Reinventing State Civil Service Systems

Abstract

This article explores the first 5 years of the State of Georgia’s reform of its centralized civil service system, including an assessment of the environment leading to the reform. Additionally, the article explicates three organizing models for the delivery of public human resource management services and suggests that the state should have moved toward a strategic model that shared real personnel authority between the central personnel agency and the respective departments. The article concludes that the Georgia reform is an anomaly, not a trend.