The Difficulty of Connecting with the Parties Responsible for Addressing Important Problems - Assignment Example

The Difficulty of Connecting with the Parties Responsible for Addressing Important Problems Mildred and Katrina In an illustration that was given by Donald Kettl, in his bestselling book, The next government of the United States, Kettl attempts to compare the devastating effects of hurricane Katrina to the end of life care that his ailing mother in law received in the American system of medic aid. When hurricane Katrina swept and leveled the Gulf Coast of the United States, it managed to expose the multiple myriad weaknesses that were evidently facing the American government’s disaster and emergency preparedness systems. All the systems were thrown into an uproar as they were seen to severely be struggling to cope with the after effects of the devastating hurricane. It took an extra ordinarily long time for the emergency response services to start responding to the effects of the hurricane and even then, there were evident signs that the emergency services were clearly struggling, and were having trouble coping with trying to help the hurricane survivors (Kettl, 2009). In contrast to this, kettl’s mother in law was seen to receive excellent end of life case through the government’s Medicaid. All her wants and needs were adequately and sufficiently addressed by the program which was seen to be doing an excellent job at ensuring that it was able to deliver quality and timely services (Kettl, 2009). Through the aid of these two illustrations, Kettl is able to identify that although the united States government has consistently proven to be good at the delivery of the basic services like medical care, garbage collection, and management of pension schemes. It had proven to be quite incapable of handling large scale and unexpected problems like the effects of hurricane Katrina. Kettl argues that as opposed to the standard “vending machine model” that has been proven to work just fine when it comes to handling repeated problems that might face the system such as garbage collection, the handling of disasters is seen to require concentrated public-private and multi agency partnerships (Kettl, 2009). Kettl argues that it is increasingly becoming more and more difficult for the government to adequately meet the needs and demands of its citizens. As a result of this increasing difficulty for citizens to connect with the government so as to have their important issues addressed, there has been a general drift towards the creation of a situation whereby most of the work geared at meeting the demands for better and more services by the government has now been placed in the hands of private contractors (Kettl, 2009). Kettl advocates for the continual promotion of the private sector’s role and argues that the government should play a more pivotal role in trying to make attempts at leveraging private stakeholders (Kettl, 2009). Illustration Demonstrating this Occurrence in Organizations At different times during a complex company’s growth, the company might find itself unable to address some of its key concerns in a manner that can be deemed as being effective. Some of these concerns might concern aspects such as insufficient product production capacities capable of meeting the current demand by the customers, inadequate marketing infrastructure necessary for ensuring that the company is put on the map and can be able to effectively compete with other emerging competitors and Insufficient human resources necessary for running the company effectively. This inability to effectively handle these responsibilities by the company’s main decision making organs can often be blamed on the increasing complexity of the modern business organizations. It has been shown that complex systems often develop relatively complex problems. After careful evaluation, a company might find that it is unable to effectively connect with all these demands being placed on it even though these matters may happen to be expensive, serious and have arose directly in areas that are the company’s key management’s area of responsibility. If this situation is permitted to continue developing, the company might find itself facing serious risks as a direct result of a breakdown in its current business organization systems. Possible Solution to Effectively Arresting the Development of such a Situation A possible solution that can be employed to amend this solution is the use of business outsourcing services by the organization. Business outsourcing basically involves the contracting by a business of some of its specific responsibilities and operations to other third party outsourcing services providers. Outsourcing was initially mostly associated with manufacturing companies which were seen to outsource some of the production processes to other companies in an effort to meet the market demand for their products (Kakabadse & Kakabadse, 2002). Outsourcing has grown to now involve various other company processes from human resources management and accounting to finance, front office operations and contact centre services. Business outsourcing has been seen to help increase the flexibility of an organization or company as outsourcing is basically cheaper in comparison to expanding some of the business departments and product production capabilities in an attempt to improve the company’s services and production capabilities. Outsourcing enables companies to be able to maintain their overall entrepreneurial agility and speed. This is because companies do not have to sacrifice this by concentrating on becoming more and more efficient as they continue to expand. Hence this is seen to effectively stave off a company’s premature general internal transition that can cause it to move to move towards a more bureaucratic phase from the often fast paced and often informal entrepreneurial phase of operations (Kakabadse & Kakabadse, 2002). By outsourcing some of their functions companies are better able to adequately concentrate on their core competencies and the management is freed to be able to effectively address the internal issues and needs that affect their core competencies which they had initially been unable to address as a result of increased work load and pressure on their part. References: Kettl F. D. (2009). The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail and How to Fix Them. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. ISBN 978-0-393-05112-4. Kakabadse, A., Kakabadse. N. (2002). Trends in Outsourcing: Contrasting USA and Europe. European Management Journal Vol. 20, No. 2: Read More