Accountability and Performance Update – April 4-10, 2022
IBM
April 11, 2022
Courtesy of the Center for Accountability & Performance, American Society for Public Administration.
Pandemic Waste Is Enough to Make a Person Cry
Federal News Network (Interview with Comptroller General Gene Dodaro)
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Tags: GovTech, COVID19
Accountability and Performance Update – August 2 – 8, 2021
LinkedIn
August 09, 2021
Courtesy of the Center for Accountability & Performance, American Society for Public Administration
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Tags: GovTech
Accountability and Performance Update – July 26 – August 1, 2021
LinkedIn
August 02, 2021
Project Evident's Actionable Evidence Initiative works to improve the outcomes of students who are Black, Latino/a/x, or experiencing poverty by promoting “actionable evidence.”
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Tags: GovTech
Can We Restore Trust in Government – One Customer at a Time?
LinkedIn
June 03, 2021
Public trust in government – especially the federal government – has plummeted in recent years. This has ominous overtones for democracy, which is founded on trust. No wonder a recent survey of business CEOs believe restoring public trust needs to be at the top of the national agenda.
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Tags: Customer Experience, GovTech
Reinventing the Grant System to Be More Outcome-Focused
LinkedIn
April 20, 2021
Is it time to reinvent the roles of the many players in the federal grants management system?
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Tags: GovTech, Management
Lessons Learned from 30 Years of Government Reform Efforts
LinkedIn
March 23, 2021
What should newcomers to government know about what reform efforts happened before they arrived?
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Tags: GovTech, Management
Learning Agendas: An Effort to Answer -- “Does It Work?”
LinkedIn
February 18, 2021
In 2017, Congress gave tax breaks for investors in designated Opportunity Zones around the country. The idea was that this would generate substantial private sector investments in more than 8.700 lower-income census tracts. Did it work as intended? This is one of scores of research questions raised in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) most recent learning agenda.
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Tags: GovTech
Is It Time for “Back to the Future” to Improve Agency Management Practices?
LinkedIn
January 27, 2021
What does "quality management" in government look like? It was a top initiative in the 1980s and 1990s. Does it matter today?
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Tags: GovTech, Management
Looking Beyond the Federal Data Strategy
LinkedIn
December 16, 2020
There were quiet celebrations a year ago as the long-awaited Federal Data Strategy and a 2020 action plan came to fruition. It involved hundreds of dedicated people across the government and the action plan covered 20 specific elements. But the federal data strategy is but a foundation for a potentially broader vision. A new report on the critical need for intergovernmental data sharing by Harvard’s Jane Wiseman says we need to extend it to become a national data strategy that embraces states and local governments as well.
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Tags: GovTech
From “People” Analytics to “Relational” Analytics
linkedin
January 24, 2019
Like most private sector organizations, they focus their analyses on data they have based on individual people, such as the data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, and from the Office of Personnel Management’s FedScope database.
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Tags: Analytics, GovTech
Three-in-One: The New Evidence Act
linkedin
January 15, 2019
In one of its last actions before adjourning last month, the 115th Congress passed the “Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018.” This new law implements about half of the recommendations made by the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking in September 2017. The president signed it into law yesterday. Among other things, the new law requires agencies to designate Evaluation Officers and Chief Data Officers, and publish their data sets in machine-readable form.
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Tags: GovTech, Management
The 5 Paradoxes of an Innovation Culture
linkedin
January 07, 2019
Creating a culture of innovation in your agency can be a tricky thing.
A recent trend has been to set up an innovation office to be the catalyst for new ideas. These offices can be helpful starting points and an inspiration to employees across an organization. However, most leaders want to create a culture of innovation across their entire workforce, not just in an elite subset of employees.
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Tags: Innovation, GovTech, Culture
Let’s Get Organized! Implementing a New Program Management Law
linkedin
December 19, 2018
The many headlines and Government Accountability Office reports about challenges in implementing Federal programs are constant reminders of the criticality of having seasoned program managers in place.
Congress recognized the governmentwide shortage of program management talent and leadership commitment in 2016 when it passed the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act (PMIAA). Two years after its passage, slow but steady progress is being made to implement not only the law’s requirements but also its underlying intent – to improve the government’s ability to manage large and complex programs.
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Tags: Management
A Tale of Two Cities: How Different Performance Management Systems Use Citizen Feedback (Part 2)
linkedin
November 07, 2018
Performance management is a global trend, as well as the inclusion of citizen feedback as a component of these systems. What are the commonalities and contrasts in two cities of the same size but with very different forms of government? The post is broken into two parts – this one is the second, and focuses on the approach taken in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. The first part focuses on New York City’s approach.
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Tags: Management
A Tale of Two Cities: How Different Performance Management Systems Use Citizen Feedback (Part 1)
LinkedIn
November 05, 2018
Performance management is a global trend, as well as the inclusion of citizen feedback as a component of these systems. What are the commonalities and contrasts in two cities of the same size but with very different forms of government? The post is broken into two parts – this one focuses on New York City’s approach. The second will focus on the Chinese city of Hangzhou.
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Tags: Customer Experience, GovTech, Culture
What's the Role of Curiosity in Innovation?
LinkedIn
October 03, 2018
Agency leaders often promote the importance of innovation.
But where does innovation come from?
We are told that innovation is the process of improving or adapting a service, product, or system in order to deliver better results and create value. It turns out that most innovations are the result of the curiosity of employees, not the creation of an innovation office staffed by specialized “innovators.”
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Tags: Innovation, GovTech
What's the Role of Curiosity in Innovation?
linkedin
October 03, 2018
Agency leaders often promote the importance of innovation.
But where does innovation come from?
We are told that innovation is the process of improving or adapting a service, product, or system in order to deliver better results and create value. It turns out that most innovations are the result of the curiosity of employees, not the creation of an innovation office staffed by specialized “innovators.”
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Tags: Open Innovation, Management
Do Data-Driven Meetings Work?
LinkedIn
September 05, 2018
The use of data-driven meetings made a big splash in the federal government nearly a decade ago. But do they really make a difference in making things happen?
Background. The use of data-driven meetings was popularized in the mid-1990s by the New York City police department, which dubbed them “CompStat” meetings. These meetings were seen to contribute to a significant drop in crime and was eagerly replicated by other cities (Citi-Stat) and a number of states (State-Stat). Harvard professor Bob Behn studied this phenomenon and wrote a book about “Performance-Stat” as a leadership style and way of thinking and behaving, not just an administrative process innovation.
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Tags: GovTech, Management, Future of Work
Does Interagency Conflict Have Its Virtues?
LinkedIn
August 14, 2018
One of the rationales for reorganizing government agencies and programs is to reduce conflict and increase coordination between agencies.
The steady trend towards the increased use of cooperation and collaboration is happening against a backdrop of historically stove-piped programs and built-in institutional conflict, between and within agencies. Coordination is seen as good and conflict as bad. But can interagency conflict be good?
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Tags: GovTech, Culture, Future of Work
Managing Programs: More Complex Than It Seems
LinkedIn
August 07, 2018
The Government Accountability Office has long bemoaned the dearth of effective program management across the government. Its current list of high-risk programs ranges from the flood insurance program, to the 2020 Census, to Defense contract management, and to the security clearance process.
A 2015 study by the National Academy of Public Administration reinforces GAO’s concerns, concluding that “institutionalizing the discipline of program management across the federal government should be a top priority.” This included creating an integrated approach to program management, creating a professional community and voice among program managers, and greater clarity in their roles and responsibilities. But what is the best approach for doing this
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Tags: GovTech, Management, Future of Work
Moving Beyond "Boxology"
LinkedIn
July 18, 2018
Headlines have already faded from the recent release of the President’s long-awaited government reform and reorganization plan with its bold proposals to move organizational boxes between federal departments.
Skeptics call the President’s proposals to reorganize “boxology,” since they see them as merely shuffling around organizational boxes without anything actually being fixed. Even a respected public management observer such as Donald Moynihan questions the Administration’s commitment: “Is it the nice, sensible documents that OMB puts out, or their actual management practice?”
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Tags: GovTech
Civic Engagement in the Future
LinkedIn
May 22, 2018
The precipitous drop in public trust in government over the past decade has been unsettling to many government officials – but engaging citizens directly may help reverse this trend.
From its earliest days, American democracy has been rooted in vigorous civic engagement. More recently, there have been fears that increasing distrust in institutions – including government -- will lead to large scale disengagement in civic life. However, some optimistic observers are hopeful that the Millennial Generation will create a new momentum for civic involvement. But what will that involvement look like in the coming generation – both inside and outside governmental institutions? And importantly, what are the implications for the perceived legitimacy of government action in the society?
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Tags: GovTech
Role of Artificial Intelligence in the Future of Government
LinkedIn
May 03, 2018
The value of introducing artificial intelligence in government is to improve performance and consistency in services to the public.
This parallels the goal of many public administrators -- to create reliable, repeatable administrative processes. This could be done via the emerging technologies associated with artificial intelligence, but Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby write in a recent book about AI that: “The moment a realm of intellectual activity is codifiable, it ceases to be uniquely human.”
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Tags: GovTech
Agencies Reveal New Priority Goals
LinkedIn
February 23, 2018
The President’s FY 2019 budget released in mid-February was accompanied by a set of statutorily-required “Agency Priority Goals” and four-year strategic plans.
The GPRA Modernization Act requires agencies to develop a set of 3-5 two-year priority goals and the Trump Administration posted its first set of goals for major agencies on an updated performance.gov website at the same time the FY 2019 budget was released. But the goals didn’t get the same billing as the budget
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Tags: GovTech
Next Steps in Improving Government
LinkedIn
January 30, 2018
Have government reformers put the chicken before the egg? For years, their attention has been on improving performance by focusing on program results.
A new study by the National Academy of Public Administration says there has been a missing step.
The Academy’s study questions the progress of performance improvement efforts over the past two decades, asking: “To what extent has the government’s capacity improved as a result of these management initiatives?” After reviewing Government Accountability Office reports and other studies, it concludes: “Based on limited evidence, the record is mixed.”
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Tags: GovTech
Engaged Employees Require Engaged Leaders
LinkedIn
January 03, 2018
Why is increasing employee engagement at work seen as such a big deal?
In a 2016 review of more than 82,000 work units across 230 organizations covering nearly 2 million employees, the Gallup Organization found: “The relationship between engagement and performance at the business/work unit level is substantial and highly generalizable across organizations.” So, it is no wonder that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in its annual survey of federal government employees, assesses the extent of employee engagement, as well. In its 2017 survey, OPM reports that government-wide, 67 percent of employees responded that they were engaged at work – as measured by factors such as whether their leaders provide leadership and that they are having a good work experience (the highest since 2011).
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Tags: GovTech
Using Data: From Hammer to Flashlight
LinkedIn
October 31, 2017
The recommendations by the recent Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission are a significant step towards creating a better supply of data for researchers and policymakers. But the next step is huge – getting the resulting data used.
The “use of data” step is complicated by two elements: Who would use it?, and For what purpose?
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Tags: GovTech
A Ray of Hope for Federal Performance
LinkedIn
October 06, 2017
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released its latest assessment of agencies’ progress in becoming more performance and results oriented in their work. The assessment was less-than-stellar, with the understated title noting: “additional actions needed to address pressing governance challenges.
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Does Competent Management Matter?
LinkedIn
September 13, 2017
Federal agencies are currently in the midst of developing grand reform plans and four-year strategic plans to submit to OMB this week. But sometimes it is worthwhile to stand back and look at whether you’re doing the basics right.
A new article in the Harvard Business Review by a team of researchers led by Raffaella Sadun, Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen, have done just this, for private sector companies. But their lessons apply in government as well, observing: “Core management practices can’t be taken for granted."
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Tags: GovTech
When Are Managers Willing to Take Risks?
LinkedIn
September 06, 2017
Do federal managers systematically avoid taking risks, or do they regularly try new things, undertake organizational changes, and innovate?
The common perception is that, as a group, federal managers tend to be risk adverse. However, new research based on data from the annual federal employee viewpoint survey concludes that the answer is: it depends. Managers in both high-performing and low-performing organizations tend to be risk takers. They probably feel they have little to lose by trying something new. In contrast, managers in stable, middle-of-the-road organizations tend to be risk adverse and do not want to rock the boat by taking risks.
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Tags: GovTech
