ABSTRACT
Hillsborough County, containing Tampa, Florida, and approximately 825,000 people, has a comprehensive program built around four strategies that, in a very traditional local government, bring about change:
Communicate clearly why change is necessary. We were asking employees to change everything about how they felt about work, what they did at work, to whom they reported at work. We needed a consistent change message. We needed to reinforce the importance of implementing change to get support not just from our employees but also from our board members, interest groups, and the community at large. Our approach was not radical. What was radical was the way we put the package together, combining a high-quality employee newsletter, an award-winning monthly video news program; the county administrator’s annual report, with an emphasis on improvements each department made; Partners in Progress (a political group); and the Intersolve Steering Committee, which was our public and private partnership experience (although we experienced mixed success in working with the private sector on some projects).
Provide the necessary resources to implement productivity improvements. For the first time we joined groups: Public Technology Inc., International City Management Association, Florida Innovation, National Association of Counties, and American Society for Public Administration. We told our people to go to meetings, and we paid for them to go. We created and supported two new departments: Operations Improvement and Development and Information Technology. Information Technology sets a strategic direction for information systems and telecommunications, assists departments in the development of prototype systems, and advises departments in the acquisition of hardware and software. Operations Improvement and Development is an in-house consulting group that provides work-flow analysis improvement teams, organization development, performance measures, strategic planning, and training for our line employees and management.
