Ombudsman versus Deming

Ombudsman was introduced first in 1809 by Swedish constitution and means more or less representative or proxy. Therefore we have representatives in parliament and people’s representative. So here is a question for you - why the hell do we need to have additional people’s representatives such as ombudsman and special commissioners? Aren’t our parliamentary representatives supposed to defend our interests? Do we really need to pay 2 different persons to do the same job and maintain 2 separate administrations? Don’t take me wrong – I have nothing against ombudsmen, which in most cases are doing great job defending people against the state. I’m just against the retarded system, which makes them necessary. I’m against politicians which propose new ombudsman positions as solutions to the real problems. Let’s say it clearly – ombudsman is never a solution – it’s a patch for internal inefficiency of administration and a costly one. Politicians like it because it’s a quick fix and they can shift the responsibility from them to the newly created position and show you before elections that they care. Well maybe they do care (probably more about voting result than about you), but they are either too lazy to really solve it correctly instead of curing the symptoms or they have missed at least last 50-60 years of quality management.
In 1950 W. Edwards Deming gave some lectures about statistical control process to Japanese engineers. These lectures have change the modern industrial world and quality assurance forever. Japanese producers by improving the quality of their products and assuring the quality of whole process converted Japan in the second world power in industry in just 40 years.
And this is what we need in our political process. Instead of creating ombudsmen everywhere, we need to improve our administrative procedures. We need to start to apply Kaizen techniques to administrative environment. We need to assure total management quality – in laws, in regulations and finally in our Point of Sales (POS) of administration. Instead of creating new positions of supervisors and of correcting of errors, we should train people in administration to be better and more efficient.
The existence of ombudsmen tells me also one more important thing – bureaucrats does not know how to speak to normal people – they prefer to talk to other bureaucrats than to normal citizens. They want to isolate themselves from citizens by walls of paper and other bureaucrats. In Poland we have already reached ridiculous levels of these intermediaries. This is a current list of main ombudsmen/commissioners:

These all patients’ ombudsmen apart of making me very sad make me also thinking that maybe a patient is not a citizen at all, since we have it separated from the national ombudsman.

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