– extracted and adapted from RAKAN Sarawak October-December 2022 –
The administrative perspective in the country is changing rapidly and new roles and responsibilities for civil servants are emerging due to rapid socio-economic progress, urbanisation, and new technological interventions.
There is an urgent need to bring constant adaptability and flexibility in the roles and responsibilities by the civil servants to assimilate, adapt and adjust to these changes. Civil services need to transform in modern times as the levels of expectancy and transparency have increased manifold.
We must work together for Sarawak. We need a bureaucracy that is creative and constructive, imaginative, and innovative, proactive, and polite, professional, and progressive, energetic, and enabling, efficient, and effective, transparent and tech-enabled.
Civil servants need to continuously learn, unlearn, and relearn in order to adjust to the rapidly changing perspectives in Sarawak.
It is important for public servants to be innovative and to support, propagate and promote innovative ideas to provide hassle- free citizen-centric services.
In general, public expectations of efficiency, quality and customisation are shaped by their holistic experiences, including those with private sector providers, and their expectations are changing.
Governments become more citizen-centric when public wants and needs drive policy decisions and public service provision.
High-quality service delivery relies on a thorough understanding of public expectations, experiences, and key drivers of satisfaction, as well as a public decision-making framework that puts public at the centre.
This approach has multiple aims and benefits, including making public administrations more efficient, effective, and transparent, which can, in turn, further increase citizen satisfaction and trust in government.
Public service become more citizen-centric by utilising data and information to better understand public needs, and to support civil servants identify potential accessibility gaps, instead of the bureaucracy second-guessing public, governments consult public about their needs, and encourage their direct participation in policy making and service design and delivery.
This means that public service is more responsive, accessible, and effective. Moreover, measuring public satisfaction and preferences, and gathering user feedback, can help civil servants monitor performance over time, improve service delivery, and assess the
impact of reforms.
Citizen-centric and data-driven processes require access to information as a basic precondition and requires moving beyond the reactive dissemination of information, towards proactive government dissemination of information.
Public transparency and government openness imply the proactive publication of open government data that can be shared, analysed, and reused on a large scale within the framework of personal privacy and data protection legislation.
This paves the way for innovative uses of government data to generate good governance value for better public services, greater public sector accountability and integrity, economic benefits through the creation of new data driven business lines and social value through citizen engagement and data-driven journalism.
Innovative approaches adopted by public servants and supported by science, information technology can bring transformational and spectacular changes in fields like agriculture, health, education, citizen service delivery, etc., leading to increased ease-of-doing and ease-of-living for common people of Sarawak.
