Revitalizing the State: 3. fragmenting the state for innovation

Abstract

Organizational research indicates that large organizations involved in many different activities can counteract the diseconomies of size and complexity, tendency to bureaucratization, and to increasing resistance to innovation by breaking up into relatively autonomous, self-contained units such as relatively autonomous, self-contained divisions, retaining mainly policy control at the centre and a powerful MIS as a monitoring device. States too can enhance their administrative capacity and innovativeness highly by decentralizing and by fragmenting themselves into relatively autonomous, self-contained units headed by professional managers with clear accountability and clear mandate. Such unbundling must, however, be in the pursuit of an integrating, shared vision of national excellence like social justice, economic growth, and improvement in the quality of life. Several case studies from a number of countries of government departments, agencies, and projects that were decentralized along the foregoing lines under a shared vision of state excellence demonstrate the efficacy of this strategy of fragmenting the state in certain effective ways. Several additional mechanisms can institutionalize the culture on innovation in governmental bodies, such as progressively higher goals, with potential conflict among goals. The operationalziation of a strong serving the customer commitment, an operationlized commitment to cut costs, to make increasingly technologically sophisticated offerings, to benchmarking, to entrepreneurship, to global scanning for innovations, trends, and opportunities, to periodic diagnosis of the organization s functioning, to participative decision making and brainstorming for novel but workable solutions, to periodic, exonovation, and toa daunting developmental and growth vision are powerful mechanisms to make government bodies highly innovative.