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Perry Lam

In a report released earlier by the Legislative Council Secretariat, Hongkong Post was chastised for failing to diversify its services to meet market demands and relying too much on traditional mail business to generate revenue.
But our post office is certainly not the only government department which can't keep pace with change. The descent of the Information Services Department into irrelevance after 1997 is a case in point.
The government has been getting so much bad press since the handover that it seems only fair to ask: as its public relations consultant and news agency, is the department doing its job? What the department lacks, I believe, is a strategic understanding of the increasingly hostile media environment in which the government must operate.
In the eyes of a large part of the local press, the chief executive and the people who work for him are guilty until proven innocent. And a highly suggestible, credulous public is prone to believe the worst accusations made against the government by the media.
Yet the government desperately needs a public mandate for the effective implementation of its policies.
The paradigm irrevocably shifted when Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony and became a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. But somehow it has escaped the department's notice.
With great insouciance, it goes about its daily business of issuing press releases, making announcements and running a news and media information system. No one on its staff of over 300 seems to have any idea that the department is now in the business of public persuasion, not public information.
The department is not alone in performing the extraordinary feat of not noticing that times have changed.
It's part of the civil service and the civil service has never been famous for being responsive to changes. Nor is it meant to be. Civil servants, as a great stabilising force in society, are usually forgiven for being a little dull and slow-moving.
In the words of Walter Bagehot, dullness in matters of government is a good sign and an indication of its success.
But if reforms and innovations will not come from within the various departments, they must come from without and the top down if necessary.
In The Innovator's Dilemma, the management classic published in 1997, Harvard economist Clayton Christensen argues that companies lose their competitiveness when they are consumed by serving the needs of their customers in the present without giving any thought to how these needs may evolve.
Doing the right thing, therefore, becomes the wrong thing. This is exactly the problem of many government departments.
Bringing reforms and innovations to these departments will no doubt disrupt, at least in the short run, the services they provide to the public - Christensen calls these "disruptive innovations". But it will be a small price to pay for the self-improvement, smooth functioning and enhanced competitiveness of the city.
Perry Lam is a local cultural critic


On Second Thought: Hong Kong government departments must move with the times