The World Bank held a series of seminars this past Spring on the state of the international public sector performance and results movement over the past two decades. I came away more encouraged than I had expected regarding advances in several developing nations – with implications for the more developed countries. The World Bank heldRead… Read more »
Congress is considering expanding the transparency provisions first developed for the Recovery Act to all federal spending. A new report looks back at states’ experiences in implementing the federal reporting requirements and offers insights for the potential of extending such requirements. Since 2009, the public has been able to track the outlay of more thanRead… Read more »
How does a leader change the culture of an organization that is resistant to change? Start by working with the existing culture, says business writers in a recent Harvard Business Review article. In this way, the culture can be an accelerator of change, not an impediment. Business writers Jon Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline KronleyRead… Read more »
A perennial lament by advocates of the use of performance measures is that Congress seems to rarely use them in making decisions. Here’s a guide prepared by GAO, along with three examples of how congressional committees have used performance information to make decisions. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) works for Congress and is a bigRead… Read more »
Jonathan Breul retires today from his role as executive director of the IBM Center. He has had a long and storied career in public service over the past four decades, where he has left a lasting mark. I’ve worked with Jonathan directly or indirectly over the past 30 years. His retirement is a good inflectionRead… Read more »
How do you tackle a large-scale, complex challenge that evolves over time, involves thousands of stakeholders, and where there is no clear solution? For example, is there a road map for how the Internet evolved? Could we do it again? IBM Center author David Witzel examines the evolution of the Internet over the past fourRead… Read more »
What works when developing a cross-agency collaborative network? A six-year long study of 266 existing collaborative networks of public safety organizations distills valuable lessons for how to design and sustain similar networks in other policy arenas. Professors Jane Fedorowicz and Steve Sawyer have authored a new report, “Designing Collaborative Networks: Lessons Learned from Public Safety,”Read… Read more »
Which risks can be managed using a compliance model vs. which risks need other approaches? Robert Kaplan and Anette Mikes provide a framework in a great Harvard Business Review article. In their HBR article, “Managing Risks: A New Framework,” Kaplan and Mikes say: “risk management is too often treated as a compliance issue that canRead… Read more »
While “austerity” is the buzz word in the federal government today, just three years ago the government had launched a massive recovery operation to stem the tide of what looked like a bottomless recession by spending $787 billion as fast as possible. How did career feds make it happen right? While there are debates asRead… Read more »
Here’s a terrific checklist of questions managers should be able to answer as they undertake a consolidation of infrastructure or management functions. It is buried in a new report by the Government Accountability Office. Sometimes GAO does terrific work but couches it in ways that its value may not be immediately obvious to busy readers.Read… Read more »