Innovation & Transformation Award: Bundesagentur Für Arbeit

The International Panel of Judges has decided to honor Bundesagentur Für Arbeit (The Federal Employment Agency of Germany) with the Innovation & Transforming Award in 2013. Transforming the largest service provider of the German labour market into a modern service provider and an efficiency-oriented service agency, meanwhile fulfilling important legal mandates. Bundesagentur für Arbeit currently has approximately 100.000 employees and during the course of the year 7,77 million people newly registered as unemployed while at the same time 7,72 million people found a new job.

The transformation initiative is a major undertaking with all odds against it. Meanwhile, with a structural approach and with surgical precision mapping all tasks, activities, functions, roles and processes across departments and organizations and interlinking the data with the information flow and services of 13.82 billion euros unemployment benefits in 2012.

Some of the the lessons to be learned for the LEADing Practice community from the Bundesagentur für Arbeit transformation project “Relation to Strategy” are:

• Capture not only business purpose and goals, but also the service goals. This will help you reorganize what you do and how you do it.
• Rethink process and activities based on the alignment of business service to business strategy.
• Define business innovation and transformation based on what you deliver (service) and how you go about it (process).

Focus Area

• Identify requirements on multiple levels (strategic, tactical and operational).
• Focus on service issues, weakness clusters and optimization potential at the same time (to not sub-optimize).
• Develop role based standards (process and service).
• Ensure process and service integration (across business areas). This is the single biggest potential to identify duplication of business functions, tasks, services, resources and data.
• Continuous improvement based on the role-based service orientation (who does what, where, how and why).

Transformation Tasks & Services

• Identify process.
• Develop process models with involved tasks, rules, objects decisions, measurements and reporting.
• Rethink the service construct and delivery model (service provider and service consumer).
• Optimize business functions, tasks, services, resources and data.
• Develop standards.
• Identify and define ownership e.g. business managers and process owners.
• Increase the level of automation, but not based on how the work was done before, but based on how the work should be done. Therefore solution will be centered around the role-based service orientation (who does what, where, how and why).