Title: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND HIS/HER MAJESTY - THE CLIENT
Abstract: From colorful administrative landscape and diverse mosaic of agenciesand organizations, no institutional entity, at any moment or segment of its existence, shouldtreat citizens as subjects and submissive supplicants, but rather as customers, as main driving force in State, and even as its employers. Namely, in modern society citizens are not subjects of State nor its officials, but grant mandate, authority and legitimacy to government. Therefore, they should not meeklyaddressthe civil service, but, on contrary, to receive an efficient and high quality service for their needs. The client should be a key link to administrative chain. Similarly to private sector, where focus is on consumer, in public sector focus is on client. Clients are most important and the client is a god should be basic concepts and driversin actions of theadministration. According to philosophical matrix of new public management, any one who is a direct user of services of a particular public organization is considered a client. Such an established paradigm of reasoning implicitly shows that every public organization, at any time, has in its focus a certain target group of citizens to which it serves.Doing so, each public-administrative entity should channel its energy in direction of anticipating and identifying needs and demands of clients, i.e. its activities should be determined, above all, by expectations and preferences of public. The orientation towards serving client would not only mean production of good services in present, but also constant pursuit of better durable services. Thus, as a kind of barometer for quality and reputation of a particular public service, satisfaction of consumers-taxpayers with products and services produced bythe public bodies, should be taken into account. In European administrative systems there is, in general, a crystallized awareness that orientation towards administration based on rigid and inflexible rules and rigid procedures must be substituted with orientation based on results. The main idea of this approach is that administrative services exist, above all, to provide services or products to their customers (or customers). This is starting point for establishing contours of a model of administration that guarantees quality cost-effective services, and abandoning retrograde concept of administration that only offers services without a clearly defined mission. The care for efficient and effectiveprovisionof administrative services that will recognize interests and needs of clients and taxpayers is accepted as an essential professional and ethical component of modern administrative services. In these countries, determination to increase power of customers is strongly emphasized, as a substitute for former practice of decision-making by service provider (administration) without proper consultation with consumers of such services.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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