Challenge > Cover
Story > Rising to the (Bench)Mark
Rising
to the (bench)mark
The
Singapore Quality Class, Singapore Quality Award
(SQA), People Development Standard, People Excellence
Award, ISO 9000 certification and Organisational
Excellence (OE) award are terms familiar to all public officers.
The pursuit of excellence in the Public Service has led more and more ministries
and statutory boards to take up the challenge to benchmark themselves against
internationally and locally recognised standards.
Why should public organisations be excellent?
We aim to be excellent for a very simple reason, which is to be prepared to cope
with change. We strive to continuously improve our processes, service and standards
to meet the demands of a changing environment. The public’s demand for
a better Public Service means that it has to be flexible and able to adapt to
changing customers’ needs. Systems and processes enable the Public Service
to achieve this.
However, the journey towards excellence requires more than systems and processes.
From the profiles of two recent SQA winners, we can conclude that the “softer” aspect
of an organisation — its people — also play a very important role.
We can see that committed staff are the X-factor of an excellent organisation.
We need good leaders to be able to motivate staff to work towards a common goal
of the organisation. Without visionary leaders and engaged staff, the best systems
and processes will not work.
In this issue of Challenge, we profile two Singapore Quality Award winners, CAAS
(see this story) and IRAS (see
this story), and a Public Service Award for Organisational
Excellence winner, HDB (see this story). These
stories will convince you that the Public Service is serious about being the
best in the world. So learn
more about how these three organisations embarked on their journey towards excellence.
Read about their best practices and find out what makes these organisations shine.
