There’s No Such Thing as Free Bureaucracy

The goal of ideal bureaucracy is a more rational and efficient organization, said the German sociologist Max Weber nearly one hundred years ago. I would like to add my two cents with a few suggestions.

Bureaucracy is mostly seen as an endless task of filling different forms, to be given to authorities, to be moved back and forth between them. The goal of the play is to prove various self-evident facts to different authorities.

In the coming years, many people will retire from administrative tasks in the public sector. Their positions will be filled in with fewer people. Using a worn-out phrase: to John Smith, this is both a threat and an opportunity.

The Worst-case-scenario: the world will be run as rigidly as ever, but with fewer people. The second worst-case-scenario: the web will be flooded with various forms to be filled in with a computer and then printed on paper and sent to authorities by snail mail. In my opinion, in an almost perfect world we could use governmental services as self-services whenever possible.

To John Smith, self-services mean easier living, as the public services can be accessed anywhere and anytime. There have been ambitious talks about a single public services portal in Finland, but it would be enough to have the services online in the first place. The browser window is a one-stop-shop: I am willing and able to move between different portals on the Internet. However, these portals should provide true e-service; I don´t want to print out papers of three different authorities from a portal just to fill them in and then return them back by snail mail.

The currently lacking transparency in public services could be easily increased with tracking codes. If I had a pending case in public administration, I could check the status of the case on the web with a mobile ID. I could see what has happened so far, what will happen next, who is working on the case at the moment and who I can contact if there seems to be a delay. I would also see who has access to my files and why.

I certainly don´t want to dispose of in-person customer service in the public sector. In complicated matters, the personal touch and face-time are needed. E-services could help to achieve just that; by replacing administrative routines with self-services, civil servants could be liberated to work on these more meaningful and relevant tasks.

The self-service concept of public services has been at the planning stage for years. One of the roadblocks has been the lack of common, secure and cost-efficient authentication. Another obstacle has been and still is the moving of public sector services online. The latter will surely take time and a lot of understanding and co-operation.