Flemish government headcount increases by 7000 ….

This weekend I read an article in the newspapers about the increase in the number of Flemish public officials (“ambtenaren”). The headline was that more than 7000 additional employees are serving the Flemish population over the last 7 years; an increase of 17%. That equals the number of people working for a company like eg. Electrabel. The increases on the Federal level, within the Brussels administration and the Walloon administration are quite comparable. Is there an issue with the efficiency of our Public Services? Efficiency is apparently less critical in the Public Sector than it is in private companies. Today “efficiency” is seen as a knock-out criteria for private 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 the different 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? And 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 information on their employee file. A “study” had to be executed to know how many people were actually working for the Flemish government; capturing insight in age, sexe, education level and other indicators on headcounts at the same time. I have the impression that lots of private companies equally lack ready available insights or key indicators 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 from the company in the next 10 years?” … I have personally experienced (based on customer contacts) 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 should be easily available out of a classical Personnel Administration system like SAP HR. Maybe there is a large opportunity to improve the insight and business intelligence and to supply company management with relevant KPIs on personnel/headcount matters.

I am sure companies will welcome this (not only when having to make decisions on headcounts these days).