In 1996, the Ethiopian government introduced the Civil Service Reform Program (CSRP) to disentangle the intricacies of the old bureaucratic system, and to build a fair, responsible, efficient, ethical and transparent civil service that accelerates and sustains the economic development of the country. However, lack of competent personnel, prevalence of attitudinal problems and absence of a strong institutional framework constrained the success of the reform. To reinvigorate the CSRP, the Ethiopian government has been implementing BPR in public organizations since 2004. In this regard, there are claims and counter-claims on the effectiveness of BPR implementation in improving the performance of public organizations. Motivated by such claims, this research has assessed the design, challenges, implementation and outcome of BPR in four public organizations using questionnaires, interviews, observations and review of secondary sources.

Over the past three decades, African countries have been reforming their public sector with a view to improving efficiency, effectiveness, accountability and transparency as part of efforts to improve the delivery of public services. Reform actions have included privatisation, public/private partnerships, commercialisation and adoption of private sector approaches in managing public organisations. This book, put together by OSSREA, reviews measures by African countries in that regard, the extent to which the measures have achieved their intended results, as well as the factors behind the failure to achieve those results, where this was the case.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of nine international workshops held in Hoboken, NJ, USA, in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2010, in September 2010. The nine workshops focused on Reuse in Business Process Management (rBPM 2010), Business Process Management and Sustainability (SusBPM 2010), Business Process Design (BPD 2010), Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2010), Cross-Enterprise Collaboration, People, and Work (CEC-PAW 2010), Process in the Large (IW-PL 2010), Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2010), Event-Driven Business Process Management (edBPM 2010), and Traceability and Compliance of Semi-Structured Processes (TC4SP 2010). In addition, three papers from the special track on Advances in Business Process Education are also included in this volume. The overall 66 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions.

This paper examines the Annual Progress Report on the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. The broad thrust of the government’s strategy remains creating rural growth, accelerating private sector growth in the modern economy to create employment and incomes, and strengthening of public institutions to deliver services. The government has embarked on an aggressive program to accelerate progress as rapidly as possible, including a big push on education to create human capacity, expanding infrastructure as rapidly as financing and capacity will allow, opening the economy, building institutions, and decentralizing government.

?Financial Management Information Systems: 25 Years of World Bank Experience on What Works and What Doesn?t? was prepared as an updated and expanded version of the FMIS review report drafted in 2003, to highlight the achievements and challenges observed during the design and implementation of Bank funded FMIS projects since 1984.