Specialized international session in public administration
Managing Change
French Cases vs.
World
Case studies
Pr. Dr. Claude Rochet
Institut de Management Public
Aix-en-Provence
Université Paul Cézanne

Is change possible within public
services?
 Generally accepted ideas
– Public services (PS) are reluctant to change
– PS encapsulate too many vested interests
– PS is no longer useful: why bother changing
it?
– The weberian model is obsolete: destroy it!
– The problem is not to change but to reduce
the size and the role of public services
– Civil servants capture PS for themselves
– Market mechanisms are superior to public
mechanisms
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 2

Summary
 Change, Why?
 Change, How?
 Case study #1: BNF
 Case study #2: ONF
 Conclusions and discussion
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 3

Change,
Why?
From institutions to
organizations

The big picture: the IIIrd
Industrial revolutionRuling developed
countries as incumbents
Incoming countries
(BRIC) as challengers
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A paradigm shift
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A technological revolution
re-deals the cards!
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The process of change
Risks of
institutional
freezing
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Institutional evolution is the key
 Institutional
evolution helps
defining the new
rules
 Institutions are parts
of the nation’s
competitive
advantage
 Institutions help
coalesce the other
components of the
socio-economic
system
The existence of systemic effects is
the reason why the State exists!
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 9

Institutions and organizations
Mainstream ideas
Institutions (formal and informal):
rule makers
Incentives for
organizational
innovation innovation
Organizations: rule players
“Both what organizations come into
Managerial hypes and existence and how they evolve are
fundamentally influenced by the
public management tools institutional framework. In turn, they
influence how the institutional
framework evolves” (North, 1990, p.5).
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Summary
 Change, Why?
 Change, How?
 Case study #1: BNF
 Case study #2: ONF
 Conclusions and discussion
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 11

How change occurs in public
organizations?
 POs do not benefit from a feedback
from the market as do private org.
 Feedback relies on long term
outcomes difficult to measure
 Instead, they may benefit from a
fiscal rent
 Only two factors may boost change:
– Evaluation
– Crisis
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For the while, crisis is the most
effective agent of change
 Crisis is the fruit, as Schumpeter described it, of
“that kind of change arising from within the
system which so displaces its equilibrium point
that the new one cannot be reached from the old
one by infinitesimal steps” (Schumpeter, 1911).
 Being farther from this disruption, public
administrations and their structures tend to
integrate the new paradigm more slowly. While
the public subsystem was leading change in the
golden age period of the previous cycle, it is now
a laggard and this lag becomes a cause for the
persistence of the disequilibrium of the global
system.
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Why crises are an opportunity?
 Classical weberian capabilities are not
oriented towards change
 Evaluation is ineffective and “listening to
the citizen” is a buzzword
 Strategic initiative for change is split
between political and managerial power
 Administrative arrangements are strongly
embedded in history and culture. Change
is heavily path dependant.
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An analysis framework:
resilience
 “The ability of human communities to
withstand external shocks or
perturbations to their infrastructure,
such as environmental variability or
social, economic, or political
upheaval, and to recover from such
perturbations”(Adger, 2000).
 An organization must be resilient
(stable) but also capable of change
(adaptive learning)
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growth or exploitation (r)
How does it work? conservation (K)
collapse or release (omega)
reorganization (alpha)
Human and
We define resilience, formally,
cognitive as the capacity of a system to
capital
absorb disturbance and
reorganize while undergoing
change so as to still retain
Local event transforming
essentially the same function,
global organizations or
institutions structure and feedbacks - and
therefore the same identity.
The aim of resilience management and
governance is...
either, to keep the system within a particular
configuration of states (system 'regime') that
will continue to deliver desired ecosystem
goods and services (preventing the system
from moving into an un-desirable regime
from which it is either difficult or impossible to
recover) or, to move from a less desirable
to a more desirable regime.
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Being both adaptive and resilient
Bureaucratic
Appropriating creative rationalization
destruction process From the dominating
refounding social state to the autistic
consensus, state
organizational
reengineering.
The innovative State
Decoupling from
environmental
evolution and threats.
The contested state
Accumulating human
capital and strategic
leadership. Endogenizing the
The conquering state decoupling through
crisis
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Summary
 Change, Why?
 Change, How?
 Case study #1: BNF
 Case study #2: ONF
 Conclusions and discussion
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 18

La Bibliothèque Nationale de
France
Getting out of crisis through the
information system

The new TOLBIAC site: Pump
and circumstances!
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MACRO ENVIRONNEMENT
 Socio-cultural evolutions :
– Longer studies
– Internet
 Technological evolutions
– Internet :online books & documents (gallica), libraries
network
– Archiving web pages
– Numerical documents conservation
 Legal framework
– Intellectual property
– BNF mission by law
– Rendering accounts (Cour des comptes, hearings)
– Working law
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PORTER MODEL
Entering in competition!
Unexpected
entrants: State
Google
Financing,
controlling,
New threats reporting
Power of
negotiation
Providers: Editors, Competitive BNF “clients”:
IT vendors, intensity students, researchers
Power of
patronage negotiation
New products
Source : M.E. Porter, Choix
Products substitute : stratégiques et concurrence,
internet, online libraries, Economica, 1982
foreign libraries
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The 5 forces’ model More a public policy
problem than a
10 managerial one! intensity: weak
10
Competitive
New entrants:
weak at the
beginning, then
very strong
10 Users and
Provider
clients power:
negotiation 10
power: strong
0 weak
Power of the Substitute
10 10
State: very threat: strong
strong
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The crisis: a mismanaged
project!
 A project made for prestige, ignoring
working librarians conditions
 I.S.:
– a war machinery against old fashioned
XVII° century librarians
– Technically over sophisticated but
functionally deficient
 1998: few months after the Grand
opening, the BNF went on strike!
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Crisis as an opportunity
 A new management team takes advantage of this
strike to put the project back on track through the elaboration of a
strategic plan.
 Focus groups gathered in every department, including
readers and representatives of the librarian’s profession.
 This participative process will help to break the arrogant
image of the BNF while issuing proposals that will help pointing
out key strategic objectives.
 Five key focus areas are released linked to results and
management indicators.
 Emphasis is put on customers’ satisfaction whether
physically or through the website (http://www.bnf.fr), associated
with process improvement regarding collections and their
availability to the public, the implementation of accrual
accounting to allow the linking between strategic needs and
resources allocations decisions and with better working
conditions.
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The result: a strategic plan
Dimension Objectif Projet Indicateurs
Bénéfices pour les Améliorer les services -Augmenter l’amplitude -Nbre de documents de magasins
usagers! rendus au public, sur d’ouverture de 61 à 66 heures autorisés pour le jour même
place et à distance par semaine -% de docs communiqués en
-Développer les services à moins de 45’
distance, notamment par - Amplitude ouverture 66h00
l’utilisation d’Internet 1 .
Processus 1)Développer et -Atteindre les objectifs - passer de 65 000 (2001) à 80
protéger les collections, d’acquisition annuelle 000 ( 2003)
A de facto les insérer dans les
réseaux
- Réduire le délai de
catalogage du dépôt légal
- descendre de 16 à 8 semaines
- de 1760 (2001) à 14 000 (2003)
balanced scorecard - Assurer la sauvegarde des
documents sonore, audio-
visuels et multimédia 2) Les indicateurs seront définis
2) Engager la 2) Projet non mature en 2001 avec le projet en 2002
rénovation des sites de
Richelieu et de
l’Arsenal
Personnel et Approfondir le projet -Entretien annuel - de 92% à 100%
apprentissage social et améliorer les - Formation - de 961 KE à 6,2 ME et nbre
organisationnel conditions de travail -Promotion jours formation /agent/an
-Mobilité - cible quantitative
Gestion Optimiser la gestion -Délai de règlement des De 78 à 55 jours
factures
-Taux d’engagement du %
budget
-Montant des intérêts de 400 KF (1999) à 275 (2001)
moratoires de 99 à 99,5%
- Taux disponibilités de
smoyens informatiques
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Actualiser
Evaluer Concevoir
Ajustement
s Ob
ul tat je cti
Rés fs
Valeur de la politique
Evaluation Stratégie
Gestion
Activité Moyens
Politique de la valeur Processus
Mettre en oeuvre
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 27

Strategic deployment :
Le Projet d’établissement
 Improve service, locally and
at distance
 Improve and protect collections
and integrate it in networks
 Renovate the old sites
 Deepen the social project and
improve working conditions
 Optimize management
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Strategic levers
HUMAN RESSOURCES
STRATEGY
FINANCIAL INFORMATION AND
RESSOURCES IT MANAGEMENT
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LES LEVIERS STRATEGIQUES (1) :
Les ressources humaines
HUMAN RESSOURCES
Managing Erasing Communication
competences antagonisms and and coordination
and careers promoting
common values
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LES LEVIERS STRATEGIQUES (2) :
La gestion des technologies de l’information
Élevée Stratégie de la BNF
 Les technologies de l’information auprès du
grand public
PERCUE
VALEUR
 Les technologies de l’information au service
d’une renommée nationale et internationale
Faible
Faible « PRIX » Élevé
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LE DEPLOIEMENT STRATEGIQUE (4) :
Le jeu d ’indicateurs équilibré du PE
 Performance  Indicators
goals – Surveying
– Objectives strategic
– Roles deployment
– Examples – Examples
a « balance scored board »
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From collapse to success
•The crisis originated in classical technical project
mismanagement due to the prevalence of political and technical
arrogance. It could have resulted in a complete failure or new
investments to reengineer the project.
•In fact, this project had no resilience at all since it never worked.
The strike was motivated by the desire of the librarians not to do
their noble job is such hellish conditions.
•It is the shared decision of making the strike a momentum for
change that gave the project its present today resilience through
the strategic process that creates mobilization of the agency’s
potential and connectedness among the employees and
management.
•As a result, the Library is alive, but practically the business
model has been reconceived bottom-up, starting from readers
needs and appropriate working functions for librarians. It is very
unlike to the initial politically arrogant project.
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What happened?
A coherent activity
A strategic model based on
planning process value
involving all the creation
stakeholders
An activity model
based on prestige
BSC de facto Strike Crisis as a momentum
to (re)build the activity
model
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Summary
 Change, Why?
 Change, How?
 Case study #1: BNF
 Case study #2: ONF
 Conclusions and discussion
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 35

ONF: before the crisis
The Office National des Forêts (ONF) is the
French governmental industrial and
commercial agency in charge of
the management of the public forests.
For a long time, its business model
is unbalanced:
State forest – which exploitation is a ONF
monopole – represents 40% of its
business portfolio towards 35% for those
of local communities, a semi-
monopolistic activity, since communities
may deal with another provider. Other
activities are purely commercial (15%)
Rebalance the business or purely public interest missions (10%).
The first produces a surplus, which
model is a tough change finances the deficit of the latter. Such a
process, as well internal situation is abnormal, for it is not the
ONF mission to subsidize local
(people) as external (local communities forest management.
communities)
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The crisis: an exogenous event
 26 & 27/12/1999: The
century worst tempest: 88
deads, 500 000 Ha
forests destroyed, 420
000 over 1 300 000 trees
knocked down
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Emotion is enormous: Versailles
forest destroyed!
140 Millions m3
knocked down!
(i.e. a trainload
from Oslo to
Gibraltar!)
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An interesting resilience case
study
 For the biodiversity, tempest may be
good!
 Biodiversity increased in holes:
– New flora species
– Mechanical exploitation increases biodiversity
– The sun favors appearance of new species in
fauna and flora.
 But what about social resilience?
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 39

Endogenizing the crisis
 ONF improves its social role and
image
 Hard work mobilizes personal: sense
of belonging increases
 Selling the trees finally succeeded,
giving legitimacy for the need to
implement a commercial culture
 Crisis provokes internal and external
awareness for the need to change
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The strategic move: contracting
with the state
Engagements de l’ONF Engagements de l'État
30% de gains de productivité Réforme du statut des
réinvestis personnels pour introduire
Réorganisation lourde : réduction plus de responsabilité, plus
du nombre de fonctionnaires de d’autonomie et de meilleures
7000 à 6700 à l’horizon 2006 (sur rémunérations ;
un total de 13000 personnes en Versement compensateur
2001) et réduction des niveaux jusqu’en 2006.
hiérarchiques par la réduction des
implantations régionales
Ces gains de productivité doivent
être utilisables pour rétablir
l’équilibre d’exploitation
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New resilience, new business
model
The conjugation of the crisis management and the
reengineering of the business model had allowed a
negotiation with the local communities and to understand what
the ONF business model has to be, based on the synergy
between activities, managed as a portfolio: public forests
management are monopolistic or semi-monopolistic activities that
must support competition in terms of costs and deal with public
sustainable development issues, while other activities are fully
competitive. Costs and tariffs logics are different according
to each activity, but the key points is knowing costs, that is
emphatically coined as ‘moving towards a commercial culture’.
On such a clarified basis, negotiations with local communities and
other partners have been completed on a mutual benefit basis for
each part.
Important investments in the information system allow to
see the real costs and to link performance evaluation to
operational results.
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What happened?
New activity
model and
Making a
5Y transition
natural
agreement
catastrophe an
with the State
opportunity
Improving a
commercial Tempest!
culture
Financial disequilibrium
New activity model due to the activity model
and hierarchical Obsolescence
structure Social and political lock-in
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Lessons learned
The key success factor is in this case the previous
clear vision within the management of what has
to be the new business model, which is
classically an r to K phase job.
But without managing the crisis as a
momentum for change, it would not have
benefited from an to phase which created the
condition of a new vision of the agency role and
tangible elements it was based on.
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 44

Summary
 Change, Why?
 Change, How?
 Case study #1: BNF
 Case study #2: ONF
 Conclusions and discussion
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 45

Making crisis a momentum for
change
 Crises must be managed: they do not act
by itself but must be endogenized by
managers: a Schumpeterian innovation
process!
 Managers must have a strategic vision
before the crisis
 Managerial techniques are useful but
organizations and managers may find their
way on an inductive and learning by doing
basis
Strategic intent is the key, not
managerial techniques
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 46

Institutions and organizations
Political leaders and
institutional change relies
on change in mainstream
ideas
Institutions (formal and informal):
Incentives for rule makers are ideas driven
innovation remain
poor when
mainstream ideas
mismatch the
reality of
organizational
learning Organizations: Strong adaptive
learning is the key
Crisis and adaptive work
to improve resilience
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 47

The floor is yours!
 What amazed me?
 What idea(s) am I desired to dig?
 How is this relevant in my
country/job?
 Find examples where this approach
could have applied?
 I do not feel concerned by this
approach: Why?
22 juin 2007 Claude Rochet 48

Thank you!
Have a nice stay in
Paris and a good way
back home!
My web site:
http://www.claude-rochet.fr
Claude.rochet@univ-cezanne.fr