The Baldrige Quality Process Implications for Public Sector Organizations

Globally, governments are constantly striving to keep abreast of an ever-changing world. In the United States, more specifically, governments are faced with fluctuating economic and revenue circumstances, rapidly changing citizen's needs, and ever-increasing infrastructure requirements.Like the challenges that U.S. businesses and industries face, public sector organizations-in order to be successful-must respond to these complex changes and needs with the greatest efficiency and effectiveness possible. To do this, they must focus on excellence in every situation that is encountered through superior management and organizational processes and practices. For well over a decade the Baldrige values, concepts and criteria have been a mainspring for achieving performance excellence and productivity in American businesses, small or large. The Baldrige Quality Program has also provided the public sector with model self-assessment and improvement approaches. Using the Baldrige criteria, for instance, public sector organizations have strengthened their leadership structures, built workable and sensible organizational and administrative strategies, focused their attention more carefully and astutely on their customers (viz., taxpayers or the citizenry at-large), utilized data and information in better ways, improved human resource management, and, perhaps most importantly, shifted from emphasis on simply effort to that of results. In this article, the Baldrige Program will be discussed in order to discover what it is and how it can assist governments do a better job. First, some essential background information on the National Baldrige Program will clarify what the program is all about and its impact on state quality programs and those elsewhere. Second, a brief discussion of " the Baldrige Payoff " will give some insight into what an organization gets out of participation in the Baldrige process, i.e., self-assessment, feedback, improvement, and recognition. Third, a discussion of the core values and concepts will allow for an appreciative, hopefully more meaningful understanding of the Baldrige process. These values and concepts are critical not only to grasping the Baldrige process and system, but also to instituting a genuine enthusiasm for their utilization in public sector organizations. Fourth, the Baldrige criteria themselves, the linchpins of organizational and administrative excellence, will be discussed. The criteria, according to the current director of the Baldrige National Quality Program, Harry Hertz, " can help one align resources, improve communications, productivity and effectiveness, and achieve strategic goals " (National Institute of Standards and Technology, Memorandum, 2002). And finally, a few concluding remarks will, it is hoped by this author, spur some of those …