Flemish government headcount increases by 7000 ….

You must have seen the article in the newspapers this weekend about the increase in the number of Flemish public officials. More than 7000 additional employees serving the Flemish population over the last 7 years; an increase of 17% … can you imagine? That equals the number of people working for companies like Electrabel. The increases on the Federal level, within the Brussels administration and the Walloon administration are quite comparable. Is there a problem with the efficiency of our Public Services?
Efficiency is apparently less relevant in the Public Sector than it is in private companies. Today “efficiency” is seen as a knock-out criteria for companies to stay in business. If your company is not operating efficiently, you will be put out of business by competitors. Streamlining end-to-end processes, within each department separately but also across different departments within the organizations, transparency in each process step, no duplication of work, stable, reliable and traceable information … all elements which are a necessity in private companies. ERP solutions like SAP played an important role in enabling this in the private sector. How about the Public sector? Do they have the same drive to organize their operations and processes? Do they have the same tools and systems to do so?

The other element that attracted my attention is the fact that the Public Sector was lacking actual and crucial information on their employee file. A “study” had to be executed to know how many people were actually working for the Flemish government, while capturing insight in age, sexe, education level and other indicators on headcounts. I have the impression that lots of private companies equally lack ready available insights on key information on what they call “their most important assets”. Do private companies have the intelligence available to answer questions like “what is the evolution of personnel turnover in the last 10 years, eg. per education level?”, “how many people will retire in the next 10 years?” … I have personally the impression that Business Intelligence on personnel information is less developed than it is on topics like inventory levels, customer information or available production capacity. The personnel data is easily available in a well classical Personnel Administration system like SAP HR. Maybe there is a large opportunity to improve the insight and supply company management with relevant KPIs on personnel matters. Something companies will welcome when having to make decisions on headcounts evolutions these days.