will become increasingly dependent on employment in government and seasonal tourism and serious economic setbacks will likely be the result. A balance of payments problem will also most likely develop as Euros flow out of the country for goods manufactured elsewhere.

Next a detailed analysis of the agencies organization charts will show how departments are managed how personnel are dispersed within the agency. This analysis should point out where redundant layers of bureaucratic management are located.

A thorough review of how an organization is structured will involve the assessment of how its functions are organized to support its mission statements and its culture. Functions are the names of specific independent sets of repeating activities and should be the foundation for the structure of the organization. What you are looking for is repeating independent sets of activities and any lumping together of difference sets of activities within a department. This is not big problem if the functions are budgeted separately
within a department but when departmental budgets are not broken down into functions confusion and inefficiency will result.

To find out how well an organization is meeting its mission obligations a survey of its “customers” or those in the general public that it services is needed. What the organizations customers say about the services they receive is the ultimate test of an agencies accomplishments but does not address how efficiently it operates. To determine where improvements can be made we need to analyze the each of the agencies functions with high level Flow Charts showing the major steps required to bring the services to the public.

When all of the above is completed a revised organization is built from the ground up rather than the normal top down method. First “customer” needs and requirements will drive the outputs of the organization. Then the functions required to fulfill these needs are identified. Followed by the customer interface personnel, those providing the services to the customer. How this level of the organization is managed depends on the mission statement they are to fulfill. For example is this a Service mission or a responding mission? The differences between these two are significant. In the instance of a service mission almost all of the needs of the customer are known in advance and can be preplanned. The responding mission is like that of a fireman the customers needs are not specifically known in advance and must be satisfied by training through drill scenarios. This will have a direct effect on the level and quality of training of the service providers. The differences in the management between these missions is again reflected by the needs of the customer.

Customers of a service missions want the services to be fully provided and in a timely manor. The best management structure for doing this is a team of personnel who can focus on providing continuous improvement to the processes that service the customer’s needs.

The responding mission management will require an on-the-scene manager to direct the actions of providing immediate services to the customer. However the next level of management may well be a team consisting of on-the-scene managers who will plan for future responses by implementing continuous improvement into the processes.

The upper management should consist of a director to head the agency with direct supervision of the organizations staff services such as Personnel Services, Accounting and budgeting, Information Management (computer services) and a high level Policy Team consisting of the various department managers. With today’s communication capabilities middle management should be kept to an absolute minimum number of levels.

Because the bureaucratic management structure is so imbedded in our way of governing few seem to realize that it has flaws that cause the public ongoing hostility due to its red tape or that it may provide an opening leading to disaster. It is important for us to realize that the bureaucratic management structure will not be reformed by current government leaders without extensive and repeated focus on major bureaucratic failures. The bureaucratic management structure is the root cause of America’s anger and anxiety over 9-11 and the hurricane Katrina disasters. The following is a list of just a few major Bureaucratic failures that have resulted from its everyday routine short comings.

1. The 9-11 plot could have been discovered if the FBI bureaucracy had allowed it’s agents to search Moussaoui’s computer when he was first arrested. A mid-level bureaucrat denied the request. This kind of decision making is a routine part of most bureaucracies and involves “second guessing” the decision of an agent in the field and is a direct result of too many layers of management.

2. The Hurricane Katrina response disaster happened as a result of a bureaucracies need for “time to develop a common mission and culture” those things were lacking when FEMA and the newly organized Homeland Security bureaucracies where combined. In newly formed bureaucracies the rules for management have not been fully developed and with nearly all decision-making being concentrated at the top of the organization the result was a complete melt down. If decision-making power had been delegated down to the lowest level of effectiveness (I have discussed this several times elsewhere) the agency could have avoided most of its decision-making problems. The implementation of an on-the-scene High Level Team which was finally done and led by Vice Admiral Thad Allen of the US Coast Guard is a necessary element of Homeland Security response management. FEMA should be organized with low level response teams (Work Improvement Teams, discussed in detail elsewhere) for quick on-the-spot decision making service to victims.

3. The FEMA bureaucratic blunder dubbed by the media as the “FEMA Ice Follies” apparently went on for months. Here is what happened. When hurricane Katrina was approaching a computer “told” FEMA authorities how many truckloads of ice to order for disaster relief including enough for the city of New Orleans. When 80% of New Orleans was evacuated they only needed about 40% of the ice. But instead of admitting their mistake and letting the ice melt they solved the problem by moving the trucks all over the country with their refrigerators running 24 hours a day waiting for the next hurricane. At last 250 truckloads were found in Maine many more in other states at a considerable distance from the gulf coast. To top things off FEMA paid $35 thousand for each truck load of ice which regularly costs only $6 thousand. You could dismiss this a mistake that could have been made by any organization except for the fact that bureaucracies are known for their lack of common sense. This is a direct result of a bureaucracy’s robotic behavior of rigidly following a set of rules in this case a computer printout a common occurrence found in nearly all large bureaucracies.

4. Several years ago a fired government translator of Islamic documents testified before Congress that she had been given a poor job performance rating and laid off. The reason she gave was that she had failed to follow her supervisor’s instructions to reduce the number Islamic documents she was translating and allow a backlog of documents to build up. The backlog was to be used by the supervisor to justify an increase in the number of translators. The more personnel that the supervisor had working for him the larger the salary he could justify.

This is a typical example of what I call a “turn-around” bureaucracy and how they operate. This is a common type of organization in US, State and local governments. In many cases the lack of concern for the people they serve is deplorable. In the above example the supervisor cared nothing about the fact that the entire nation was waiting for the translation of the Islamic documents to see if another 9/11 attack was imminent. If a Work Improvement Team(WIT) had been installed in the Translation Department this problem would not have occurred.

There are many benefits from a national identity card. Stolen identities can be significantly reduced. It hampers the ability of those without ID cards from roaming freely within our society using false IDs to get jobs, barrow money, and collect welfare and Medicaid. Ex-convicts and sex offenders become visible. The benefits far outweigh the big brother arguments against universal IDs. The savings to business alone in the billions. Crime will also be significantly reduced. But for disaster relief with positive ID the mountains of Red Tape simply go away. Resulting in a significant reduction in fraud and speeds relief to legitimate victims. This can happen if modern communications and Computer Database management systems are also implemented for quickly processing the need for resources.

Border Security
Our Coast Guard and our Boarder Guard should be beefed-up to stop all illegal immigration. We should setup employment offices on the border for American employers who want to hire aliens legally. They should have temporary IDs, work permits and a job before entering the US. There is no reason to have Mexican illegal aliens dieing in our southwest desserts year after year. Our Mexican and Canadian borders could also be better patrolled using unmanned aircraft which can stay aloft for many hours with monitoring cameras both day and night.

Aliens should not have US state drivers licenses. They should use the licenses from their own country which is common practice in Europe. Having a US state drivers license defeats the reason for the National ID card and opens the way for terrorists to drive tanker trucks.

Planning for Disaster
All disaster planning should begin at the county level by determining the threats and the “needs” for the county. There should be several plans that are based on threat level for hurricanes. The force level of the hurricane should determine who is to be evacuated and how to respond to the emergency. Environmental disasters, tornadoes, wild fires should each have its own unique disaster evacuation plan.

The local county “needs” for resources and services are then coordinated directly with the state plan and finally with the Federal government for their resources thus completing the plan. Note that there are three parties to emergency planning. Local county governments drive the plan and are ultimately responsible for the plan they are the stakeholders. They bring their demographics and resource needs to the state for assistance in planning how the resources of the state should be made available. Then the combined local and state plan is merged with the required federal resources and the county plans are completed. The final step is publicizing the plan so that the public knows what resources will be available and how they are to be evacuated. The key is bottom up planning, where top down planning is either wasteful or inadequate. When an impending disaster is seen all that is needed is agreement by state, local and Federal governments on which plan to use. The particulars of the plan are then immediately broadcasted to the public.

Getting the Public on Board
This is not an easy step convincing the public to prepare for a disaster when much of the population will not even wear their car seat belts. Be careful about lumping all Americans under the label of “the public”. The fact is that we are a mix of socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Each of these groups will require a unique approach to get them to “buy in” on preparing for a disaster. How ever its done it is important that people living in hurricane zones should be made aware of evacuations plans and know how they personally are to get out of the danger zone.

In industry the traditional organization was a bureaucracy made up of company personnel and a union for shop personnel. This type of organization was dominant until the mid 1980’s when Japanese methods of quality improvement began to be replicated mainly in the union shops. Industry has traditionally concentrated its efforts for improving efficiency on the union shops and ignored the need for innovation among company personnel. The Japanese quality improvement methods became widely accepted in industry as a standard for all of its organization by the early 1990’s. The result has been a moderating effect making the entire company more efficient and therefore more competitive.

As an example before Japanese quality practices were introduced we had a thriving steel industry in the Ohio valley. The Union’s short sighted demands for superior wages and benefits and a practice called “feather bedding” (forcing the company to hire unnecessary union employees) diverted funds needed for capital improvements. The result was that foreign steel producers with modernized plants drove the US steel industry out of business leaving us with the Rust Belt in the Ohio valley.

Answer: The part of the article “The Replication Challenge” by Robert D. Behn that you are probably referring to follows: “… before the innovation can be replicated, someone has to answer two questions.

First: What are the core characteristics of the innovation? To employ the innovation in a different jurisdictional, political or organizational context, the replicators obviously need to know what, exactly, are the driving features of the innovation.

Second: What are the cause-and-effect interactions among the core features of the innovation, the context within which the innovation was implemented, and the consequences that it produced? Because the context in which any innovation will be replicated is bound to be somewhat different from the original set of circumstances, it is necessary to understand how its driving features work. After all, to make the innovation work in a new setting, it will need to be adapted in some way(s) — perhaps conspicuously, perhaps subtly. Yet, to be effective, such adaptations need to maintain not only the core features of the innovation but also the cause-and-effect relationships among these features and the context to ensure that the adaptation still produces similar benefits.

Innovating is relatively easy. Specifying the core components of the innovation and the cause-and-effect relationships among these components in such as way as to permit other jurisdictions to replicate the innovation is, however, a significant challenge.”

I will try respond directly to the challenge of Robert Behn’s excellent article. The “Team Improvement Idea” was implemented first in Japan and then became popular in American industry in the 1980s. It was known mostly as “Total Quality Management” and has since been adopted by some government agencies. The core Idea espoused by the Japanese was to build better quality products. Which was a direct result of the bad reputation that Japanese products had for being cheap and of poor quality in the 1950’s. Since there are few physical products produced by government the core idea has shifted to the Team Improvement idea. I call these “Work Improvement Teams” which focus on improving the processes of the function that they are involved with at the lowest level of the organization. I have expanded the Team improvement Idea to all levels of the government organization. First in the governor’s Blue Ribbon Committee and then to the High level Cross functional team. The key driving element to my recommended approach is in having personnel have responsibility for decision making power at their level in the organization. The result is the pooling of the innovative resources of the entire organization to focus on improving the problems at hand. The process can be stated as the driving down of the decision making process to the lowest level of effectiveness. Another way of putting this is to have those who “own” a problem participate in the solving of that problem. The immediate effect is to awaken the idea within individuals that they can make a difference the exact opposite of a bureaucratic environment where individual initiative is generally squelched.

The second innovation is in determining labor hours and therefore staffing more precisely by budgeting personnel. Budgeting personnel have long estimated the labor hours and other expenses that go into the making of a function’s budget these estimates are at best educated guesses. The following example can best explain this innovation. The key is in requiring all of the WITs to Flow Chart all of the processes of the function they are associated with. This is necessary to describe in detail how improvements to processes are to work. There may actually be two Process Flow Charts one showing the current process flow and one showing the improved process flow. These two Flow Charts are usually presented to management by the team for approval. The Flow Process Flow Charts are then given over to the budgeting personnel to calculate the savings that the team has generated. The man hour calculations although they appear to be estimates are relatively precise because of the need to find the least costly process by the WIT. Staffing of the WIT is even more precise because of the gross decision in deciding the number of personnel required. In other words you cannot staff with one half of a person making the staffing decision much simpler.

The staffing level of both employees and management along with all expenses incurred by the function is summed and divided by the number of either “units produced” or “people served” for a one month period. The result is a funding formula which when multiplied by the estimated future “units” or “people served” becomes the next years budget. The funding formula which may be valid for several years with minor changes can be used as a direct input to the Performance Budgeting system thus simplifying the entire budgeting process while significantly increasing its accuracy. The increased budget accuracy allows law makers to know with greater certainty which functions have failed to manage their budgets. The core of this process is in strengthening the budgeting process by making inputs simpler and more precise.

A. The Blue Ribbon Commission setup by the Governor has the following function to make high level decisions concerning state Health and Family Services (not just Medicaid) and provide oversight for the Medicaid Program as well as other Health and Family Services. The reason for this is that each state has unique problems in this area that vary in degree from other states and to insure that the state family’s needs are met efficiently without duplication. The Commission should meet on a regular basis or as required. Funding for the Commission should be separate. It has the following mandate:
1. Determine what services are legally required of the state mandated by law and by Federal guidelines.
2. Research Censes data to determine the type and degree of the state’s family problems. For example: juvenile crime, drugs, school dropouts, disabled, medical services etc.
3. The commission must then define how available funds are to be spent and in doing so they will define just what the State’s policies are concerning Medicaid and other programs.

B. The Cross Functional Team more appropriately could be called the “Health and Family Services Team” consists of high level personnel from each of the State’s Service agencies. The Team should meet on a regular basis or as required. Funding for the Team should be from the budgets of each of its members. The Team has the following Mandate:
1. They will follow the Commissions oversight recommendations and put in place the high level rules to be followed by the various agencies.
2. In addition the Team will be the watch-dog over its own members to prevent duplicated services and to be sure family services are provided efficiently and timely. The Commission is to be alerted in a timely manner when violations occur.

C. The Medicaid function is budgeted and managed separately from other agencies. The organization of this function should not be the traditional bureaucracy but a flat organization with “Work Improvement Teams” consisting of those personnel who actually deliver the services. Each team will meet weekly to suggest and install approved improvements to the processes of the function. This will provide continuous improvements in providing services to the Public.

Of critical importance in preventing fraud is the State’s computer systems which should provide cross references and positive identification of applicants for Medicaid. I have identified how these computer systems should be structured using SQL Relational Databases in Article 84. “The Failure to Manage State Resources due to Obsolete Computer Systems”. If Your State’s Information Systems Manager insists that these SQL Relation Databases are not warranted you should seek a second opinion from one who understands the problem and does not have a hidden agenda. The SQL Database systems although expensive to install can save the state billions. Without them its nearly impossible to prevent fraud.

The last recommendation is for a comprehensive Performance Budgeting system. Beginning with identification of labor and other operational costs a Funding Formula is developed for direct input into the next year’s Performance Budgeting system. For more on this see Article 85. “A Tutorial Roadmap for Medicaid Management Reform”.

The following excellent article addresses some of the up-front considerations that a state must address in reforming Medicaid.
“Medicaid Management Makeover” by William D. Eggers from Governing Magazine.
“The manner in which Medicaid is administered- how cost savings are identified and realized, how state resources are deployed, how policies are implemented and enforced, and how critical day-to-day decisions affect health and financial outcomes–significantly affects its performance. Transforming how Medicaid is managed may not be as sexy as making new policy proposals, but we won’t solve the problem without it.”

“Sustained cost containment in Medicaid requires states to actively and