PHOENIX (CBS5) -
They want to change the way they do business to save taxpayer money. Heads of state agencies met for the first time Thursday to get that ball rolling.
Gov. Jan Brewer signed an executive order to create the Government Transformation Office. The purpose is to define work that can be done more efficiently, to streamline operations.
The committee is made up of six different state department directors and a couple of representatives in the private sector.
"We work with the agencies to prioritize, what are the processes that will most directly benefit the public, but will have the greatest returns, so they can pursue their own agencies mission," said Transformation Office Administrator Robert Woods.
The office has already started training several agencies and identified projects that could improve service and wait times that end up costing more taxpayer dollars.
"Part of those projects will be how you give nurses more time to spend with patients. You talk about agencies with permits. How do you make permits easier to issue, take less time?" said Woods.
It'll help agencies identify areas that can be worked on with less people and reallocating people to different areas. Woods wants to make it clear that this is not a job-cutting measure.
"The goal of this effort is to never lay off folks. In fact you have to allay the fears of the folks that they're going to lose their job. That's not how this works," he said.
Woods said there's not really a way to know what benefit this will have to the state in terms of saved taxpayer dollars until their annual report is released next September.
The office wants to launch a website that shows the projects their working on and what kind of benefits they have on the state sometime early next year.
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