Reforming the Public Sector: How to Achieve Better Transparency, Service, and Leadership

10. Strategic Management in Italian Ministries: An Empirical Assessment of Gains from and Gaps in Reforms

In the two decades since 1990, governments have been facing very important challenges: the global financial and economic crisis, climate change, and demographic ageing are just the most recent of known issues that need to be addressed. Citizens are turning to the state, seeking immediate solutions to complex problems and demanding high-quality public services.While society’s expectations of government are increasing, the resources available to meet these needs are becoming increasingly limited.As the current global crisis has shown, one of the imperatives is to find a balance between providing short-term solutions to the most immediate problems and ensuring intergenerational equity in a long-term perspective. Public sector reforms since 1990 have been driven by the belief that there is a performance deficit and have emphasized the need for agencies to define and measure strategic goals, targets, and achievements.1 In this setting, strategic management becomes a key notion in support of evidence-based policymaking. Literature Review Strategic planning, lately also called “strategic thinking” and “strategic management ,” has been singled out as one of the critical areas of public management research as well as a still-relevant approach in the new post-Weberian organization.2 It has been defined as a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, within legal bounds.3 Empirical evidence has indicated that strategic planning is associated with higher performance.4 A consistent part of this empirical literature draws on the Miles and Snow model 194 10 Strategic Management in Italian Ministries: An Empirical Assessment of Gains from and Gaps in Reforms denita cepiku, andrea bonomi savignon, and luigi corvo in recognizing a taxonomy of “ideal types”for organizational strategy adopters in relation to structure.5 The process varies from context to context. The conventional approach to strategic management includes the following steps: 1. Development of an initial agreement concerning the strategic planning effort 2. Identification and clarification of mandates 3. Development and clarification of mission and values 4. Assessment of the external environment 5. Assessment of the internal environment 6. Identification of the key strategic issues 7. Development of strategy 8. Description of the organization in the future Implementation of each step requires the use of specific instruments.6 The strategic management process not only is a disciplined path toward goal achievement but also represents a genuinely innovative cultural approach for public organizations.7 It is an opportunity to promote a confrontation moment for decisionmaking between policymakers and managers, to increase engagement through staff participation, and to revisit what is truly important for the organization. The literature has highlighted the following issues: 1. The specificities of strategic management in the public sector, namely, the relevance of democracy and politics, activities regulated by law, and funding based on taxes 2. The preconditions of the political and administrative context that enable effective strategic management 3. The aims and benefits of strategic management in a post–New Public Management (NPM) era 4. The different approaches: rational planning and political decisionmaking models, logical incrementalism, and strategy absence 5.The different stages of strategy formulation,implementation,and control8 More recently, the literature has emphasized a concern with issues of crosscutting (the need to coordinate with other ministries), the need to integrate strategic planning with other processes, and the advent of new instruments such as scenario planning.9 The theory of strategic management belongs to the rational approaches to public sector decisionmaking and thus is a response to the objections raised in public administration toward bounded rationality.10 We acknowledge a gap when it comes to linking the quality of management to the performances achieved, which is especially true for research carried on Strategic Management in Italian Ministries 195 outside the United States and United Kingdom that focuses on the central level of government—that is, on one of the extremes in Barry Bozeman’s publicness continuum.11 However, in this chapter our aim is neither to demonstrate that strategic management matters nor to link organizational characteristics to the choice—and effectiveness—of strategic stances; rather, our objective is to analyze whether other aspects, such as policy and context, also influence the takeup of strategic planning processes in the public sector.12 In other words, in this chapter we make an effort to connect policy design and policy management.13 To do this we view “snapshots” of the state...