NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NURTURING THE PUBLIC SECTOR’S INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY FOR BETTER PERFORMANCE AND RESPONSIVESS

29 November 2012, Comments 0

SPEECH BY
Y.BHG. DATO’ SRI DR. ALI BIN HAMSA
CHIEF SECRETARY TO THE GOVERNMENT OF MALAYSIA
NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NURTURING THE PUBLIC SECTOR’S INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY FOR BETTER PERFORMANCE AND RESPONSIVESS
27 NOVEMBER 2012 (TUESDAY)
PULLMAN PUTRAJAYA LAKESIDE HOTEL

Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh,

Salam 1Malaysia and a very good morning.

Y.Bhg. Tan Sri Abdul Halim Ali
Chairman of Institute Sultan Iskandar

Peter Allen
Deputy Dean
The Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG)

Y.Bhg. Dato’ Dr. Halim Man
Director of National Institute of Public Administration (INTAN)

Distinguished presenters

Valued participants

And the media fraternity.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
1) I would like to start by acknowledging the efforts made by Institute Sultan Iskandar, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in collaboration with Global Event Asia and UTM Perdana School for hosting the National Conference to celebrate innovation & creativity within the public sector. Through this conference, it is hoped that it will bring us together on the discourse of public service innovation, and further encourage us to innovatively find ways of conducting our services and make service delivery smarter, faster, and more effective. Our ultimate desire is one – to attain a high performance public service as our country shifts to join the society of high income developed nations.

2) The Public Service has been the main protagonist in the governance of Malaysia for many decades. The public service has played vital roles in the development of Malaysia, from its colonial days to current development. Today’s era is seeing a rapid rate of globalisation. Communicating thousands of miles apart becomes easier, journeys across the globe become shorter, businesses flourish within seconds and decisions are made with the click of a button. All these achievements have two things in common – they are the product of innovation and creativity. It is therefore important that we equip the public service system with necessary tools to be competitive against the fast changing world.

3) The future that we desire now is a high performance public service with constant productivity increment. As we all are aware in July 5 of this year, YAB Prime Minister has outlined six core principles – swift, accurate, integrity, productivity, creativity and innovation that civil servants need to adopt in order to move beyond the traditional mind-set of “business as usual”. Two acronyms – CTI (Cepat Tepat dan Integriti) and PCI (Produktiviti, Kreativiti dan Innovasi) serve as new call signs for better service delivery to the people. My vision of tomorrow’s public service is an organisation that swiftly and accurately fulfils the needs of the Rakyat with integrity, and without any forms of delay. Efficiency, effectiveness, and virtue in public service delivery is an important aspect in promoting economic growth especially in shifting Malaysia from a developing nation to a high income developed nation.

4) And let’s not to forget, these three principles should be supplemented with PCI (Productivity, Creativity and Innovation) to cater to the increasing demands from our stakeholders. To realize the government’s transformation agenda, we need to expand our productivity scale to overcome our limited resources. The public service in tomorrow will not be the same as today. We need to develop a non-traditional and non-stereotypical public service which could be achieved through creativity and innovation. I take example of the passport making process. While in the past it takes a while before we could get our passports, but at present, we can have our passports ready within an hour after payment had been received by the Immigration Department. We need to be innovative and proactive at all times. We need to be creative in providing services to our stakeholders, and these services must be beyond their needs. Perhaps maybe in the future, the passport making process becomes even simpler that our passports auto- renews and actually arrives at our door the night before the old one expires? I therefore encourage all civil servants to adopt CTI and PCI in their everyday business to deliver extraordinary levels of service on any ordinary day.

Ladies and gentlemen,

5) Innovation and creativity is crucial and very much relevant in today’s era. An innovation requires change and the willingness to learn but change is not always necessarily innovative, in fact learning processes does not always lead to new ideas and practices. An innovation might not necessarily be mega structure rockets or multifunctional pens. It could be simple things that we see and encounter in our everyday lives.

HIGH-PERFORMANCE PUBLIC SECTOR
6) A high performance public service is a service with strategic clarity, solid execution, strategic resource management and performance-oriented organisational culture. These four strategies are important in shaping the desired public service. The public service now needs a clear definition and set of strategy for its mission, mandate and outcomes throughout the organisation. Only once we understand what is important and how to achieve what is expected from us, we can then be in harmony with reality. This will indirectly lead to efficient processes, transparent prioritization, and continuous improvement. The public service also needs to strategically manage and develop its workforce, financial and physical resources. When all these various differential factors have become one, we will then become a high performance public service.

NATIONAL BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY
7) Innovation is the heartbeat of development. It is the key driver and catalyst to our country’s economic growth. One major innovation we observe in our government at present is the National Blue Ocean Strategy. It is essentially value innovating on the current pool of resources to achieve programmes that are high impact, done at the lowest cost and are rapidly executed. Under National Blue Ocean Strategy, several initiatives have been introduced. One of these is the Urban Transformation Centre (UTC). UTC acts as a One Stop Centre that house various federal and state government agencies, private sector institutions and community services in previously underutilised existing buildings. It offers these services 7 days a week, with extended working hours, where we can now enjoy all these facilities under one roof. I am proud to say that UTC Melaka was readied only in 6 weeks, from the day the idea was mooted and has therefore benefitted the Rakyat. Apart from Melaka and Kuala Lumpur, more UTCs are in the pipeline as was mentioned by the YAB Prime Minister in Budget 2013 which has been recently passed. Other outcomes of National Blue Ocean Strategy are Rural Transformation Centres (RTCs), 1Malaysia For Youth (1M4U), 1Malaysia One Call Centre (1MOCC) and the army and police collaboration in trainings and policing. These are some of the examples of innovative ideas and creative thinking by our leaders that I believe will drive the country forward.

COMPREHENSIVENESS AND SUSTAINABILITY
8) To be a high performance public service, it is important that the public service adopts innovative activities and programmes. Not only that, the programmes must also be comprehensive in a sense that it involves top public service leaders to implementers, taking into account all aspects and possibilities available. The comprehensiveness is essential especially in the realm of public policy formulation. Not only must civil servants of various levels be included in policy making, they must also understand fully the implementation mechanism to ensure the success of these policies.

9) In my working visits to various government agencies and ministries, I have advocated the concept of Merakyatkan Perkhidmatan Awam to improve the effectiveness of Public Service
delivery. The concept calls for civil servants of various levels to go to the grounds to experience first-hand the public service delivery. Civil servants are also the Rakyat, so the services that we provide are the service that we will receive in return. Going to the ground will ensure that the message is fully understood across all levels. We not only experience the impact of our policy implementation, but we can also interact with the Rakyat to hear their suggestions, complaints or comments in order to improve our public service delivery.

Ladies and gentlemen,
10) To become a world-class public service, we need not only be innovative and comprehensive, we also need to sustain and continue developing the on-going programmes. For instance, the
Government Transformation Programme (GTP) 2.0 has been introduced as a continuation of the GTP introduced together with Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) and Political Transformation Programme (PTP) by PEMANDU. Similarly, PEMUDAH is also constantly deliberating and developing measures to improve the nation’s competitiveness. Some examples include the completion of identification card in one day and passports ready within an hour upon payment to the Immigration Department. The testimony to these measures is the World Bank Ease of Doing Business Report 2012 where we ranked 12th out of 185 economies.
11) We cannot stay in the same niche forever. We need to adopt transformative continuity. We need to continue progressing towards a better service and adapt to changes of time. Each public
service I believe must have its own “moving forward”. There will be predictions of future scenarios how the public service wants to shape itself. It could be in terms of economic opportunity, social development or environment protection, depending on what is the interest of that public service. Malaysia has chosen to remake itself with various transformation programmes, because in the end we wanted to see ourselves part of the fraternity of high income developed nations.

Ladies and gentlemen,
12) We have a huge task to transform and modernise our public service thus we shall continue our pursuit of a comprehensive, sustainable programme of innovation and creativity towards a high performance public service. On this note, I officiate the opening of National Conference on Nurturing the Public Sector’s Innovation and Creativity for Better Performance and Responsiveness. I wish all of you a successful conference.

Thank you.
Wabillahitaufikwalhidayah Wassalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh.

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