Breaking New Grounds:
Experience of Sarawak Public
Service -Datuk Haji
Abdul Aziz Haji Husain
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| YBhg. Datuk Haji Abdul Aziz Husain, Deputy State Secretary - Human
Resource |
"For the Civil Service to
achieve its transformation into a New Civil Service, leaders and members of
the Civil Service must work together effectively and journey into a transition
towards a professionally service-driven organization.
New initiatives
need to be taken and experimented upon in order to evolve new ways of doing
things.
The top
management will need all the support, cooperation and teamwork from each and
everyone in the Civil Service in order to be effective in their transformational
leadership role.
Some
of the challenges that the Public Service will face are the pace of change,
the need for new skills and knowledge, the uncertain and ambiguous environment,
speed, the need to listen and use NGOs, keeping up with developments in technology,
getting agencies to learn and unlearn, changes in customer's requirements, sources
of revenue, advocating national interests and opportunities.
Transformational
Leadership is required to identify and exploit the opportunities that are inherent
in the challenges facing the Public Service.
In this
new environment, we are dealing with knowledge workers who form the intellectual
capital of the Public Service and who will help the Public Service achieve its
vision and mission.
In the
New Millennium, the direction which organizations, both public and private,
will move depends very much on their leaders - the people who provide strategic
directions to achieve great visions.
Leaders
who are able to translate powerful visions into reality will become a key factor
for organisational transformation success.
Policies,
systems, procedures, rules and regulations must be reviewed to ensure that they
support the transformation of the Public Service.
Globalisation,
economic libe-ralisation, convergence in computing and communication technologies,
the call for governance and the demand for ever-increasing quality of services
in the next millennium will impose major challenges on the Public Service.
These
challenges provide the Public Service with opportunities to introduce changes,
especially in the human resource management sector.
A failure
on the part of the employees to changes their mindset could become an obstacle
and prevent the Public Service from taking advantage of the opportunities presented
by the changes in the environment.
Poor
leadership, fixed employees' mindset, failure to change existing systems and
procedures and the lack of mental and spiritual resilience will therefore prevent
the Public Service from exploiting the opportunities fully.
The second
half of the 20th Century has seen a dramatic change from industrialisation age
to IT knowledge-based society.
Major
reforms in the public service have taken place since the 1980s with a shift
from public administration concept to the new public management approach.
The focus
has been that from processed-based to that of result orientation, meaning that
the emphasis is from output to outcome.
In Sarawak's
perspective, we aspire to be a developed state in Malaysia in line with Vision
2020.
Capitalising
on the natural resources of the state and the need to focus attention on more
value-added activities like manufacturing and services necessitate an ever-challenging
agenda for the Civil Service.
The New
Millennium is the starting point where we can gauge the progress so far."
"The
general trend and reforms in the Civil Service and dynamics and complexity involved
in the development initiative calls for a paradigm shift in the mentality of
the Civil Service.
I fervently
believe that a major shift in mindset, an improvement in work attitudes, and
the constant search for new ideas, new ways of thinking and doing things
are needed if we aspire towards the reality of the New Millennium.
Capitalizing
on IT to address inefficiencies and closer management-staff working relationship
should underpin the new model of the Public Service of the future."
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