Project for Principles of Business Excellence
The Dubai Government Excellence Program (DGEP) was initiated in 1977 with the aim of promoting excellence in the Government of Dubai, which is considered the second largest of UAE’s seven emirates. The other large emirate in the UAE that makes significant contributions to the improvement of UAE’s public sector is Abu Dhabi. Since its initiation, DGEP has leveraged on awards to influence and motivate government entities to improve. Several important elements have influenced the significant growth of DGEP into one of the most complex entities situated at the apex of government decision-making in the emirate of Dubai. Without a doubt, one of DGEP’s most important elements that have played an integral role in its growth in recent years is the mandatory participation in “Distinguished Government Authority” (for large entities)/ “Distinguished Government Department” (for small or newly established entities” and “Distinguished Government Employee.” The primary objective of DGEP during its initiation was to improve the public sector in the UAE by rewarding good management and service delivery in the public sector, and the achievement of this has been greatly influenced by the push for mandatory participation in the aforementioned categories. Mandatory participation paves the way for organizations and other entities to rely more on their staff than rely on external stakeholders. It should be noted that mandatory participation in the mentioned categories has turned the evaluation of excellence in UAE into an obligatory passage point, and the importance of this to DGEP is highlighted by the fact that is has paved the way for assessors to inspect the quality of formal elements of management including policies, guidelines, definitions of authority, and to interview employees to find out whether they are aware of those formal elements, how they seek to use them, and if they can relate to their specific task contexts. For instance, with DGEP, an emphasis is placed on the formulation of effective policies to help achieve public sector improvement. Besides, having authoritative leaders who make good decisions is emphasized by DGEP, and this is one of the ways through which DGEP contributes to the growth of public sectors in various countries, which is DGEP’s principal objective, and thus, the significance of mandatory participation in the already mentioned categories is underscored.
The significance and success of DGEP have seen its emulation in other emirates in the UAE such as Abu Dhabi. In fact, other emirates such as Abu Dhabi that have emulated DGEP have managed to achieving excellence through their government excellence programs. As with the case of DGEP, Abu Dhabi’s excellence programs have embraced an initiative where entities with the highest scores adopt those with the lowest scores and try to see how the latter can be helped. On several occasions, having entities with lowest scores adopted by those with highest scores indicates the need for cooperation between both the lowest and highest score entities or organizations. With this initiative, Abu Dhabi and other entities have managed to do away with hierarchical contexts that make it harder to achieve organizational excellence and delivery of quality outcomes. Moreover, the emulation of DGEP has seen Abu Dhabi’s government excellence programs mobilize customers not so much as a class of concrete actors but as a rationale for guiding the relationships between government entities and government entities and the public. In fact, this has seen Abu Dhabi’s government planning organized, government performance benchmarks developed, and every governmental activity carried out in agreement with the customer perspective or rationale. As such, as with the influence of DGEP on Dubai government, Abu Dhabi’s government excellence programs have resulted in the shift from operating in the traditional public sector mode to operating in a very competitive corporate mode, which has led to improved services and enhanced customer satisfaction thereby highlighting how Abu Dhabi has been in achieving excellence. Also, by emulating DGEP, Abu Dhabi’s government excellence program has resorted to the separation of awards for “authority/department” and “agency” with the aim of giving smaller and usually less professional entities a chance against big or famous entities. As such, competition among organizations or entities is stiffened paving the way for improvement in the public sector, which is the principal objective of most government excellence programs.
The article notes that a driving rationale that has underlain DGEP’s works since its initiation is voluntarism. Voluntarism in itself is the principle of relying on voluntary action to have something completed or done, and on several occasions, it has interfered with organizational or governmental activities and processes. Despite voluntarism being a key element of the excellence awards scheme, it is one of the perspectives of DGEP that should be changed to make DGEP even more effective. This means that participation in the DGEP should be made mandatory for all entities, departments, and individuals if its effectiveness, which is an improvement in UAE’s public sector, is to be seen. It is also noted that UAE’s political culture influences DGEP-related decisions, and this ought to change to make DGEP even more effective. The fact that DGEP-related decisions are rooted in the UAE’s political culture means that the ruling families in UAE society and their strong support for modern administrative systems have to a large extent compromised decisions made related to DGEP. In several countries, improvement in public sectors has been stalled by the involvement of the political class, and this is the case in the UAE. For a long time, the rulers in the UAE have been in the last instance the guarantors of the stability of public sector employment that is in one way or the other associated to DGEP. In the real sense, UAE’s political and ruling class should not have a say or control of DGEP-related decisions if the latter is to be more effective. Having the political class control key decisions in a country can be disastrous as most of the decisions made are often inclined towards favoring a particular side of the political divide. DGEP has to a large extent ensured that the gap between the high and low socioeconomic classes is bridged, one of the hallmarks of improvement in the public sector.