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Executive Voices: An Op-Ed Column

Reinvention
At Commerce, we're changing how we do our job but not our mission

By Jim Fain

In his inaugural address, Gov. Mike Easley laid out his vision for One North Carolina. He described a state where every community matters and where every individual counts. It is the goal of the N.C. Department of Commerce to ensure that North Carolinians have equal access to economic prosperity wherever they live.

As our economy moves away from a focus on agriculture and traditional manufacturing toward enterprises driven by capital, technology and entrepreneurship, our challenge is to successfully guide the state in that transition. In view of that goal and the governor’s vision, I’m often asked to describe the role of Commerce.

People know us primarily as recruiters. As North Carolina’s lead economic-development agency, we work to recruit and retain new, quality enterprises and promote the state globally through public relations, marketing, overseas business-development missions, web sites and other activities. We’re able to present all 100 counties to relocation clients, ensuring they can find the best fit available for their needs. But we also offer a broader range of services that I’ll describe below.

First, however, let me outline how we go about our work at Commerce, which may be as important as what we do. We’ve done a lot of self-assessment in recent months to evaluate our effectiveness and efficiency, comparing our work with similar agencies in neighboring states. That healthy process has led to the reorganization, reengineering or reinventing of most of our operations.

Like most businesses, we began that process by identifying our customers — the citizens, companies and communities of our state. In serving these customers, we’re guided by our mission statement: to enhance the economic well-being and quality of life of all North Carolinians, which fits nicely with Gov. Easley’s vision. To that end, everything matters – good roads, cultural amenities, schools, sites, everything. Often, then, our job is to bring together other state agencies, local and regional economic-development organizations and private-sector allies to serve our customers.

Our self-assessment also led us to adopt key values to drive how we carry out our mission. We believe everything we do should be characterized by three adjectives: proactive, knowledge-driven and targeted. We know that “passive” doesn’t cut it in a competitive world. As recruiters, we must target the kinds of companies we want to bring to North Carolina and go knock on their doors. Similarly, our new 21st Century Communities initiative is an example of packaging all of our services and proactively taking them to challenged counties.

Knowledge-driven speaks for itself. We value experience and assume hard work, but to be successful, we’ve got to be smarter than our competition. So we’re building a research and analysis unit  to develop information and ideas to drive our sales and service efforts.

Finally, targeting scarce resources can ensure that at the margin we’re using every dollar and every minute to get the best return. That’s why we’ve been shifting resources to high-return activities. For example, we consolidated three offices in Europe and the Middle East into one – without a loss of effectiveness – to free budget dollars for other programs.

At Commerce, we also have embraced what we call the “3 Cs” – change, collaboration and communication. Change ensures continuous improvement and relevance in rapidly changing times. Collaboration with our partners in both the public and private sectors is the only way we can accomplish our mission. And if this collaboration is to be truly effective, we absolutely must be good at communication, both internally and externally.

Now, back to our customers. Obviously, everything we do ultimately must serve the citizens of our state. We serve them most directly, however, by operating the Commission on Workforce Development and related training programs for our workers, funded by the federal Workforce Investment Act.

For communities, we provide tools to municipalities, counties and local community groups. These include the Main Street Program, which assists small and medium-sized cities in redeveloping downtowns; community development block grant programs targeted by Commerce to neighborhood and housing development efforts; and planning, technical assistance and consulting services from the seven regional offices of our Division of Community Assistance.

In addition to recruiting assistance, we provide support to companies through our Existing Industry and International Trade divisions. We also operate targeted programs promoting the travel, film and sports industries in our state.

As Gov. Easley has said, all the incentives in the world won’t attract a company unless we have quality workers and good places to live. Recruiting may be our most visible activity, but a good workforce-development delivery system and programs to build the infrastructure of our counties are equally important. That’s why a principal outcome of self-assessment was to commit equal resources to all three customer groups.

Let me conclude by mentioning a strategically important change. The Easley administration last year proposed and the General Assembly approved transfer of the state Board of Science and Technology to Commerce from the Department of Administration. This step will more closely align policymaking by this important board of business and campus leaders with the economic development policy and activities of our state. The board’s thinking about how we invest in science and technology, how we transfer technology from campuses to the marketplace, and how we use our knowledge assets to recruit knowledge-driven enterprises will be essential to how we build our 21st Century economy.

Jim Fain of Raleigh is secretary of the N.C. Department of Commerce. Before joining the department in 1999 he served for 25 years as an executive with First Union National Bank.

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