Proposal for shared services performance management model applied to portugueses public administration

Comunicação apresentada no 8º Congresso Nacional de Administração Pública - Desafios e Soluções, em Carcavelos de 21 a 22 de Novembro de 2011.In order to improve the quality of the services and the relationship between the central public administration and citizens the Portuguese government launched an egovernment initiative including both front and back-office processes. The implementation of shared services represents one of the transformation vectors having as major goal the gain of efficacy by reducing the organisational structures and the gain of efficiency through the rationalization of back-office processes. The main target was first the development and implementation of both financial and human resources shared services management solutions and afterwards the enlargement of this concept to other domains such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The shared services implementation target is the central public administration, which employs 550.000 workers. Depending on the success of this initiative it may be later extended to regional and local entities encompassing a total of 800.000 workers. This shared services initiative catalyzes the need of having a global public administration structure in order to provide services with the required quality and to implement adequate and flexible process oriented business models. In 2007 GeRAP, a public enterprise owned by the Ministry of Finances and Public Administration, was created aiming a suitable implementation of this paradigm. As an outcome of the financial and human resources shared services implementation experience, a Portuguese Governmental Open Cloud (GO-Cloud) project was launched with the aim of deploying an ICT public infrastructure able to integrate other private and public clouds and to offer quality infrastructure services at lower costs. The GO-Cloud overlays the double objective of establishing a technological platform that will leverage the shared services adoption spreading among public administration entities, concerning both the already deployed financial and budgetary management solution and the shared human resource management solution, and the provisioning of ICT resources and services in a more flexible and effective way. A successful implementation of shared services in a public and wide environment such as the Portuguese public administration requires a suitable reference architecture, reliable and scalable infrastructures, automated procedures, adequate management processes, an agile organization and adequate relationship models, based on a set of core competences. Thus, this paper focuses the way shared services are being implemented and managed in the Portuguese public administration, considering both the scope of this activity and the differences between public and private contexts. It 8º Congresso Nacional de Administração Pública – 2011 | Página 338 also presents the adopted service oriented architecture (SOA) and both the business model and the shared services analysis model (SSAM) used to grant GeRAP internal and external alignment. SSAM contributes with a formal analysis structure through the identification of main pillars that sustain the shared services implementation in Portuguese public administration. The defined pillars will be used as analysis vectors to create a performance model which will be able to evaluate the performance reached by shared services implementation and to anticipate some actions

Forest Land Ownership Changes in Portugal

Publisher PD

From skepticism to mutual support: towards a structural change in the relations between participatory budgeting and the information and communication technologies?

Until three years ago, ICT Technologies represented a main “subordinate clause” within the “grammar” of Participatory Budgeting (PB), the tool made famous by the experience of Porto Alegre and today expanded to more than 1400 cities across the planet. In fact, PB – born to enhance deliberation and exchanges among citizens and local institutions – has long looked at ICTS as a sort of “pollution factor” which could be useful to foster transparency and to support the spreading of information but could also lead to a lowering in quality of public discussion, turning its “instantaneity” into “immediatism,” and its “time-saving accessibility” into “reductionism” and laziness in facing the complexity of public decision-making through citizens’ participation. At the same time, ICTs often regarded Participatory Budgeting as a tool that was too-complex and too-charged with ideology to cooperate with. But in the last three years, the barriers which prevented ICTs and Participatory Budgeting to establish a constructive dialogue started to shrink thanks to several experiences which demonstrated that technologies can help overcome some “cognitive injustices” if not just used as a means to “make simpler” the organization of participatory processes and to bring “larger numbers” of intervenients to the process. In fact, ICTs could be valorized as a space adding “diversity” to the processes and increasing outreach capacity. Paradoxically, the experiences helping to overcome the mutual skepticism between ICTs and PB did not come from the centre of the Global North, but were implemented in peripheral or semiperipheral countries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Dominican Republic and Portugal in Europe), sometimes in cities where the “digital divide” is still high (at least in terms of Internet connections) and a significant part of the population lives in informal settlements and/or areas with low indicators of “connection.” Somehow, these experiences were able to demystify the “scary monolithicism” of ICTs, showing that some instruments (like mobile phones, and especially the use of SMS text messaging) could grant a higher degree of connectivity, diffusion and accountability, while other dimensions (which could risk jeopardizing social inclusion) could be minimized through creativity. The paper tries to depict a possible panorama of collaboration for the near future, starting from descriptions of some of the above mentioned “turning-point” experiences – both in the Global North as well as in the Global South

Understanding intergovernmental cooperation in a context of devolution: an empirical study of collaboration among portuguese municipalities

Why do local governments engage in formal cooperative agreements to deliver municipal services? What are the determinants of these collaborative efforts? We review the literature on horizontal collaboration and intergovernmental relations developed by the political economy, public choice, institutional collective action, and network literatures and present a theoretical model that intertwines several arguments from these literatures. The theoretical model suggests that the decision to collaborate is a product of prior experiences of competition/cooperation between municipal governments, the incentives for efficiency gains derived from cooperation, and the institutional setting in which intergovernmental relations take place. Based on this theoretical model and using a research design inspired by the literatures on international conflicts and coalition governments, we develop and test a series of hypotheses concerning the decision to cooperate by Portuguese municipal governments in face of recent decentralization trends. We find support for our trust and centrality hypotheses as incentives to cooperation, but fragmentation within local governments poses a constraint to collaborative efforts between municipalities.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Policy Issues in U.S. Transportation Public-Private Partnerships: Lessons from Australia, Research Report 09-15

In this report, the authors examine Australia’s experience with transportation public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the lessons that experience holds for the use of PPPs in the United States. Australia now has decades of experience in PPP use in transportation, and has used the approach to deliver billions of dollars in project value. Although this report explores a range of issues, the authors focus on four policy issues that have been salient in the United States: (1) how the risks inherent in PPP contracts should be distributed across public and private sector partners; (2) when and how to use non-compete (or compensation) clauses in PPP contracts; (3) how concerns about monopoly power are best addressed; and (4) the role and importance of concession length. The study examines those and other questions by surveying the relevant literature on PPP international use. The authors also interviewed 23 Australian PPP experts from the academic, public and private sectors, and distilled lessons from those interviews

From Governmental Accounting to National Accounting: Implications on the Portuguese Central Government Deficit

Based on the relevant differences between Governmental Accounting (GA/microeconomic perspective) and National Accounting (NA/macroeconomic perspective) this paper examines the main adjustments made in Portugal to the General Government Sector data required to convert Governmental Accounts into National Accounts. It also assesses the impact of those adjustments on the Central Government deficit, the largest share in the Portuguese public deficit. Following mostly a qualitative research methodology, the empirical study is based on interviews to officials preparing NA and on several documental sources. The purpose is to validate the major data adjustments from GA into NA regarding Central Government, while, in addition, assessing their impact using data from April 2008 Excessive Deficit Procedure notification, covering the 2004-2007 period. The main findings indicate that differences concerning the accounting basis are the most relevant and that the subsequent adjustments have a considerable impact on the Portuguese Central Government deficit. This research points therefore to the need for more convergence between GA and NA, namely with respect to the transactions recognition criteria in order to use a common accounting basis, and for a complete and coherent reporting information system in GA.