It’s surprising that privatization makes some people feel uneasy. It just makes me feel long in the tooth, since privatization is as American as handguns.

Privatization is an arrangement under which private firms become involved in the financing, designing, building, owning or operating of public facilities or services. Another name for such arrangements is public-private partnerships. The underlying concept is that the public and private sectors both benefit by cooperating to provide services.

Public-private partnerships are more common than most people realize. For example, governments have always used private firms to prepare the engineering and architectural designs for public buildings. Essential public services such as electricity, gas, and telephone communications have traditionally been provided by private firms functioning as regulated monopolies.

More recently, private firms operate prisons, sanitation services, toll roads and other functions normally associated with public agencies.

If public officials had to list 10 reasons for their rising interest in public-private partnerships, the first nine would be saving money. This is driven by tight fiscal conditions and taxpayer demand for more services than governments have the resources to provide.

Since private firms must pay taxes and earn profits- two costs that public agencies don’t have- it is reasonable to wonder how profit-generating firms can deliver services at lower costs than public agencies can.

The usual answer involves vague references to “private sector efficiency.” But such vapid cliches undermine privatization’s credibility. An important factor that enables private firms to deliver services less expensively is that few of them are subject to the regulations that hamstring public agencies. As a result, their procurement procedures are simpler, faster and more strategic.

Private firms are always on the lookout for new technologies and other tools that promise to make  service delivery more effective. They understand we did not get out of the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. Most public agencies are risk averse. so the only practical way for government enterprises to get things done in new and better ways is to let private firms assume the risk of failure.

Public agency managers rarely have the option of choosing a supplier based on timely delivery, quality, and lower life cycle costs. They’re usually restricted to a small group of suppliers who have mastered  the intricacies of government contracts, are willing to dot every “i”, cross every “t” (often several times) and wait months to be paid.

Avoiding “waste, fraud and abuse” guide public agency procurement. The standard assumption seems to be that the public would rather waste countless extra dollars to avoid any possibility of losing a single dollar to fraud or abuse. And few public agency managers can be expected to lay his or her career on the line to exploit more efficient trade-offs.

The bottom-line focus of most private firms forces them to live in the real world, where practical results, not procedures, are what count, That’s why private managers can exploit the benefits of just-in-time inventory management, economies of scale in purchase orders, and meaningful supplier performance measures to make their operations more efficient.    ·

Greater efficiency also means being able to aggressively exploit new technology to improve customer service, streamline production, and reduce costs. But there’s always some risk in being among the first to embrace new technology.

Private managers are paid to accept and manage risk; public sector managers are paid to avoid risk. This, coupled with elaborate procurement rules, is why public agencies usually end up with trailing  technology. They prefer not to “risk the public’s money” until a better technology has been so totally proven that it’s often obsolete.

Persuading government officials to outsource the risk of developing, financing, operating, and maintaining new innovative technology is a full time job, one with plenty of opportunity for overtime.

originally published: March 29, 2014