Public Sector Futures in The Connected Republic V

What are the big factors driving change in the public sector?  Here are a few obvious ones…feel free to throw in your suggestions and explain why you think they are having such a significant impact on the way the public sector works and evolves.

• Growing complexity of policy challenges and ‘wicked’ problems to be fixed (think climate change, financial meltdown, chronic disease management, pandemics, looking after older people, lifting literacy, sustainable cities…)
• Dramatic changes in technology and the social and cultural changes they have enabled and accelerated eg social networking, collaboration, the rise and rise of the ‘abundant’ Internet etc
• More demanding and discerning customers and citizens
• Transparency, trust, and not just the need, but the requirement for confidence in public institutions and their ability to govern
• Personalized responsiveness.  A Citizen-centric society is requiring services at their point of need in the timeframe (real and perceived) that they need it.
• The battle for talent – finding the right people, with the right capabilities, with the right connections, to do outstanding work
• Having to orchestrate a much more complex mix of people, organisations and interests to get things done, to make decisions and to sustain support for difficult and contentious decisions
• Working out new models of accountability to reflect the new more distributed, networked and collaborative work models that are becoming more dominant in the public sector

Any more?