An initiative of
the National Academy of Public Administration, 
and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, 
Princeton University




Oral History Program 	Series: 	Governance Traps
			Interview no.:	J28






Interviewee: 		Liliana Caballero			

Interviewer:		Matthew Devlin

Date of Interview:	5 November 2009

Location:		Bogotá
			Colombia





Innovations for Successful Societies, Bobst Center for Peace and Justice
Princeton University, 83 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544, USA www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties

DEVLIN: 	Today is November 5th, 2009. We're in Bogotá, Colombia with Liliana Caballero, who was Secretary General in the second mayoral administration of Antanas Mockus. Liliana, thank you for joining us.

CABALLERO:	Thank you for your interest in learning about our experience in Bogotá. 

DEVLIN: 	I thought I might begin by asking, how did you come to be involved in the Mockus administration? What was your background that led you to this?

CABALLERO:	I'm a lawyer from the National University. All of my professional work has been in public administration.  I was Antanas's secretary general at the rectory of the National University. I was the secretary general in the second administration. 

	The task for Secretary General in Bogotá is the second in command in the Mayor's office. In fact, I replaced Antanas in twenty-one opportunities. Basically, the task is to coordinate all of the members of the Cabinet in the mayor's team. We designed the scheme of work in order to execute the development plan, through which many of the objectives of the development plan was under one of the members of the Cabinet in such a way that you could do follow-up. You could have accountability and have the details of how all of the objectives were being moved forward. 

	We had two organizational schemes. One was the mayor, the traditional one, the mayor with the entities in charge. Bogotá at that time had 64 entities without the existence of the concept of the administrative sector. That means that all the entities depended directly on the mayor. 

	So the first thing we did was to group them informally, trying to develop the idea of the administrative sector, which means that all of the entities that had to do with mobility in the sector or social sector, etc. So this has been adopted through an accord of the council, which at that time was perhaps hard to implement, because all of the people considered themselves at the same level, in the sense that they depended directly on the mayor. That was the first accord that allowed for the implementation of the system, which exists throughout Colombia.

	So this is a sectoral or vertical system, and the other one is the one we can call transversal or horizontal. It had to do with their responsibility or with being in charge of the seven goals of the development plan. 

	This meant-for example, in my case, I was in charge of the objective of admirable public administration, which had to do with institutional strengthening, administrative reform, and other issues which I will mention later on. This system had that vantage that while some secretaries responded to a certain objective, people at the second level of entities were in charge of a specific program of the objective. We ensured that all the public servants were conscious of what project or program they were involved in, so that they could feel that accomplishing goals and achievements was also their responsibility. 

	So for this, we had exercises. For example, at the end of the first year of the administration, instead of doing the traditional Christmas party that all public entities do, we had an event in a public park in which all the public servants were wearing a t-shirt of different colors depending on the goal of the development plan that they were working on. It was 5,000 people with shirts with different colors, and due to the transversal coordination system each one of the objectives included people of different entities and different levels of the administration. And at that event, every one of the objectives had to be accountable to the rest of the administration of Bogotá. That's how a big commitment started, and it was evidenced that every single public servant was related to a goal of the development plan. 

	With this type of exercise, we had two purposes: recognition and accountability. There were many other exercises that also had these objectives. For example, the awards given to the best public servants were not selected through the traditional Colombian scheme, but selected by their own peers. For example, we had a program called Anonymous Heroes that allowed peers to identify the public servants that were going way beyond fulfilling their role. So this was not just one fulfilling one's legal responsibilities, but putting an extra percentage on top of what was mandated by law. So they had already chosen one of our ten people who we really did see as heroes. 

	For example, a hospital worker in an area of Bogotá called [Sumapaz] where there's a guerilla presence. He was a hospital worker who put his life at risk, in the middle of a battle between the guerilla and the police, in order to pick someone up who had had a heart attack. This is being a hero. But there are also other things. For example, the woman who was a janitor at a hospital, and every time she was paid would buy a special meat which is used in Colombia to make a certain type of soup, which is a special type of soup here that is given to mothers who have just had a baby, so that they can nurse better and recover their strength. 

	So what's important here is that the peers chose the winners because they saw them as good examples, and beyond implying recognition, they would show their other peers that just fulfilling their responsibilities was not enough. Other examples, simple ones: if we needed the citizens to get to know a program, we would do, for example, a contest in which an award might just be an airfare to any city in the country, and the people had to explain that they'd explained to the citizens a specific project.  So this way we didn't just have help in spreading information about certain programs, but additionally, we got them to understand the importance of the program. 

	We used a figure of putting someone else's shoes on so that the public servants would understand, because they are also citizens, what citizens may feel when they're on the other side of the desk. This was, I think, something that was very important in order to implement all of the programs, because normally what happens in the administration is that the first levels are involved. The people who are in the administrative career, or the ones who remain, don't understand why the changes are being made, and they don't feel ownership of the changes. 

	I started telling you this because this was an important aspect of coordination. Perhaps, something that really helped with these changes was including the public servants. Something that is really important here is that all of our work was always around our commitment to the citizens. This is what Antanas called a Copernican revolution, which is not having the citizens go around the state asking for a favor, asking for their rights, but the administration going around the citizen that should be at the center.

	That's where we begin, besides all the other programs that were a part of this Admirable Public Administration program, a great strategy that we called Service to the Citizen. This program is based on two elements besides the one I've already mentioned. One, which is getting the public servants to understand that the 1991 constitution had changed the role from functionaries-that was used before, which are people who perform a certain function-to that of public servants. The other fundamental element,was for them to understand that the public administration does not attend to clients, or users, but citizens with capital and investment. To get the public servant to understand that the citizens are their bosses, that their salary is being paid with their taxes, was a great change. 

	We did simple things, such as, to get public servants to understand how much they were being paid in one day, so that at the end of the day, they could reflect on the idea: have I really merited getting this amount of money? 

	So this program of Service to the Citizen started for various reasons. First, because we detected rapidly that the citizens equate bad service to the lack of transparency. I'm sure it's happened to all of us, but if we go to a public office, if the process is made difficult for us, if we're asked for more paperwork, we assume that the public servant is asking for some type of bribe. In this way, the managers of the entities learned that if we didn't develop a general strategy of services, the image of transparency would go down. 

	That's why we started by doing this first: to identify over 5,000 public servants who had direct contact with the citizens. From the security guard at an entity, the secretary where citizens primarily call, the person who works at a window, the fireman, the policemen, etc. There are many ways to relate to the citizens on behalf of the administration. The strangest or furthest way one is the one of managers and the mayor. It is rare for a citizen to speak with a manager or the mayor. 

	So once we identified these people, we did, in a very simple way, an analysis of whether they were the right people to attend to the public, what needs they have. And we started to build the first transversal team, as we called them. This is an experiment that worked very well in this area and was translated to all the other areas. It basically consists of identifying the public servants who have one task in all of the entities. For example, as I was saying, Service to the Citizen, judicial matters, planning, internal control, communications, and it has worked because when one meets an equivalent who speaks the same language and has the same worries, and therefore experiences can be shared, the issues of competence could be shared and best practices could be identified. 

	This also allowed us to identify where capacity building had to be strengthened. Here again there are new ideas that came up. We did not have any resources for capacity building, and due to that reason we identified capacity builders among public servants. We asked people to tell us what they thought they could work with in terms of capacity building. And we were able to find where the capacity builders we had and the needs met. Once again, there, we have the recognition and the visibility of the best ones. 

	A beautiful example is in the office of the mayor. There's a public servant who is like the waiter who's in charge of the protocol in terms of food and attention to the mayor and his guests. He offered to offer capacity building in terms of cooking and protocol. The high public servants in the Mayor's office took courses with him of food and protocol, and it was wonderful.

	So to continue, the issue of public service. We identified the people, we got them to commit. Every semester we have an event in which we award those that are best qualified. The award consistently given them: a silver carrot. The carrot is a symbol for us. It symbolizes honesty-I'm not sure what else, transparency-due to a Colombian way of speaking. People who are zanahorias-carrots, that's what they are. 

	The beautiful thing about these types of events is that we invite the public servants who could be a security guard or someone who works at a window, with his manager, with whom he probably had never had the opportunity to talk. This is in terms of public servants. This was a big commitment, and that worked well, because once a citizen is well attended to, this begins to-he begins to reflect this into his notion of the entities and into the way that he thinks and respects and his attitude toward the institution. 

	Then we began to analyze the issue of service as such and discovered that 60% of the people of Bogotá belong to the lowest social class, and as a consequence, do not have easy access to the Internet nor have credit cards, much less messengers, and therefore have to go to the administration, to the municipal government in order to pay their taxes, pay their pubic services, etc. 

	So the first thing we did was to perfect what we called the presence system, the System of Presence. In Bogotá, there were eighteen CADES (Centros de Antencion Disrital Especializados), which stands for Central Systems of Specialized Attention. We started by analyzing them, looking at what point were the lines longest, looking at how the service was being offered, doing polls, surveys. But in a very elementary, very intuitive way. 

	The most important thing that's occurred in these changes is the desire to do it right. So we started by improving these CADES. We began to use the same concept that supermarkets use. If, as a client, you need to make a big shopping trip for the semester, buy everything from television to milk, sometimes all you have to do is buy one bag of milk because you don't have it. And sometimes you just want to do your usual shopping trip. For this reason, on top of the CADES, which we called the normal supermarkets, we created something called the Rapid CADES, the fast CADES, which are just for payment of services. We were able to accomplish that the payment of services would go from an hour and a half of waiting in line to five minutes from when the citizen would go into the door. This is something that we accomplished because in these Rapid CADES, there were employees who were able to count the money really fast, who were specialized in this, and to attend to the citizens' needs. 

	Once again here, we start to see how important teamwork is in sharing the responsibility among different entities. We do not have funds, I insist, because in the development plan we hadn't looked at this as a big program. So the first Rapid Cade was put together by one of the public service companies. That company put up the territory and the building, and the other public service entities would put up their personnel and their computers. This way they were being reproduced, because the first one was owned by the electricity company, the next one by the telephone company, the next one by a private bank. So what we did was to multiply the places of service at a minimum cost for all of them. 

	Then the most marvelous thing was what we called the Super CADES. Super CADES, as I was explaining to you, are like the macro-markets. They're marvelous. Why? Because all the services that Bogotá offers can be found there. But, additionally, many of the most important services of the national administration as well. The citizen does not understand if their judicial certificates are in the competence of the national, or the government, or the mayor. So there, once again, we see teamwork between the national sector and the district sector. 

	Additionally, we unified the image. The Super CADES were built in big warehouses in a very simple way: built with an absolute guarantee of respect for the citizen, good treatment, dignified treatment, and friendly processes. This is something that we were able to accomplish by having facilitators, when you would enter the Cade, that would tell the citizen how this could be done, where it would be done, or whether he could do it by Internet. I would like for you to see them, because they are something marvelous. It is really respect. 

	Additionally, the Super CADES are installed in the big Transmilenio stations, allowing the citizen to get off from the bus, do the process, and then get right back on the bus. 

	In addition to this, which is what we have called System of Presence, we also worked on the technological presence: processes through the Internet, etc., but keeping in mind that most citizens will not use these. An important one was creating the telephone, one specific phone line for services, which is just three numbers, which allows citizens, just by calling this one line, to get all the information they need. 

	There is a beautiful anecdote here, which I like to tell, because now I can tell it as a result, but of course the construction was difficult. We didn't have the resources, I insist. To get a phone line of three numbers was complicated, so I had to find out what lines were available in the administration. They found one that was supposed to be to avoid suicides. So I called it and the person answered. I said, "Where are you answering?" They asked me, "Who do you need?" I said, "All I want to know is where you are. Where are you answering?" And I was asked, "What do you want?" I tried this couple of times. I took the recording to one of the government councils where I was able to demonstrate that if I was about to commit suicide, and that's how I was attended to, I would commit suicide even faster. So I was able to get this line, this phone line. I had to commit to also attending very well to the potential people who may commit suicide. That's how I got that phone line. And today it is a total success.

	Then we started measuring, improving, and all of this has led to Colombia receiving more than four awards, national and international, on the issue of service. The many governments of other countries and the national government itself have wanted to learn from this experience. That's in terms of service to the citizens, which is the one who puts the theory to work, the theory that the citizen should be at the center of the administration. 

	But quickly I'd like to you about what we called the pillars of Admirable Public Administration. In the first place, it has to do with a key concept, which is that public resources are sacred resources. This implies not only that public servants cannot steal, but they have to be conscious of the responsibility that they have to administer public resources.

	So in the Cabinet, for example, we managed the concept of how much it costs for one child to go to one public school. That was the measure that we would have in order to make decisions. So when one of the members of the Cabinet wanted to get certain funds for projects that perhaps were not as important, the question was always, "Would that justify not educating five, ten, fifteen children?" And automatically, they would realize their responsibilities. That's just one example of how we were able to create an understanding of how public resources are sacred resources. 

	Another very important pillar is the one of continuity, which we have described as constructing on top of what is already constructed. That is one of the successes of Bogotá. The most recent mayors have picked up and improved what their ancestors had done. Since the usual administrations in Colombia, a new manager comes in, he does not conclude what the last one did, and here we did the opposite. 

	Another pillar is the one of shared work, coordination and teamwork, which I explained with a few examples.
	
	Another one is more and better channels of interaction with the citizen which will be reflected in the program of service to the citizen. 

	Another one is that of external validation, which is very important. We used all the possible mechanisms so that from the outside what we were doing would be validated, so that it would be evaluated, and so that they could tell us how we could improve. For example, if we had a credit with the IADB (Inter-American Development Bank) and all the recommendations and evaluations that we got from them, we would analyze them and take them in, consider them. All the intervention by the control organs [Contraloría (entity of financial oversight), Personería (ombudsman), Procuradoría (attorney general's office)] was seen as an opportunity for improvement. 
 
	Another pillar is one that every action can be a lesson learned. We evaluated everything. We looked at everything. We got lessons from everything. The good and bad results were used either to improve or conserve.

	Another one was respect for the separation of powers. A lot of respect for the work of the district council, but at the same time, this has led to the change of political customs. We never gave a contract, a public contract, to a councilman. No one can say that we were pressured or that we allowed ourselves to be pressured in any way. This was hard. For example, in my case, I had to push forward an administrative reform. I had to present it eleven times to the council. It was not improved without technical fundamentals. They would simply dissolve the courtroom. They would change the terms because they did not have technical arguments. They basically kept on taking me to the council so that they could pressure me. So the consistency and the reality between the speech and what you actually do allowed the council to know that they could pressure us all they wanted to, but that we were not going to change in our concept of separation of powers. 

	The other issue here has to do with co-responsibility and auto-regulation, self-regulation. This has to do with citizens that are conscious about their rights, fulfilling their obligations, and on the other side, an administration that facilitates the fulfillment of obligations and rights. This is a summary of a lot of things that I could tell you, but I think this picks up on the basic principles.

DEVLIN: 	There is certainly a lot there. Very fascinating. I was wondering if you didn't mind, maybe we could go into the details of just a few of those. 

CABALLERO:	Great.

DEVLIN: 	Maybe working backwards, this system of presence, was it the CADES. It seems they existed before the second Mockus administration. 

CABALLERO:	Yes, but this was developed in the second administration.

DEVLIN: 	So, you mentioned during the second administration, the lines were long and they weren't functioning the way they should. Why weren't they working well?

CABALLERO:	In the first administration, Antanas worked a lot on civic culture, and he has accepted that you could not work on civic culture without also working on public administration. Perhaps that has to do with my profile, and with my obsession of efficiency in the public administration, and because I was able to create teams that were very committed. I don't know if Antanas told you about this. We worked 24 hours a day with the [attitude] of a manager who pulls up his sleeves and works with the people, and we were able to accomplish this.

DEVLIN: 	With the CADES, you mentioned the lines were long for some services; some things weren't working well. Were there any that were working particularly poorly?

CABALLERO:	Yes. As I said at first, this wasn't even measured. They wouldn't look at the time; [translated from Spanish: this took a citizen]. The worst thing was that the people who attended these services were people of the lowest economic class. In order to do the process they have to not go to work for a day. They have to move to a place far away, or they can't have lunch because this has to be done during the lunch hour. So, due to that reason too, the CADES in these service places were  done specifically in [peripheral] areas. Because what we wanted to do was to put ourselves in the citizens' shoes. We began to amplify the times in which they were open to work on Saturdays, because the hours of service could not be at the same times as the hours of work.

DEVLIN: 	So you didn't just change the model towards the supermarket model? You also changed the location [of the CADES].

CABALLERO:	Everything. That's why I said first it was an integral change program, because you would have very modern, beautiful buildings, but if your public servants are not committed, you are not going to achieve it. This had to be integral. 

	As I told you, we had to be very creative on our projects and the way that we were working with the citizens, reaching the citizens. Always keep seeking that the norm be applied. In Colombia, beyond the constitutional norms, there are many laws and decrees that demand that there be good service, that the processes take less time, that they be efficient, that things be measured, but norms are not enough. 

	As an example, a few years ago it was ordered by law that every public entity have an office of complaints, complaints and claims. What did we do for this to work? First of all, our office, we're not called claims and complaints, but complaints and solutions. We began to use information of the complaints. To analyze it, we would carefully [look at what entities] were the ones that received the most complaints. Why were people complaining? And we always solved the complaint. We facilitated the process for the citizen to be able to complain about us. So today, the citizen can complain by Internet, phone, postal mail, or in his own presence. He is assigned a number of which he can do follow-up in any way. He doesn't have to do the follow-up in the same way that he complained. And we were obsessed with the idea of solving, solving, solving.

DEVLIN: 	At these CADES where people were going for services, which services were they going for?

CABALLERO:	At the minimum, payment of public services, payment of taxes, basically the ones that required charging funds. This is another concept. When the public and private sectors compete, it is worried about providing a good service. So when the constitution allowed for private companies to offer public services, the service of public entities improved. For example, in terms of telephone service. But when the administration has a monopoly, it abuses. For example, in tax payment, either you pay at the date that we say or you'll be charged interest, late payments. So that's the difference. Where there's a monopoly, that's where you should offer the best services.

DEVLIN: 	The supermarket model-could we just go over the way that differed from the pre-existing model?

CABALLERO:	Well, today, all the places of service have the same quality. The big ones have the advantage that there you will find every type of service of Bogotá and of the national government. The others are for less services, because as I told you there are three; Rapid CADES are the fast ones, normal CADES, and then Super CADES.

DEVLIN: 	So you did keep the normal CADES model.

CABALLERO:	Yes, because the more places you have, the more they offer, the better the service. But the idea is that the ones [that today are] CADES should rapidly become Super CADES. 

DEVLIN: 	The fast CADES, they were just for payment? How did you get it down from an hour-and-a-half to five minutes?

CABALLERO:	Because all you do is pay there. The person does not have to find anything out. The people who work there are specialized in rapidly counting funds. There is a very good online system to verify, and all people do is pay. It's as if when you go to an ATM. All you do is go to take out the money.

DEVLIN: 	So the fast CADES, are they physically distinct from the other ones, [the structures]?

CABALLERO:	Yes, in image they are very similar. We try to tell the citizen rapidly that they find where the service points are. The scheme also allowed to have less congestion, less lines in the CADES and Super CADES.

DEVLIN: 	You mentioned that the first one was put together by the electric company, the public electric company. Does that mean that every Rapid Cade only dealt with payments for the entity that created it?

CABALLERO:	No. One entity would get it to work, but they would offer the services of all the other public services. The first one was placed by one and offers all of them. The next one was placed by a different company, but they offer all of them. It's an excellent business for us, for the administration, because it creates all these places. And for them it's also good business because they have many places, but they are only paying for one.

DEVLIN: 	So, as a citizen, I could make all my payments to the city at one of these locations. 

CABALLERO:	Yes.

DEVLIN: 	And you mentioned that one was set up by a private bank. Why would a private company be involved?

CABALLERO:	Because private banks are also able to get the funds for public services and taxes. Sure, we work a lot on integration of the public and private sectors. 

	I permanently worked with managers who were very recognized in terms of service, because I, on top of being a public servant, again, I have a double role. I'm a mother, I'm a housewife, as well. So I learned some elemental things such as going to [Carulla] supermarkets, for example, where one calls and-for example, one can call and say, "I want these little breads that are ten centimeters. They're a type of bread, I don't remember the brand. I think I remember that the bag is yellow." They will ensure that one gets the bread of the yellow bag even if I don't remember the brand. I think that's where my obsession started to get the administration to work in the same way. When you get the public servant to have that double role, that's how you make change.

DEVLIN: 	In the Super CADES, you said that you brought in national level services. Which ones?

CABALLERO:	The ones that needed the most help in terms of congestion. The one of judicial certificate, the cédula, - national ID card, the health processes such as pensions, health ID cards. I don't remember them, but there were seven. The most important ones. Passports.  National taxes. The most important ones.

DEVLIN: 	How many of these Super CADES were set up, and were they also in the peripheral areas?

CABALLERO:	Yes. The first one is a beautiful story-works on something called the [Centro Administrativo Distrital], the District Administrative Center. That was the hardest, but they took it on as a challenge, because that place was known by the citizens as a place where you go to be embarrassed or-.

DEVLIN: 	A place of humiliation.

CABALLERO:	The place of humiliation, yes. It was a challenge because the building was already there. Because the changes in terms of cables of institutions were complicated. But if you don't attack the sickness where it is the greatest, you're not going to achieve it. 

	The next ones were simpler because we created new ones. It was easier to assign the cubicles, the cables, the lights, etc.

DEVLIN: 	How did you get around this challenge that the first one had this really bad reputation?

CABALLERO:	It was the first one that we inaugurated, and due to the concept of continuity in Bogotá, I left the next ones under contract [and under construction; Lucho Garzon], the next mayor, inaugurated them. In Bogotá, the people recognized the advances so much that even if the mayor would like to change it or to not develop it, he wouldn't be able to do it. Such as Transmilenio, this idea of services, public education.

DEVLIN: 	So you created all these new spaces where both local and national entities could provide their services. That also means you created a whole new set of responsibilities for all these entities. Usually, bureaucracies don't like that. 

CABALLERO:	Shared work is a fascinating experience, because you create common rules. Everyone who wants to be in the Super CADES has to submit to certain quality standards, and there's a manager who's with them who coordinates the entities who offer their services there. So these people have a double [subordination]. They have two bosses: their own entity, and the manager of the CADES or Super CADES.

DEVLIN: 	Why would the entity send its personnel to a Cade in the first place? For example, national level entities; why would they be that committed to improving their services?

CABALLERO:	Like any change, this was a slow one. At first, we wanted the citizen to not necessarily have to know whether the process was related to the presidency or national, because the citizen doesn't understand this. So the citizen goes to get his judicial certificate, and it takes a while. He'll probably think it's the mayor's responsibility. We were very interested in perception, not just to do well in the polls, but also because cultural change cannot be achieved if people do not perceive consistency between speech and action. At first, they didn't want to be involved, but as they discovered the efficiency of the scheme, it was the opposite. We did not have enough space for all the entities that wanted to offer their services.

	Today, the national administration is reproducing the system. At first, I was contracted to work on this. These are formulas. If there's no commitment from above and everyone else, they can't be reproduced. So the process there has been a lot slower.

DEVLIN: 	Another topic you highlighted was the idea of service to the citizen. One thing you said that I thought was very interesting: you wanted public servants to think of the public as citizens and not clients. But there's a whole other tendency in public administrative reform to do just that, to get public service to think of the public like clients. So what was your thinking there?

CABALLERO:	The thing is a client acts as a service, and he probably has a good offer to choose where he will go. The citizen has paid his taxes, and the services are being offered to the boss. The constitution says [in one of its] principles, one of its fundamental principles, that the state has to be at the service of the community, that administration cannot create-cannot treat the citizen like a client that's going to bring returns. That's the difference. The other thing is, that to try to implement, to try to apply private systems into public administration does not always work, because there is something different. The private sector is looking for returns, and the public sector must work, must serve.

DEVLIN: 	You said one program you had to cause this change in mentality was to get public servants to understand how much they're getting paid per day. On a very detailed level, how did you do that?

CABALLERO:	Dividing everyone's salary by 30 days.

DEVLIN: 	You'd send them email or something? 

CABALLERO:	We did it like that once, informing everyone. So when you know that every day you get 10,000 Pesos, 100,000 Pesos, you ask yourself, "Is what I did today, does it correspond to this money?" 

	There are many examples, many things that we did in order to change. There are many I could tell you. Another example: in order to recognize the work of the public servants, we created a fair which we called the Fair of the Admirable in a big public park, [Simon Bolivar] Park.  We asked every entity, as if this were a fair, to show us their more successful projects, and that they do it in a way that any citizen could visit and understand. So every entity chose the best of their work and will show it in a simple way and just love the citizens to see the efforts of the administration going to good services. At the same time, the public servants felt that they were being recognized for their work. 

	Something that is very important is that citizens-even though there were difficulties of corruption that generate an unfavorable perception of public administration-recognize the public servants, and that the citizen also put himself in the shoes of the public servant.

DEVLIN: 	Another program you had mentioned was the transversal team. But at the very start of that, you had said that you conducted an analysis of whether the people who had most contact with the public, whether they were the right people, what needs did they have. What did that analysis look like? What was important about that?

CABALLERO:	In the first place, the directors of the public companies considered that the issue of service had to be done by the people who are the least committed. So to have someone attend to the public was seen as a punishment. Why is it punishment? Because if you're at a normal desk, you can take your time to have some coffee, go to the bathroom, call your children. But if you're working at a window and you pick up a phone, the citizen will feel bothered by this. If you go to the bathroom and you take a long time, the citizen will feel bothered by this. So the first recognition is that the people who serve the public directly have to have specific personality conditions. To attend to the public creates a lot of stress for these reasons. So you need people with a capacity with patience, with a capacity of innovation, and with excellent public relations. 

	The other thing is, we started to identify people who had good will, but did not have the right tools. For example, some would say, "At my window there are less people than at the next window. But I cannot help my peer because I do not understand what it is that he does." Simple as that. So this started to change the perception of people towards these public servants, especially of the managers. In that they feel that they were being considered, so they could share their experiences, that someone was listening to them, that someone was understanding their requirements, and their attitudes started to change.

	Another very successful example was the judicial issues of the administration. I'll try to give you a summary because this is quite a big project, but it is very interesting. With the same strategy of the transversal teams, and perhaps because the secretary general was in charge of all the judicial issues for the whole district, we used the same strategy. We got together the lawyers, we did capacity building, we got them to be committed. We started choosing leaders and we started to discuss the big issues, to standardize the judicial work, and to start to have a man-work focus for the legal work, which included measurements, evaluations, standardization of processes, etc. Today, Bogotá, in terms of measurements, Bogotá wins about 99% of the-[translator asks interviewee to repeat something]-it wins about 90% of the lawsuits that are brought against the city.  

DEVLIN: 	In terms of the transversal teams themselves, who is in the team and where is the team?

CABALLERO:	The team is throughout the entities. We identify the people with similar responsibilities, basically in the areas of support of all these entities: in the legal area, the service area, the planning area, communication area, internal control area, budgets area. The basic areas that all entities share. 

	The magic of this is what I was telling you. In an entity, for example, I am a lawyer. The managers and most of the public servants think that the lawyers' work is something that will get them stuck. They also say, "Ask the lawyer and see if we can." They say this with a bad tongue. When you get together the equals and they talk about these problems, when you begin to identify that in one entity there's a person who solved the problem with an easier way, you begin to permeate to the rest of the team. To easily identify the best practices and to apply them in a transversal way, you create spaces where people can speak the same language. They recognize leaders who can pull the others up, who can do capacity building for the others.

DEVLIN: 	In addition to best practices, you mentioned that this helped you identify where capacity building was possible. How did it do that?

CABALLERO:	In a simple way. For example, in the case of the lawyers, one time a month they will all be invited to a big conference with an expert. The experts were too honored to speak about their issue with 1,000 people; they will do the conference for free. The other scheme that I was telling you about, the expert in contracting who was a public servant, will do workshops and help the formats that will facilitate the process for the others.

DEVLIN: 	I know your time is short and we can't steal much more of it, but it's been fascinating and hopefully we can, maybe, pick it up at another time. Thank you so much.

CABALLERO:	My pleasure.

Innovations for Successful Societies				Series: Governance Traps	
Oral History Program						Interview number: J-28
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Use of this transcript is governed by ISS Terms of Use, available at www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties