It Takes a Bureaucracy

Ask a Wal-Mart store manager who her customers are and she will point to the people standing in line at the register or pushing shopping carts down the aisles. She sees her customers every day, talks with them, has a personal relationship with them.

But what if you ask a government manager who his customers are? Tim Barnhart, president of Federal Management Partners Inc., an Alexandria, Va., consultancy, has thought a lot about that question. To him, the government customer isn't necessarily the person who walks through the door to deal with an agency the way Wal-Mart's customers shop. For government agencies, the customer is the American public as a whole.

Hundreds of thousands of employees interact with customers in a business like Wal-Mart's all the time. But if government's customer is the American public, then it's safe to say that much of the workforce hardly ever deals directly with the customer.

"In government almost no one is in contact with the customer," Barnhart says. "Instead, most employees in an agency are in constant contact with what I would characterize as false customers-beneficiaries, stakeholders, contractors-and can easily come to believe the agency exists to serve those false customers."

That's why business can have little bureaucracy while government *needs bureaucracy to stay focused on the customer. "Everything an agency does is driven by laws, regulations, rules, hierarchical chains of command, all designed to make sure its thousands of employees are serving a public customer they never interact with," Barnhart says.

The people in government who have the most contact with the American public, or at least who are responsible for responding to and representing its interests, are the politicians at the highest levels. Forest Service managers, for example, might regularly deal with conservationists and loggers to balance their competing demands. But neither the conservationist nor the logger is the customer, Barnhart contends. Instead, it is the public as represented by elected officials. "Because this public customer is most closely connected to the top of the organization and is often very disconnected from the bottom, a top-down bureaucracy is an essential tool for ensuring the Forest Service maintains its focus on that customer," Barnhart says. "In a typical business, by contrast, the customer is most closely connected to the bottom of the organization. That kind of business can maintain its customer focus with little or no bureaucracy."

Barnhart's analysis is fascinating in the context of the ever-present effort to make government operate more like a business. If bureaucracy is a defining characteristic of government, then it's not something that can be brushed away and replaced with a Wal-Mart-style management structure. "This bureaucratic dynamic is what distinguishes government from business and really defines the government culture," Barnhart says. "That's why it's so incredibly difficult to simply lift management practices from the private sector and apply them to government. It's apples and oranges."

Who managers think their customers are is central to how they manage their operations. The veteran walking through the door at the Veterans Benefits Administration, the taxpayer filling out a W-2 for the Internal Revenue Service and the camper at Glacier National Park might seem like the customers government is serving. But those individual interests can diverge from the interests of the public as a whole. Perhaps it takes bureaucracy to make sure federal managers and employees remember that.