This chapter deals with the common assessment framework (CAF) and its application in the local and regional administration in the Czech Republic before the summer of 2022. After a background about how CAF works and should be applied, there are two parts about how the quality policies and CAF are used for the public administration and public sector in the country. The discussion and the solutions and recommendations parts discuss the most important issues found for the topic and for the (future) research itself. A short part about possible future research directions follows up on these issues.
TopIntroduction
Total quality management (TQM) has been applied in many firms and institutions, but it is complex and expensive. However, it has also advantages for improvement that can be used in the public sector.
The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) adapted the TQM for the needs of institutions in Europe and the EU. Its Excellence model is an efficient way to improve any institution wanting to use this approach.
That is why the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) has been developed for helping the European institutions to have a quality management technique tailored for them. Of course, it has some advantages that are inconveniences from a certain point of view.
The main advantage is that it is free, compared to the business versions of quality management. That is probably the biggest advantage that makes this quality management system accessible to any institution anywhere in the world, including NGO’s and public administration. That is why it is applied also outside Europe.
Institutions from around the world can ask for help. At the end of 2019, the responsible people for helping with its implementation, the so called EUPAN CAF Correspondents were from EIPA, the European Commission, and 19 EU countries, five other European countries, and other nine non-European countries were “piloting CAF” to help with it worldwide.
In 2022, EIPA, another institution, and 23 European countries had assigned experts to be contacted for assistance – of course, this includes some countries from outside the EU, too. On the website of EIPA, there are no contacts for outside Europe now.
For instance, the Dominican Republic made the CAF mandatory for all public institutions since 2010. That was presented at a conference and published by the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA) in 2012.
In this paper, we will use the terms “public sector” and “public administration” sometimes as synonyms, although there are some differences. In reality, public administration institutions are a part of public sector. This corresponds to the definition by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Wegrich, 2022)