Government Executive - Authors - Dan Chenok

Lessons From 30 Years of Government Reform Efforts

John Kamensky and Dan Chenok — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 14:14:52 -0400

One of the most striking things new White House staffers encounter when they first walk into their offices in the White House or the large, gray Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door is the emptiness. The previous occupants leave no files or other records beyond those retained by career staff in the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies. All policy documents are sent to the National Archives, and the General Services Administration will have cleaned everything else away before the new staffers arrive.

This can reinforce a natural assumption that new leaders start with a clean slate to reform government policies and programs. But context and perspective on what came before has great value: What worked? What didn’t?

A new report that we co-authored, along with a set of distinguished contributors, shares insights, lessons and stories about our experiences in developing and implementing different kinds of government reforms over the years.

Every President Wants ‘Reform’

Each presidential administration over the past 30 years has promoted some form of government reform. Some were broad, such as the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s and the more recent Trump administration effort to reorganize the federal government. Others were more targeted, such as George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda and the Obama administration’s Campaign to Cut Waste. Some led to more tangible outcomes than others.

Reforms come in three sizes:

Governmentwide, such as the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government effort;
Those focused on mission support functions (e.g., personnel, finance, IT), such as the Bush reform efforts; and
Initiatives specific to improving mission delivery, such as improving customer service, cross-agency collaboration in delivering related services to common customers, and increasing the use of data-driven decision making on the front line.

Regardless of the size of reform, three phases with common success factors have emerged for every reform effort: 1) developing the reform initiative, 2) implementing the initiative, and 3) sustaining the initiative.

Developing a Reform Initiative

Typically, the development of a reform initiative is time-bound, often the work of a temporary task force to staff the initiative.

Make a compelling case for change. According to public management scholar Don Kettl, developing a management reform initiative starts with the political and administrative context facing government leaders in the White House, Congress, and agencies. They have to articulate why they want to pursue reforms, what proposed actions are needed, and who needs to be motivated to act.

Engage top leaders as champions. The most successful efforts had top level support, sustained for the duration of the initiative. For example, the Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s was supported by Vice President Al Gore for the full eight years of the Clinton administration. In the Obama administration, then-Vice President Biden was effective in successfully implementing the Recovery Act, in part due to his personal involvement in calls and meetings with agency heads, governors, and mayors. Staff at all levels saw this and knew that implementation was a top priority for the administration.

Prioritize among competing opportunities. The George W. Bush administration was very disciplined in its reform initiatives. For example, it inherited more than 1,000 ongoing e-government projects from the Clinton administration. Then-chief information officer Mark Forman created the “Quicksilver” taskforce to prioritize those projects with the greatest potential impact. They ultimately selected 25 to invest in and scale. Similarly, Peter Levine, who was the Pentagon’s chief management officer in the Obama administration, faced hundreds of demands for projects to streamline Defense management processes and had to prioritize among them to ensure focus and attention.

Implementing the Reform Initiative

Historically, many reform efforts stumbled after their initiative plans were developed. Several critical success factors have emerged as keys to successful implementation:

Create a governance structure. The task force that develops a reform initiative typically is transitory in nature, and often dissolves after making recommendations. The resulting initiative needs both a champion and a governance structure to implement the initiative. In the Bush administration, the Quicksilver initiatives led by Mark Forman established a set of co-owners for each of the 25 projects it recommended, along with a “portfolio manager” in OMB to help address roadblocks.

Engage staff at different levels. Over the past two decades, reform initiatives have been largely top-down. In contrast, engaging a range of staff at different levels in an agency increases the chance of successful implementation. For example, Defense career executive Bob Stone, who helped lead the Reinventing Government initiative, made a concerted effort to engage frontline staff via the creation of “reinvention labs” and the use of “Hammer Awards” to recognize teams of federal employees who improved services to citizens or significantly improved administrative functions. This led to a greater level of commitment by field and other frontline staff, with about 100,000 people recognized over the course of the Clinton administration.

Create a community. As one element of an engagement strategy, creating communities of employees motivated to pursue a particular initiative can provide an effective implementation strategy. Numerous efforts to create communities of practice and centers of excellence have been institutionalized and made potentially more sustainable over time. GSA, for example, hosts several centers of excellence, such as the Center for Artificial Intelligence and the Center for Customer Experience.

Sustaining the Initiative

The large scale, highly visible overarching reform efforts such as Reinventing Government, specific initiatives under presidents’ management agendas, and various reorganization initiatives can evaporate at the end of an administration when their political champions disappear. However, initiatives with a statutory basis tend to have greater continuity. The following success factors have shown to improve sustainability of such initiatives over time:

Create on-going institutional structures and new routines. For example, the chief financial officers’ community worked together to ensure the long-term viability of the role of CFOs by building a strong network, staff capabilities, and a long-term plan of action for the CFO community, strengthening implementation of the CFO Act .

Use a dual-track approach. Effective management reform requires top-down vision, support, and policy framing along with bottom-up engagement by frontline employees involved in implementing the initiative. The current communities of practice and centers of excellence could enable more systematic bottom-up engagement of frontline staff in future top-down initiatives.

Embed new requirements into pre-existing administrative routines. Agencies have many existing administrative routines and typically resist adding new ones. For example, the budget process represents the most enduring, and most central, administrative routine in most agencies. Based on the experience of the implementation of laws such as the CFO Act and the Government Performance and Results Act, initiatives that align with existing administrative routines and timetables tend to have greater sustainability. For example, both the CFO Act and GPRA reports provide information to Congress at about the same time they receive the president’s budget each February.

Ensure ongoing collaboration with Congress. A crucial success factor is the importance of involving Congress, even without a requirement for legislation to act on the initiatives. The lack of action on the Obama administration’s reorganization of trade agencies and the Trump administration’s proposed merger of elements of the Office of Personnel Management into the General Services Administration suffered in part from this skipped step.

These success factors can serve as useful guideposts for the management team at OMB, the departmental deputy secretaries, leaders on the President’s Management Council and others to collectively build government back better.

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How Government Program Management Took a Cue from The Big Screen

Dan Chenok — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0500

The federal government provides critically needed services across the nation each day, to millions of people. Families receive Social security checks, students receive support to attend college, small businesses receive loans—the list goes on. The very scale of government services means that a problem in program delivery can impact a significant portion of the population. And such problems reverberate as advocacy groups, oversight bodies, and media raise legitimate questions about what went wrong.

Longstanding concerns about program management have been a recurring theme of the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list, and the issue was raised by Don Kettl (then with the University of Maryland, now with the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas) in this IBM Center report. The Office of Management and Budget addressed effective program management in the Capital Programming Guide, which continues to be informed by success on large programs at the Defense Department. For IT projects, there’s Exhibit 300, which initially was an effort to adapt commercial best practice for federal IT management. But despite these and similar efforts, the government has continued to struggle with program management across a range of areas, including the Coast Guard’s Deepwater modernization effort, the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, and modernization efforts at the Internal Revenue Service.

Against this backdrop, a group of current and former government leaders began to meet informally around 2005 at the Council for Excellence in Government (which has since closed) to develop principles and practices for agencies to build skills and capabilities for managing large programs. We talked over breakfast monthly, hence the “The Breakfast Club” moniker. Many contributed to this initiative, led by a core group that included Alan Balutis, Greg Giddens, Stan Soloway, Jim Williams, and myself. The group eventually published a report with key findings and recommendations, summarized in this 2017 article.

The Impact of HealthCare.Gov

As government continued to evolve its capacity to manage programs over time, a turning point in the understanding of the importance of strong program management came with the troubled launch and recovery of the healthcare.gov website in 2013. This event and its aftermath has been well-chronicled. A key failure stemmed from poor program management. Among the after-action reviews was a congressional hearing that included recommendations for improved program management, such as the “7-S for Success” framework from the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (the 7-S framework was originally conceived of by a group of ACT-IAC government and industry leaders over breakfast at a Corner Bakery in downtown Washington). One of the enduring outcomes of the government’s historic effort to repair the website and program directly contributed to the establishment of the U.S. Digital Service to help agencies succeed on large IT projects.

Congress Steps In

These activities raised congressional interest in how best to improve management of government programs, informed by studies from the Project Management Institute and the National Academy of Public Administration. After more hearings and discussion with Congress, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders introduced the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act, signed into law in December 2016. This law enacted many recommendations and lessons learned from efforts like those described above:

Establishment of a Program Management Policy Council;
Standards and policies for agencies consistent with widely accepted standards for program and project management planning and delivery;
Engagement with the private sector to identify best practices in program and project management;
Portfolio reviews to address programs identified as high risk by GAO, including reviews of agency programs at least annually to assess the quality and effectiveness of program management; and
Office of Personnel Management regulations to: 1) identify key skills and competencies needed for an agency program and project manager, 2) establish a new job series or update and improve an existing job series for program and project management within an agency, and 3) establish a new career path for program and project managers.

OMB has since worked with agencies to implement this important statute, continuing to bring best practice to agency program management. More studies contributed to OMB’s understanding of how to frame its guidance on implementing the statute, including a further report from NAPA and an IBM Center report by Janet Weiss with the University of Michigan.

Lessons for Leaders Going Forward

The ACT-IAC report remains a solid a framework of program management lessons learned for agencies, addressing such lessons in its “7-S” approach, which advocates that a successful government program involves:

Stakeholder commitment and collaborative governance
Skilled program manager and team
Systematic program reviews
Shared technology and business architecture
Strategic, modular, and outcomes-focused acquisition strategy
Software development that is agile
Security and performance testing throughout

Lessons learned on a broader scale are laid out in the 2017 article cited above from the Breakfast Club, focusing on the need for leadership support of program managers, clarity of responsibilities and accountability for results, professional development and change management training for emerging PM leaders, and the importance of forums for sharing best practice like that authorized in the PMIAA. Whether through this framework or the many other efforts to help government program management improve, this issue will continue to resonate as a key element of government performance in the near and far future, which may involve more breakfasts to help address issues to come.

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How Agencies Could Incentivize Private Sector Investment in Their Missions

Dan Chenok and John Marshall — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:46:18 -0500

Governments around the world seek ways to serve their constituents and carry out their missions more effectively and efficiently. This becomes increasingly important as technologies and business models evolve, raising expectations from the public and enabling new channels of collaboration between government and industry. But the U.S. government has enormous unfunded needs to modernize administrative processes, workforce skills, and technologies.

These demands continue to grow as public sector resources shrink. This gap could be alleviated though greater leverage of private sector investment, technology, and expertise. But capital markets that enable companies to finance critical needs generally do not address public sector work at the federal level. One set of such markets—state and municipal bond issuances—do not have an analog at the national level. Private investment and public-private partnerships can help to supplement government funding, and can be a source for innovation and expertise.

Addressing these and other modernization challenges requires a long-term vision for increasing investment in public goals, optimizing current budget and procurement processes to deploy greater engagement with the private sector consistent with sound use of public funds, and a strategy to achieve this change over time. As rising deficits and debt continue to constrain public sector funding, agencies can benefit from private sector investment in modernizing operations, and from processes designed to make the most effective use of investment dollars over time.

To address these challenges, the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Shared Services Leadership Coalition (SSLC) have released a new report, Mobilizing Capital Investment to Modernize Government. Three former leaders in government—Ed DeSeve with Brookings Executive Education, Steve Redburn with George Washington University, and Ken Buck with the University of Virginia—identify strategies for federal agencies to incentivize private sector capital investment.

The authors also discuss options and recommendations for revising budget and acquisition processes that have tended to limit systematic engagement with industry around investment, such as with shared services; and to discourage longer-term capital planning by government. At the same time, the report makes clear how such recommendations can be done consistent with important safeguards in appropriations, budget scoring, and procurement processes—safeguards rooted in longstanding law and policy.

This report was informed by the insights at a September 2019 roundtable discussion co-hosted by the IBM Center and SSLC, which addressed how investment, budgeting, and procurement strategies might help government meet its capital challenges. Participants included current and former senior officials from OMB, agencies, Congress, academia, and industry, and their insights pointed out ways to meet these challenges more effectively—exploring options for adopting “outside-in” solutions that draw on private sector resources, expertise, and technology to bolster public spending, as well as how to capitalize on current budget and procurement flexibilities.

The roundtable and research from the authors also reflected on how the federal government has engaged in initiatives to address this imperative over the past several decades. OMB has worked with agencies to develop several shared services initiatives that seek to apply commercial best practices across government; numerous innovations in acquisition have been authorized and implemented; industry has joined in multiple forms of public-private partnerships modeled on similar collaborative efforts in state and local governments. And recent budget innovations have brought flexible investment approaches, such as the Technology Modernization Fund.

The authors drew on this experience to identify several findings regarding current budgetary and procurement practices that affect the ability of the federal government to attract and deploy private capital in support of national policy objectives, including:

Many perceived obstacles to increased use of private capital, technology, and expertise to support federal systems modernization and an array of other public capital needs can be overcome by creative interpretation and application within established rules, in a manner consistent with the intent of those rules.

Ample precedents exist as models for future initiatives to bring private capital to bear for public purposes, and these precedents should be systematically evaluated by the federal government to determine how they can be applied and generalized.

Significant risks for both public and private partners arise from the vagaries of the budget process and the complexities of federal procurement, which can be addressed by developing a body of evaluated experience and using that evidence to establish consistent budget conventions and replicable contract standards.

Near- and longer-term opportunities exist to make the budget and procurement processes friendlier to modernization investments, and to public-private partnerships for an array of public purposes, by reducing uncertainties and risks for both sectors.

The report also outlines a set of actions that could be taken both now and in the future, including ways to incentivize private sector investment and public sector agility as well as reforms in federal budgeting and procurement. These actions take the form of 10 near and long-term recommendations for the Office of Management and Budget, the General Services Administration, Congress, and stakeholders and partners.

We hope this report helps government officials understand how best to engage with private sector partners in achieving agencies modernization goals effectively, efficiently, and with integrity for taxpayers.

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The President’s Management Agenda: A Work in Progress Two Decades On

Dan Chenok — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0500

This week, the release of the Trump administration’s Fiscal Year 2021 Budget Proposal was accompanied by several management chapters tied to the president’s management agenda. The agenda, commonly referred to as the PMA, reflects a set of initiatives and activities intended to improve the effectiveness and efficiency by which agencies serve their constituents and carry out their missions. While much focus is on the content of the current PMA, which will be updated this spring, 2021 will mark the 20th year since an agenda by that name was introduced. This milestone merits a look back at the creation of the PMA and the lessons for subsequent management agendas.

Origins of the PMA

Numerous administrations led management initiatives across agencies prior to 2001. The “Management by Objective” program in the 1970s was aimed at improving efficiency in social programs. A decade later, “Reform 88” was championed by Office of Management and Budget Director Joe Wright to look at financial management and other mission support functions. And as my colleague John Kamensky noted in a previous post, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government served as a management reform beachhead in the 1990s.

When the first administration of a new century arrived in 2001 under President George W. Bush, new OMB Director Mitch Daniels came to Washington from a successful career in industry. His focus from day one was management. Daniels sought advice from OMB career staff, including senior advisor for management Jonathan Breul, who advised reaching out to Comptroller General David Walker at the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) and Senator Fred Thompson, ranking member of the Senate Government Affairs Committee, among others. Those meetings resulted in a long list of potential topics to address in a “management agenda.”

OMB Deputy Director Sean O’Keefe, along with Breul (who was later my predecessor as head of the IBM Center), led a process of winnowing the topics into broad areas that GAO and others had long recognized as risk areas for government. They were soon joined by respected third party executive Robert O’Neill, who came to OMB on a detail from his position as leader of the National Academy of Public Administration. These three leaders, working with agency and OMB officials across different management disciplines, settled on five areas of focus for the new agenda:

Strategic Management of Human Capital
Competitive Sourcing
Improved Financial Performance
Expanded Electronic Government
Budget and Performance Integration

President Bush released these five topics (along with nine other initiatives focused on mission and program operations) in the first PMA in August 2001, as a supplement to the first budget of the new administration. The first president with an MBA prioritized progress on the management agenda in interactions with his cabinet.

The First PMA in Practice

Within each of these five management areas, OMB worked with the President’s Management Council to develop high level goals and performance measures for agencies to follow. Progress on these measures were displayed in a “stoplight” graphic (such as this 2004 version originally posted on Results.Gov) for each agency. Such an easily visualized dashboard came from a suggestion by OMB Controller Mark Everson, who had used similar systems for management reviews as an industry executive prior to his appointment to OMB. To capture the fact that the baseline performance and improvement actions for each agency varied across the five dimensions, one set of scores reflected what the agencies actually achieved, and a second reflected their effort at improvement.

The OMB Resource Management Offices assigned the color scores for each agency and worked with their colleagues in the OMB management offices. For example, the e-government scores input from my staff in the Information Policy and Technology Branch, supported Mark Forman as the new Associate Director for IT and E-Government. Agencies were understandably reluctant to have their scores shown in public, a step actively debated by the PMC. Breul recalls that one deputy secretary was quite adamant that such scores not be made public, but he and his peers were convinced otherwise when OMB Director Daniels agreed to have OMB scores made public as well (and OMB had a lot of red marks in the early days).

Over the next several years, agencies would take action to improve their management performance and thus their scores. This was a result of two main pressure points:

The President would focus time on each agency’s score in cabinet meetings, even going so far as to rearrange the seating to allow “greener” agencies to sit closer to him in the meeting.
After Clay Johnson became OMB Deputy Director for Management in 2003, he significantly raised attention to the PMA in meetings with agency leaders and at each management council session.

The PMA led to numerous other initiatives, including the introduction of the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) as a way to link specific program performance to budget decisionmaking; and the E-Government strategy known as Project Quicksilver that introduced 25 initiatives designed to leverage technology for improved services to citizens, businesses, other levels of government, and federal employees.

Implications for the Future

Every subsequent administration has brought forward a PMA to address issues of importance, and often these issues have built on rather than differed from one presidency to the next (for a look back at this progress from the perspective of four OMB deputy directors for management, see this extensive discussion with Margaret Weichert, Andrew Mayock, Clay Johnson and Sally Katzen at our Center’s 20th anniversary event). For example, E-Government paved a pathway for Open Government, both of which inform the current focus on IT Modernization and the new PMA element of a Data Strategy (it’s worth noting that the E-Government agenda had its origins in the government’s move to the Internet from the 1990s led by the National Performance Review under then Vice President Al Gore). And each of the last two administrations has built a strong program around “cross-agency priority goals” (see history in this Center report by John Kamensky).

The PMA’s origin and history point to a number of key lessons:

The core focus on five areas with a quarterly, publicly-reported “stoplight” metric was both simple to follow and powerful as an accountability signal. Easily understandable and transparent metrics have often brought more change across agencies than complex systems that track too many priorities.

The PMA’s intersection with senior official reviews and the focused attention it received from the highest levels of government, including congressional leaders, cabinet officials and OMB, made these initiatives meaningful for senior program and mission functions. Successful management initiatives have employed similar channels of visibility to connect with agency leaders.

Continuity and bipartisan progress demonstrate a key lesson that started with the first PMA. Setting up an objective process for prioritizing, executing, and measuring progress in how agencies manage their programs and operations helps any administration serve the public more effectively and efficiently. Establishing such a process early can enable progress in multiple mission and mission support areas.

Career and political leaders at OMB have made the PMA, now entering its 20th year, an expected and highly visible activity in any administration, as evidenced by the Trump administration’s focus on the PMA in its 2021 budget request released earlier this week.

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The Individuals Behind Government's Success Stories

John Kamensky and Dan Chenok — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 14:25:49 -0500

The past 30 years have witnessed major change across the management landscape of the federal government. That history provides important lessons both for today’s leaders and for those of future administrations. Yet little has been written about the role leaders and teams have played in the evolution of management reforms—often overcoming high odds to achieve success, sometimes experiencing failure, each time learning and moving forward. And rarely is attention paid to understanding what remains relevant from past experience to inform future strategies.

We intend to address that gap.

With the coming presidential election and the certainty of senior leadership change in agencies, whether from a new administration or new leaders in a second term, we believe that understanding the evolution of government reform can provide an important lens for understanding key choices facing incoming teams. In this spirit, we are starting a series called “Business of Government Stories,” where we will narrate the stories of many of the most influential events that have shaped government over the past generation.

Some of the key events in this history include:

Significant laws that have imposed greater discipline on agency operations and decisionmaking, such as the 1990 Chief Financial Officers’ Act and the 2018 Evidence-Based Policymaking Act;
A number of governmentwide reform initiatives, like the 1993 National Performance Review and several presidents’ management agendas;
Administrative initiatives aimed at improving programs and performance, including Total Quality Management and Agile and Customer Experience;
Significant technology advances that have changed the course of business, from the introduction of email in agencies to artificial intelligence.

Since 1998, the IBM Center for The Business of Government has produced hundreds of reports and interviews that focus on specific challenges and opportunities for government, all available on our website. Our 2018 book Government for the Future reviewed this content and insights from outside experts to assess broad changes over the past two decades and develop forecasts for government two decades hence. Still, missing from this portfolio is a cohesive assessment of the stories behind this progress, and the lessons of those stories for leaders today.

Our series will focus on the people behind this management evolution, and most importantly the lessons learned that can inform choices now and in the future. A podcast will accompany each post, with reflections on the stories behind these stories.

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The series will culminate in a final report that integrates major findings and key recommendations, to serve as a resource for new leaders.

We will focus on events that have been core elements of reform over the past three decades, including:

Major reform initiatives, like the National Partnership for Reinventing Government
Agency reorganization efforts, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security
Performance and program management efforts, such the creation of the Performance Assessment Rating Tool or Cross Agency Priority Goals
Key mission support initiatives that address workforce, finance, acquisition, regulation, shared services, and customer experience.

We are pleased to partner with Government Executive in releasing this series, which will run through 2020. And we are excited that this history and reflection will include the voices of some of the individuals who made change happen. In that spirit, we invite dialogue with others who want to share memories of these and other events to help identify lessons from the past that will inform our future.

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Learning from Government’s Past to Anticipate Its Future

Dan Chenok — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 09:00:00 -0400

At any given moment in time, governments in the United States and around the globe are carrying out key missions in service of their citizens, learning from and engaging with partners in other sectors, and acting as cost-effective stewards of public resources. The countless positive daily actions of government leaders go largely unrecognized amidst the focus on the highly visible challenges and problems faced by the public sector. However, stepping back to view progress over a span of decades reveals evidence of the sum total of this continuous evolution in government management and provides valuable perspective on the future of public service.

It is from this longer-term perspective about the performance and potential for government that the IBM Center for The Business of Government published Government for the Future: Reflection and Vision for Tomorrow’s Leaders. For 20 years since 1998, the center has published research from more than 400 outside contributors—largely from academia, as well as nonprofits and journalists. Collectively, these contributors created a body of knowledge about best practices and lessons learned for government improvement. In addition, the center has developed a record of public sector challenges and opportunities through more than 500 interviews with government leaders on its radio show, the “Business of Government Hour.” In Government for the Future, we draw from this rich repository of content to reflect on major drivers of public sector progress over the past two decades.

More importantly, reflection on this content provides a foundation to paint a vision of what government management may look like two decades hence. The book brings together viewpoints about the public sector in 2040. This vision of tomorrow’s government is framed through essays from experts that lay out a roadmap for how to maximize benefits and minimize risks, with potential innovations ranging from the workplace of the future to the advancement of space exploration.

Government for the Future focuses on six significant and enduring management trends of the past 20 years:

Digital initiatives, including mobile computing and cloud computing
Data initiatives, including big data, analytics, visualization, and dashboards
Performance management initiatives, addressing the evolution of the supply of performance management information, and creating a demand for its use
Social media-related initiatives, following the impact of social media that has been evident at all levels of government and has become a major agency communication tool
Collaboration initiatives, such as public-private partnerships, cross-agency collaboration, and intergovernmental collaboration
Risk management initiatives, including cyber, financial, and environmental risks

What does the implementation of management reform over the past 20 years teach current and future government leaders about how to proceed with management reforms in the future? Several common themes emerge from analysis of past management trends.

Management reform is not for the faint-hearted. It requires major commitment and staying power. In short, it’s not for the timid or those with short time horizons. It takes a well-executed implementation plan and top-level commitment.

Leaders should target key goals. Don’e overload the “system” with too much reform concurrently. Successful change leaders in government are selective about which management initiatives to launch.

Success requires time and effort, and a focus on implementation. While less successful initiatives launched over the last 20 years may have been sound conceptually, many suffered from poor execution.

Effective leadership is critical. While it has become a cliché, leadership from the top drives success in launching a management initiative.

Based on lessons learned from the past and research, the outline for a vision of what government might look like in 2040 comes into focus. We see two sets of developments evolving. First, technology will drive the redeployment of resources—people, dollars, and organizational structures. Second, as a consequence of these technology changes, the way people work and interact will change, and this will reframe how government works, including service delivery, citizen involvement, and different business models.

Government for the Future envisions three technology-based drivers of change for government in coming years:

Artificial and augmented intelligence will change the game. Advances in the use of AI will change roles, both within government and between government and citizens.

Data will drive progress. The increased availability and use of data will reframe how government managers use knowledge and insight to analyze performance, make decisions, and deliver services.

Government services will become platform-based. In this scenario, government will create the conditions for platforms that could be built in the private and nonprofit sectors collaborating with the public sector.

Moreover, the authors suggest that these technology drivers will have three broader impacts on the government of the future:

Government will be more citizen-driven. Government in 2040 will be more citizen focused, with people leveraging technology and data to interact with their government.

Government will become more network-based. The role of government workers evolving within a network-based environment as a result of technology will change, becoming flatter, more open, and more collaborative.

Volunteer participation with government will increase. Citizens will have more time to spend on volunteer activities in 2040—either as retirees or members of a 2040 workforce that benefits from technology.

For 20 years, the IBM Center has been privileged to contribute cutting-edge research that led to practical, actionable recommendations for government executives, and to have collaborated with like-minded organizations to improve government performance. With Government for the Future, we continue this collaboration among government, academia, nonprofits, and industry through the next 20 years. We hope that the perspectives provided throughout this book help leaders make this positive vision for government into tomorrow’s reality.

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Understanding Blockchain’s Promise for Government

Dan Chenok — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 16:30:21 -0400

Last week, Congress took a significant step forward in the technology space in the form of a resolution about the promise of blockchain. The resolution, authored by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., on behalf of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus, noted that “blockchain has incredible potential that must be nurtured through support for research and development and a thoughtful and innovation-friendly regulatory approach.”

Last week also marked the launch of a new report about blockchain released in consultation with the Blockchain Caucus and MIT Connection Science through the IBM Center for The Business of Government: The Impact of Blockchain for Government: Insights on Identity, Payments, and Supply Chain, by Thomas Hardjono, who leads the MIT Trust: Data Consortium within MIT Connection Science.

Understanding blockchain’s potential relies on recognition that business transactions such as orders, payments and account tracking take place every second. Often, participants to a transaction have their own ledgers—and, thus, their own individual versions of the facts. Having multiple ledgers can lead to error, fraud and inefficiencies—vulnerabilities that can be reduced by having a common view of a transaction end-to-end.

Blockchain technology enables a shared ledger to record the history of transactions with consistency and certainty. In a blockchain network, all parties to a transaction must give consensus before a new transaction is added—and once recorded in the blockchain network, a transaction cannot be altered. Blockchain eliminates or reduces paper processes—speeding up transaction times, increasing efficiencies, and building trust among participants to a transaction.

As Hardjono writes:

“Strong industry consensus exists around the belief that blockchain technology will be the leading edge of “next Internet” economy. It is imperative that government and industry work together to continue and strengthen technological and market leadership in this new area, and to address potential policy and regulatory incompatibility that may constrain growth of the emerging digital-blockchain economy.”

The report is intended to help government achieve goals set out in the congressional resolution, focusing on ways that blockchain can benefit agencies and drive economic vitality. The author addresses these and related challenges by drawing insight from three roundtable discussions in 2017-2018 among key leaders and stakeholders, hosted by the Congressional Blockchain Caucus, under the leadership of Rep. Schweikert and Jared Polis, D-Colo. The roundtables helped frame key issues, addressing how leadership and vision from government, collaboration with industry, and support for research into future applications can help drive progress in enabling blockchain technology to support digital identity, payments, and supply chain innovations.

We hope that this report provides timely insight on the potential for blockchain to help government, as agencies expand their implementation of this important technology in the years to come.

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How the U.S. Can Effectively Share Threat Information With Other Nations

Dan Chenok — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:57:03 -0400

The increasingly complex nature of threats around the world makes it imperative for governments to share information that can help them detect, protect, and respond with speed and efficiency. To that end, the IBM Center is releasing a new report, “Integrating and Analyzing Data Across Governments: The Key to 21st Century Security,” by Douglas Lute, former U.S. ambassador to NATO and now affiliated with Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Francis Taylor, former Homeland Security undersecretary for intelligence and analysis and now affiliated with Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.

The report’s authors draw primarily on insights and recommendations from two roundtable discussions with current and former government leaders and stakeholders. The first meeting, held in Washington in October 2017, focused on how the Homeland Security Department’s information sharing enterprise can have the greatest impact and interaction with partners. The second meeting, held at the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels in March 2018, focused on how the European Union and other European organizations and member states can work with U.S. agencies to enhance outcomes from improved information sharing.

Based on these sessions, the report focuses on data gathering, analysis, and dissemination challenges and opportunities across the homeland security enterprise, looking especially at how improved information sharing could enhance threat prediction and prevention in a transatlantic context. The authors address how stakeholders in the U.S. and Europe can increase understanding of effective ways to leverage channels involving technology, human capital, organizations, and private sector coordination that meet strategic, mission, and operational needs. The report highlights opportunities for governments to leverage data integration and analytics to support better decision making around cyber and homeland security.

The report finds that addressing these challenges will help the department, the EU, and related stakeholders understand common operational needs and strengthen transatlantic information sharing and collaboration, especially in light of EU protections for privacy and data security. Other topics included how best to assist Homeland Security and other stakeholders in using information to achieve strategic and mission outcomes, the expertise within government needed to develop and maintain solutions, and external linkages needed to ensure successful implementation.

As the report notes, U.S. and EU organizations can learn from each other’s experiences to develop solutions that are not predominantly technology-focused, but rooted in human-based institutions along with deficits in trust. Specifically, mutual learning can advance in several areas, including:

Fostering cross-domain or cross-function approaches to government data —U.S. agencies are developing policies, processes, and technology to resolve these issues, and the U.S. government has made data strategy a new cross-agency priority goal.
Approaching analytics through a rules-based formula, instead of binary calculation. Homeland Security has made progress in this arena.
Developing industry partnerships. For example, the U.S. government has developed numerous public-private partnerships to address cyber information sharing.
Pursuing information sharing across multilateral collaboratives, like the Schengen Area, which is the integrating factor across Europe. Schengen is a region of 26 European countries that do not require a passport or other controls to cross their borders.
Learning from the process of developing and implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation and similar policies, which have enabled the EU to promote a much more robust debate about the relationship between government and citizens involving data protection.

The U.S. and EU face similar challenges with interoperability and trust. Homeland Security has been working with the EU on interoperability; the EU has taught department officials about the “once-only” policy, under which citizens must give information to government once, and then the government uses the information in a transparent manner. The EU has also made progress on information sharing between countries.

Ultimately, trust underpins any information sharing. Given the complex environment in which the U.S. and EU operate, building trust must be dynamically negotiated and not a “binary” condition. Governments must be specific about the data to be shared, its handling, and its acceptable use. Trust is built by the successful exchange of information for a specific purpose, which requires specific content for an agreed upon time period.

Given the imperative for transatlantic and cross-sector collaboration to understand and respond to an increasingly complex set of threats facing governments, we hope this report provides timely insights for public sector leaders and stakeholders.

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How Government Can Best Address Cyber Risks

Dan Chenok, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 06:43:53 -0400

Agencies increasingly rely on social media, the Internet of Things, mobile and cloud computing to execute their missions. While those technologies have empowered employees and improved the efficiency and delivery of government services, they also have exposed agencies to greater data security risks.

Diverse agency data stores extend the source of risk throughout organizations, requiring agencies to adopt new approaches that move beyond traditional security precautions. Cyber attacks against government are increasingly common and the severity of their impact is growing. As a result, it is essential that agencies consider data security a critical element of enterprise risk management.

ERM has become a key strategy to address systemic risk across organizations, and in recent years, the IBM Center for the Business of Government has devoted considerable attention to the topic. In our most recent report, “Managing Cybersecurity Risk in Government: An Implementation Model,” authors Rajni Goel, James Haddow and Anupam Kumar from Howard University develop a decision model that allows agencies to tailor approaches for particular cyber challenges.

The authors review existing risk management frameworks in use across government, and analyze steps agencies can take to understand and respond to those risks in compliance with existing law and policy. The model is based on five steps to improve cybersecurity outcomes: prioritize, resource, implement, standardize, and monitor—the PRISM model.

As the report notes:

“The National Institute of Standards and Technology finds that poorly managed cybersecurity risk may negatively affect performance and place an organization at risk by reducing its ability to innovate. This can occur even while leaders focus in the near term on the precise status of their organization’s cybersecurity posture and the risk of becoming a victim of cybercrime or cyberattack.”

A methodology for cybersecurity risk management can help agencies become more resilient in responding to risks adequately and appropriately.

To address this challenge, the authors seek to to improve agency capacity to implement effective cyber risk management through the PRISM decision model, which can lead agencies in making intelligent choices about how best to address cyber risk. The model helps agencies prioritize risk drivers and interdependencies, and link cybersecurity goals to mission and operational objectives.

The model can also assist agencies in communicating return on security investments to mitigate cyber risks. Such communications can foster discussion, assessment, decisions and actions to tailor approaches for addressing cyber risk management in government.

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Your Agency Now Has Money to Modernize IT

Dan Chenok — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 13:12:47 -0400

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee recently heard from Trump Administration leaders about their modernization strategies following the enactment of the Modernizing Government Technology Act and the implementation of the Administration’s IT Modernization strategy. A new report by the IBM Center for The Business of Government, “A Roadmap for IT Modernization in Government” by Gregory Dawson of Arizona State University, offers some timely insight on the issue.

Dawson’s recommended roadmap is based on research into past experiences in IT modernization at the federal and state level, as well as in industry. He draws from his research and extensive case interviews with federal and state chief information officers. Using these lessons, he frames the impediments to modernization as well as risks for agencies that do not modernize, including continued exposures to cybersecurity weaknesses.

The report develops eight key lessons for government leaders at various stages of IT modernization, and concludes by setting out a roadmap for implementation that agencies can adapt to address these key lessons. It will help officials develop a modernization business case, establish and implement a change management strategy, and measure real progress. The report also examines the status of IT modernization in the public sector, and identifies key lessons from private industry and government agencies that include:

Understand the organizational drivers for modernization.
Plan at the enterprise level; implement at the local level.
Communicate value to citizens and shareholders.
Focus on people, then address processes and technology.
Make modernization a long-term commitment.

Based on these key lessons, the roadmap below illustrates how successful IT modernization can take place in government, in a manner consistent with the recently-passed Modernizing Government Technology Act. Major points include:

Modernize as an ongoing process rather than a single standalone event.
Seek feedback throughout the process to capture and act on lessons learned.
Focus on how technology supports mission goals.
Identify stakeholders for each step, making leadership and operational staff aware of their requirements and empowering them to act.
Ensure check-ins with agency leaders and key users throughout the process.
Blend a strong execution strategy, technical approach and the right team.
Provide 360-degree communications to foster knowledge and buy-in.
Measure results both inside and outside the organization.

If the government embraces these lessons, agencies can reduce operating costs, lower the risk of cybersecurity attacks, and position themselves to take advantage of new technologies, including cloud, analytics, mobile, and artificial intelligence.

The report concludes with a recommendation that government make key investments in IT modernization, identifying and prioritizing the necessary initiatives for maximum effectiveness. Priority investments should be integrated into the budget planning cycle to provide a foundation for continuous innovation and improvement. With recent statutory and agency progress, the federal government is well-positioned to modernize its technology backbone and improve mission performance.

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How Agencies Can Effectively Implement Artificial Intelligence

Dan Chenok — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 15:07:47 -0500

As the public sector adopts new technologies to improve operations and service delivery, artificial intelligence and machine learning offer agencies new potential for improving interaction with citizens and making better decisions. But implementing AI well requires a focus on sound technology management and attention to critical details.

This week, the IBM Center for The Business of Government released a new report to help agencies understand effective practices in adopting AI and cognitive technologies: Delivering Artificial Intelligence in Government: Challenges and Opportunities, by Kevin Desouza, ASU Foundation Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.

Desouza reviews recent progress made in applying artificial intelligence to public sector service provision, drawing on lessons learned from commercial experience as well as burgeoning cognitive computing activity by federal, state, local, and international governments. The report draws on this real-world experience to set forth a framework for agencies to plan, develop, and deploy AI systems. The author then puts forward a set of challenges for government leaders and innovators in this space, along with opportunities for agencies to act in addressing these challenges. Finally, the report outlines a maturity model for agencies to use in guiding their journey forward in applying AI to improve mission performance.

Desouza frames these opportunities in three broad areas: technology and data, workforce, and risk management. In each area, agency leaders will find key factors they can apply to increase the likelihood that emerging AI and cognitive applications will be implemented successfully. These factors include:

Upgrading IT infrastructure to support AI systems, leveraging cloud computing technologies.
Identifying data-intensive applications that can benefit from AI, and establishing data governance to take advantage of the benefits that AI can deliver.
Enabling a skilled public sector workforce to use AI, including through agile implementations and redesigned work processes.
Developing AI in a manner that augments human decisionmaking and follows ethical imperatives around transparency, security, auditability, and citizen involvement.
Working in partnership with government, academia, and industry.

As the author concludes: “To enable successful use of AI in government, leaders must design and implement governance and policy that promotes a skilled workforce that collaborates with academia and the private sector, risk management frameworks, secure systems, and modern technologies.”

This work follows on our recent report with the Partnership for Public Service that identifies case studies of government success in this space, The Future Has Begun: Using Artificial Intelligence to Transform Government.

We hope agencies will find the practical and actionable steps offered in this report to be useful in capitalizing on the potential for AI to improve government.

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How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Government

Dan Chenok — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 15:57:28 -0500

The IBM Center recently released Seven Drivers Transforming Government, a series of essays exploring key drivers of change in government. It is based on research and insights shared by current and former government officials. What follows is an edited excerpt from that report.

Digital transformation goes beyond advances in technology. It also involves disruption in how problems are tackled, how work is done, and how expectations are met. It has ushered in improvements in user experience, leveraging innovative approaches such as design thinking—a structured, interactive method to facilitate innovation among stakeholders. And digital technologies have significantly enhanced how agencies fulfill their missions in widely different ways. Consider virtual reality, for example: NASA has used it for data visualization, while the Veterans Affairs Department has used it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

This revolution will drive major changes for how government does business. As the Federal CIO Council’s State of Federal IT report indicates, digital transformation will significantly impact every federal agency and its employees.

The Evolving Landscape

The transformative opportunities build on two decades of progress that reflect advances in how government has leveraged the internet. These phases of change fall into three broad areas, and the functionality that each era ushered in:

Digital Government 1.0: In this era of basic e-government, agencies moved paper-based information online without any significant reforms of the processes that could simplify and streamline the interactions citizens and businesses have with government. At the infrastructure level, agencies began to review legacy systems and develop initial modernization strategies.
Digital Government 2.0: The advanced e-government stage saw agencies leverage communication technology to enable secure transactions with government. Citizens could apply for and receive benefits and permits and could make payments electronically. However, these services were still delivered in silos where agency applications focused on each user in a “citizen-centric” manner but did not scale across user experiences to improve the quality of transactions. At the same time, government also sought to develop shared services for back-office applications like HR and finance.
Digital Government 3.0: In what characterizes much of the current state of digital government, the advent of social media and other collaborative technologies has created new pathways for citizens and businesses to communicate with governments. New digital technologies, including mobile apps and open networks that relied on cloud computing, led to opportunities to involve benefit recipients, regulated businesses, or even government contractors in government processes. Co-creation and co-production of policies and programs have become more common. Technology platforms now leverage open source and agile development to foster communities of public and private sector practitioners who build new systems based on understanding user experience at scale. Common and shared services delivered through central portals have provided a foundation for accessing multiple programs with a consistent process—enabling leaner government that promotes effectiveness and efficiency.
Digital Government 4.0: The future of a digital reinvention in government will transform service delivery in the future. To take full advantage of the transformational changes made possible through the speed and scale of digital technologies, those served by government must help drive how agencies work with them. Citizen-driven government will adapt to the needs and expectations of citizens, businesses, nonprofits, and other partners to create interactions that are personalized, interactive, and easy to access and use. Cognitive technologies can enable systems to understand, reason, and learn over time, enabling government to interact with the public in real time and with strong security and privacy protections.

Modernizing IT and Reaping the Benefits

A recent IBM Center report, “Digital Service Teams: Challenges and Recommendations for Government,” finds that an important driver to rethinking government approaches to digital service delivery is the legacy IT problem, which stems from the fact that many countries began to digitize their operations decades ago using technologies now aging in place. GAO reported that about 75 percent of record-high spending on government IT in 2016 went to the operation and maintenance of legacy systems that are becoming obsolete. OMB has estimated that $3 billion worth of federal IT equipment will reach end-of-life status in the next three years.

Private sector experience has demonstrated that strategic investments in technology can produce long-term cost reductions and bring a significant positive return. As noted in the Technology CEO Council report, “The Government We Need,” duplicative and obsolete legacy systems can be replaced with modern technologies on more cost-efficient platforms. A 2015 report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation suggests that every $1 increase in new IT spending led to as much as a $3.49 reduction in overall government expenditures. Applied across the federal government, investment in new IT systems could yield billions in reduced costs while improving productivity. Building for the future requires agencies to transform legacy systems using cloud services and shared solutions that will result in substantial cost savings, allowing agencies to optimize spending and reinvest in critical mission needs, as well as leverage modern technologies such as mobile and the Internet of Things. The government’s recently released IT modernization strategy provides a roadmap for agencies in achieving these objectives.

Implementing Digital Government

Driving change in the federal government requires more than new policies or the infusion of new technology; it requires a sustained focus on implementation to achieve positive and significant results. Agencies must find ways to invest in new technologies to support secure and scalable applications. Identifying and prioritizing efforts for investment, integrating these priorities into agency and federal budget planning cycles, and applying appropriate measures to track the success of key efforts will drive solutions based on modern, cloud-enabled IT infrastructure, mobile services, and IT security. Critical to effective investment in digital modernization is understanding the existing barriers to capture savings over time from those investments and identifying means to overcome these barriers. Defining pathways to invest in emerging technologies that can help government will inform where and how private sector entities may most effectively support digital transformation in ways that improve performance and reduce costs.

For example, government leaders need to be able to procure commercial technologies and recognize the return on investment over time—that will require changes in IT contracting practices. Current procurement rules limit agencies’ ability to buy technology as a service and pay for it over a 5- to 10-year period. With private sector funding, agencies can approach IT modernization as a service they buy over time, eliminating the need to have funds for a multi-year investment in the current year’s budget. In this way, the government can work with private sector partners to acquire the technology to provide cost effective services for American taxpayers.

Digital government enables citizens and an increasingly mobile federal workforce to securely access high-quality information, data and services anywhere, anytime, on any device . As government adjusts to this new world, agencies must work together to build the infrastructure needed to support digital government and leverage the federal government’s buying power to reduce costs.

The digital government of the future will go beyond simply automating previously manual processes. Rather, citizens will help drive agencies to modernize, and agencies will work together to integrate systems and applications across platforms. As the 21st century evolves, digital government will drive efficiency, effectiveness and performance, harnessing the power of technology to meet the challenges of today while seizing the opportunities for tomorrow.

Dan Chenok is executive director of the IBM Center for The Business of Government.

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Seven Drivers of Government Transformation

Dan Chenok — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 17:19:48 -0500

The forces affecting governments in the United States and around the world continue to increase in complexity, impact, and speed. Agency leaders must continually adapt to this ever changing landscape, but how? What are the key drivers that determine how government can transform? How can government’s partners help the public sector harness these drivers?

These were the questions that framed a discussion earlier this year hosted by the IBM Center for the Business of Government, which brought together government, academic, industry, and nonprofit leaders to explore the key challenges and opportunities facing the public sector.

Participants agreed that government will continue to focus on controlling costs while improving operational performance. The group underscored the importance of transforming the people, processes, and cultures to drive results in an environment of constrained resources. They concluded that driving meaningful and sustained change requires innovative, effective and efficient decision-making.

At the end of the roundtable, participants finalized a set of priorities, which we used to create a new report, Seven Drivers Transforming Government. This special report provides a resource from which government can draw practical, actionable recommendations on how best to address government’s Magic 8-Ball questions.

These seven drivers include:

Insight – Using data, evidence and analytics to create insight that influences decision making, actions and results.
Agility – Adopting new ways for government to operate, using agile principles and putting user experiences and program results at the forefront.
Effectiveness – Applying enterprise approaches to achieve better outcomes, operational efficiency and a leaner government.
Risk – Mitigating risk, managing cybersecurity and building resiliency to meet the mission of government.
People – Reforming processes for hiring, developing, and retaining workers and cultivating talent; and leveraging data and technologies to build the workforce of the future.
Engagement – Fostering a citizen-driven government through real-time, interactive feedback to engage, co-create, and co-produce services and programs.
Digital – Optimizing new technology and infrastructure models, focusing on the user experience and incentivizing innovators to modernize how government does business.

We will continue to collaborate with academic and nonprofit experts around the world in addressing these imperatives. Stay tuned as we further explore these topics in 2018.

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Making Government’s Massive Programs Work: Now It’s the Law

Dan Chenok and Roger Kodat — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 08:00:00 -0400

Over the past few decades, private companies have recognized program management as a key factor in enhancing organizational performance with respect to complex and challenging change initiatives. In addition to managing ongoing programs, the federal government increasingly is called upon to undertake large, complex initiatives and to adapt and improve existing programs in a rapidly changing environment.

Last year, Congress enacted the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act, recognizing that these capabilities are as important for the public sector as they are for the private sector. The new law provides federal agencies with an unprecedented opportunity to build a framework that enhances program management, yielding greater value for the American public.

The National Academy of Public Administration recently released a report by an independent panel that offers advice for the government on effective practices in implementing PMIAA. The report, which the Project Management Institute requested, contains recommendations for how the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management and federal agencies can best meet the law’s requirements; it builds on a 2015 academy white paper issued prior to the law’s enactment.

PMIAA’s goal is to ensure that federal agencies incorporate essential principles critical to successful project and program management, with particular focus on the program management area. Program management has not received significant attention as an important skill set and career path in the federal government. Because many agencies have advanced in the project management area, and several agencies have embraced promoting program management, the statute also serves to supplement and enhance existing levels of expertise in the federal sector.

In implementing the statute, OMB and OPM have several critical responsibilities. OMB, for example, must establish a Program Management Policy Council to serve as an interagency forum for strengthening program and project management across the federal government. And OPM must devise a new job series, define key skills and competencies, and prepare a new career path guide for program and project managers.

PMIAA provides the federal government with an ideal building block from which program and project management can be enhanced as a discipline. The new law’s human resources-related requirements, in particular, can serve as a key enabler for federal agencies to achieve their missions.

Program and project management are not synonymous. They are related but distinct, each requiring unique skills and competencies. Effective program management depends on the effective management of individual projects conducted by a cadre of professionals with a wide range of expertise, such as skills in stakeholder and change management, public engagement and communications, and working with congressional and other overseers.

Federal departments and agencies have widely differing skill sets and experience in those areas and must implement the new law within the larger context of existing agency statutes and policies. In the process, program management cannot become just another silo. Program managers must be integrators who bring together many streams to enable success.

OMB and OPM can take a consultative approach when devising overarching policies to guide agency implementation. This means tapping into existing pockets of expertise that some agencies already have garnered through successful experiences. The new PMPC will have a great opportunity to maximize the law’s impact by establishing a strategic vision, serving as leading driver for implementation, and offering a resource for ongoing work as program management capabilities mature throughout the federal government.

By applying program and project management throughout their operations, federal agencies can achieve more results for taxpayer dollars and deliver more effective service to the public.

Dan Chenok is the panel chair for the National Academy of Public Administration’s white paper and executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Roger Kodat is a project director for NAPA.

Photo: Flickr user Tony Brooks

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The Path to Better Management of Government’s Huge Programs

Alan P. Balutis, Dan Chenok, Jim Williams, Greg Giddens, and Stan Soloway — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 15:14:23 -0400

With the enactment of the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act late last year, the federal government has the opportunity and mandate to address two long-standing challenges: delivering successfully on large-scale change initiatives and addressing the dearth of well-qualified program managers across executive branch agencies. For a government that operates through the execution of programs -- many of them large and complex -- such gaps represent enormous risk.

Even in a modular, agile world, the role of program managers remains essential, because change initiatives are more likely to cross multiple organizations. After all, the federal government manages more than $3 trillion in annual budgets and hundreds of huge programs critical to the nation and its citizens.

But the federal landscape remains littered with what Peat-Marwick once dubbed “runaway systems” -- projects that are over budget, behind schedule and failing to deliver promised benefits and functionality. Thanks to the PMIAA, the Office of Management and Budget now has the responsibility to implement a set of policies to improve program management in government. As the Trump administration takes shape, OMB should leverage this opportunity to increase the probability of successfully delivering on its initiatives.

About a decade ago, the five authors of this article began meeting as a group over breakfast (with the self-imposed moniker the “Breakfast Club”) to discuss the need for better program management. We all have served, or currently serve, in senior government management positions. Our focus then and now has been on mission outcomes and results. We believe results begin with effective management, which is built on a legacy of successful practices often referred to as portfolio, program or project management.

We came at the issue with the shared conviction that the dynamics of the environment demanded aggressive steps to modernize the government’s human capital structure and processes. Nowhere is this truer than program management. Almost eight years ago, we set out our thoughts in a paper, issued under the auspices of the then-Council for Excellence in Government, that outlined a set of steps essential to the performance improvement and results American taxpayers expect.

Of course, some things have changed since then. The pace of technology is more rapid today. Government, like the commercial sector, has changed its approach to the concept of programs, shifting to a model in which modular steps and agile processes have largely displaced traditional, large-scale “waterfall” strategies. Still, the need for strong program management skills remains central to success.

With the passage of PMIAA, a key step has been taken: recognition of program management, and the unique skills that comprise it, as a distinct career field. For our initial paper, we were able to document through survey research and focus groups that far too many agency program managers actually had little to no training in the skill sets of program management. As we noted at the time, “outside of the Department of Defense and a few civilian agencies, program management is not ‘institutionalized’ as an established management discipline.”

In the intervening years, some progress has been made, and the recently enacted legislation represents another significant step. But as OMB implements the current statute, several additional measures should be taken to make the objectives of the legislation a reality.

First, we believe there needs to a clear line of leadership. Program management is a core component of agency success and should be treated and embraced as such. Leaders -- including program managers, acquisition executives, chief information officers and heads of other key stakeholder groups -- should be held jointly accountable for success based on a common set of measures.

Second, we need to establish clarity of responsibility and accountability for the delivery of program results. The program manager should be the tip of the spear, with both the authority to make decisions and the responsibility for program outcomes. Today, lines of authority and accountability are far too often blurred or nonexistent. Having a consistent measuring system for large programs, linked to governance, is essential in every agency and should be viewed as such by agency leaders.

Third, with the establishment under PMIAA of the program management career field, we must move quickly to design and implement a consistent training and professional development process for program managers, as well as a clear and contemporary set of requirements for hiring them. We should foster the kind of cross-functional and cross-sector training and development that is the norm in the commercial sector.

Change management, a skill critical to driving success in managing complex programs involving multiple stakeholders, should be a key element of this curriculum. Other components of training can be found in industry best practice documents, such as the 7-S for Success framework for information technology programs released by the American Council for Technology/Industry Advisory Council.

Fourth, to help program managers continue to grow and learn, OMB should ensure that the Program Management Policy Council created by the statute is set up effectively. Through such a forum, program managers can share best practices, develop and pursue new ideas and collaborate with other functional leaders. Creating a community around a culture of strong program management is an integral part of building capacity. Moreover, the council, chaired by the deputy director of OMB for management, should meet regularly with top agency and administration officials, as well as other functional leadership councils, to review program progress, identify potential fixes for ongoing problems and gain broader insights.

With these building blocks in place, agencies can zero in on what is most important: performance. Programs fail for many reasons, including inadequate governance, meaningless metrics, and insufficient capacity for or willingness to change. Strong program management can help overcome each of those barriers; without it, they are likely to endure.

PMIAA provides critical fuel for a vital mission. Now it’s up to all of us to build the high-performance engine that will use that fuel to drive us forward.

Alan Balutis is a distinguished fellow and senior director, North American Public Sector, for Cisco Systems’ Business Solutions Group. Dan Chenok is executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Greg Giddens is executive director of the Office of Acquisition, Logistics and Construction at the Veterans Affairs Department. Stan Soloway is president and CEO of Celero Strategies. Jim Williams is a partner at Schambach and Williams Consulting.

Photo: Flickr user markjhandel

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Welcome to Washington. Are You Ready to Lead?

Dan Chenok — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 10:37:13 -0500

With the advent of the Trump administration in 2017, a new set of leaders will arrive in federal offices across the nation. The government they will lead has changed in many ways from the one the Obama administration inherited in 2009.

The challenges for political appointees are multifaceted. Those who are new to government will find a very different world from the private and nonprofit sectors, and those returning will find a far different federal landscape. Many stakeholders, including members of Congress, will be interested in every action new appointees take. Not to mention the challenge of managing large organizations. If Cabinet departments were listed in the Fortune 500, these executives would occupy slots in the top 20.

In 2009, the IBM Center for the Business of Government released Getting It Done: A Guide for Government Executives, aimed at new leaders—especially political appointees. The 2017 edition of Getting It Done addresses a number of critical changes they will face.

As new political executives navigate the current political environment in Washington, the waters are likely to be turbulent. The guide contains the following advice to help them hit the ground running.

Seven To-Dos

Before confirmation, be careful. There is likely to be a time lag—sometimes long—between nomination and confirmation. During this period, learn as much about your agency as possible. Be careful to avoid making commitments or decisions prior to being officially confirmed.
Learn how things work. Now that you’ve done the background research on your agency, devote your early days in office to learning more about your customers, programs, and any flashpoints that may cause problems down the road.
Act quickly. Find out which issues need quick action and which require further study. You will learn much from talking with your staff and stakeholders about how your agency is performing and what needs to be done right away.
Develop a vision and a focused agenda. These will be crucial to your success in Washington. You will need to both communicate the vision and convey a sense of urgency to get it done.
Assemble your leadership team. A key ingredient to your success will be putting together a joint political and career team. Don’t view your staff as two distinct camps. Avoid “political appointees only” meetings. Your job is to get these two groups working together as one management team committed to your vision and your agency’s goals.
Deliver results. Once you have set the agenda and a good leadership team, there will be many distractions. Delivering on promises not only will take discipline, but also a set of decision-making and operational processes. Leverage existing processes and networks where possible. Ensure that day-to-day operations are effective, but don’t try to manage them yourself or you’ll quickly lose perspective. Staying focused on measurable results makes it easier to make your case with stakeholders.
Manage your environment. All organizations—public and private—have customers and a complex environment, but many say government is harder because there are so many stakeholders. The key is to satisfy all of them, at least to a large extent. Failure to work effectively with any one group can lessen your chances of success and possibly shorten your tenure.

Know Your Stakeholders

There are 14 stakeholder groups you will most frequently encounter while in government. They fall into four clusters: bosses, colleagues, constituencies and overseers. While some groups might appear in two categories (Congress is your boss and oversees your organization), this framework is useful to understanding your relationship with each one.

Your Bosses

It is often said that one of the major differences between the public and private sectors is that you have many bosses in government. The notion that you have 535 bosses in Congress, might be slightly overstated, but there is much truth to it. In Washington, any one of those lawmakers, or their 30,000 staffers, can make your life easier by supporting your agency or more difficult by passing a directive or legislation placing restrictions on it.

Then there is the White House, where there are three distinct parts on which your job literally depends. First, there is the Executive Office of the President. While you will see the president infrequently, you will often encounter a variety of special assistants, each of whom works in a different White House office. They can be enormously helpful and supportive, once you develop a good working relationship with them.

Second, there are three White House Policy Councils (the National Security Council, Domestic Policy Council and National Economic Council). These panels have become increasingly important as the White House has assumed a greater leadership and coordinating role in new policy initiatives.

Third, but not least, is the Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates policy development and decides how much funding your agency can request from Congress. OMB will be involved in many other aspects of your position as well, such as reviewing proposed legislation or your testimony to Congress, and overseeing regulations you might propose. As in all organizations, working with your bosses is essential to your success.

Your Colleagues

In government, you cannot overestimate the importance of your colleagues. There are likely to be few instances in which you and your agency can make a decision by yourselves, even after consultation with your bosses. More common is the scenario in which your bosses will actively seek the opinion and concurrence of your colleagues in other agencies.

You should set the right tone by creating the expectation that your management team will work closely with other departments and agencies. Participate actively on interagency councils that invite you to become a member. But in this instance you must assume a different role. Instead of being a boss, you become a peer and colleague working on governmentwide issues.

While it has an oversight function, the Office of Personnel Management falls in the colleague grouping as well. Reach out to OPM to gain human capital flexibilities that can help you accomplish your agency’s mission.

Your Constituencies

Each agency will have its own unique set of constituencies. Your staff will be able to describe these groups, and you will soon be meeting with them to get acquainted and to begin building effective partnerships.

But here are four cross-cutting sets of constituencies:

Citizens. Some citizens will be your customers. You should meet with those customers to assess their satisfaction with your agency and determine whether the delivery of services can be improved. Citizens also are the ultimate bosses and have a major stake in the government’s policies and programs. Use social media and other new tools to engage citizens on new initiatives you are considering.
Unions. If your agency is represented by one or more unions, develop a collaborative working relationship with them.
State, local, and tribal governments. Federal spending will become much tighter in future years. As a consequence, government leaders will need to find new ways to accomplish national objectives through partnerships with states, localities and nonprofit organizations.
Interest groups and associations. You will quickly get to know the organizations interested in your agency. These groups are a valuable information resource. There will clearly be differences of opinion. The key to a successful relationship will not be agreement on all issues, but instead your ability to create an ongoing dialogue and to maintain a constant exchange of information between your agency and these organizations.

Your Overseers

Oversight organizations are a fact of life in government. Ongoing scrutiny of how public funds are spent will become a daily part of your life. It is all too easy to fall into an adversarial relationship with your overseers, but you should work hard to develop an effective working relationship with them.

The most well-known oversight, or watchdog, organization is the Government Accountability Office. Your staff will be busy working with GAO on reviews underway at your agency. Use information in prior and ongoing GAO studies to identify problem areas that your agency will need to work on and that Congress is likely to ask you about.

Another watchdog organization you will encounter is the independent Office of the Inspector General at your department or agency. Past relationships between IGs and agency heads have ranged from outright hostility to cooperative partnerships. Like GAO, IGs can identify problem areas that your agency needs to focus on.

You also will encounter the media. Washington media organizations are unique. You will have an able press staff to assist you in both your proactive and reactive relationships with the media. Like all the stakeholders, the media can assist you greatly in getting your message out and communicating your vision to those inside and outside of government. Time spent with the media will be a good investment.

New government leaders have a unique opportunity to make a positive difference for the nation. The 2017 edition of Getting It Done could prove useful in helping them achieve that goal.

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How the Next Administration Can Hit the Ground Running

Dan Chenok — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 08:00:00 -0400

On Nov. 8, the President-elect will begin the next phase of the transition to power that culminates with Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, 2017. The next administration will have an opportunity to improve mission performance in ways that can positively impact millions of people across a range of areas, including health care, the environment, and how they receive government benefits. To achieve outcomes quickly and effectively, new leaders will need to understand how to manage complex policies and programs across multiple agencies. Embedding management capacity at the highest levels of government should start during the transition and build through the first days of the administration and beyond.

To help inform new leaders about the link between management and positive outcomes, the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service collaborated over the past year to develop a Management Roadmap. Released Sept. 13, the Roadmap aims to help the next president implement key policy and program priorities while avoiding obstacles and reducing risk. The Roadmap will help to inform the new administration about critical management issues and actions that can strengthen government’s capacity to address national challenges.

Drawing on lessons learned from previous administrations and original thinking from outside experts, the Roadmap identifies four essential actions to help drive success in delivering government services:

Leverage executive talent. Strong leadership can foster strong performance from government employees and their partners in the private and non-profit sectors, but progress depends on aligning the efforts of new political appointees and career government leaders. Creating a cadre of career and political leaders in key program areas can help drive mission accomplishment. Specifically:

Designate a team of key management leaders working on the transition for the White House, OMB, and other central management agencies. The team should develop early management capacity and create an initial set of management initiatives.
Ensure that top appointees build joint political-career leadership teams, where each leader shares ownership in the success of key goals.

Manage government as an integrated enterprise. Americans experience government in ways that cross agency boundaries, whether they operate small businesses, apply for services, or work with law enforcement or homeland security in responding to threats. Agencies can collaborate to integrate service delivery and reduce bureaucracy. Specifically:

Establish transition teams focused on cross-cutting issues, whose members align with policy, agency, and appointments teams.
Designate a senior White House official to drive mission-oriented cross-agency initiatives, working with OMB and the President’s Management Council on mission-support activities.

Build sustained innovation across agencies. Governments around the world have made great strides in leveraging private sector expertise and commercial best practices, such as using agile techniques to streamline acquisition and information technology. The next administration can build on this progress to integrate and embed innovation into agency activities that generate order of magnitude improvements in productivity. Specifically:

Include technologists and data scientists on transition teams.
Designate a White House champion for integrating innovation across agencies, including a focus on improved customer experience via citizen-centered design and active response to citizen feedback.

Strengthen decision making to achieve results. During the transition and into the first months in office, new leaders must sift through a vast amount of data and options in order to make effective choices. These leaders can leverage analytics, risk management, and other tools to make informed decisions that improve mission outcomes in alignment with near term opportunities. Specifically:

Draft plans for the administration’s budget proposal in March.
Develop a shared governance framework for decisionmaking across the president’s leadership team, based on sound data and evidence on the progress of strategic priorities.

The Roadmap was developed following a set of Roundtable discussions with a broad cross-section of current and former government leaders and stakeholders, drawing on a series of reports that described key findings and recommendations that arose from those discussions.

Image via Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com.

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How Do You Do a Start-Up in the Government?

Dan Chenok — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 09:00:00 -0400

Government periodically creates new agencies to address particular issues of national concern. These can take a variety of forms, including entire new departments (such as the Department of Homeland Security), independent oversight organizations (such as the Directorate of National Intelligence), large components of other agencies (such as the Transportation Security Administration), and even entirely new small agencies (such as the Administrative Conference of the United States). The newest new agency, which will commence operations October 1st, is the National Background Investigations Bureau. While new agencies have unique missions, they share a common experience of how to succeed as a start-up in the public sector.

Earlier this summer, the IBM Center and the National Academy of Public Administration co-hosted a roundtable discussion among experts in the standup of a new government enterprise. The goal of the session was to draw out lessons learned and best practices from leaders who have successfully launched new organizations, in order to help those engaged in similar efforts now and in the future. Roundtable participants shared many insights in a non-attribution setting. These insights are also relevant to existing agencies that go through mission, organizational, or operational changes, as may be the case across government during the transition to a new administration.

Below are key points from the discussion:

Focus on governance. Ensure that all parts of the organization work together as a leadership and operational team. This is critical for clarity of mission and a strong management council helps align the agency from mission to back-office.

Make sure the operational mission is clear.
Integrate all governance councils with the operational mission.
Leverage experienced business partners in procurement, human resources, the general counsel, and finance to accomplish business goals.
Define all relevant policies both inward and outward, issuing governance to promote shared implementation in both inward and outward forums.

Establish leadership roles and responsibilities. Identify the appropriate skill sets for all leadership positions and include mission operators in decisions.

Know all authorities and who is responsible for each prior to standup.
Enhance communication and transparency by establishing a culture among leaders to put hidden agendas out in the open.

Establish a decision process. Define decision-making structures to ensure consistent decisions that align with those made during the planning stage for a new agency (e.g., by an agency transition team) with long-term leadership needs.

Identify key decisions for transition, make those decisions and proceed.
Keep work streams focused and moving forward.
Tie decisions to an integrated master calendar that shows what actions need to take place when.

Stand up operations rapidly. Leaders can’t fight every battle or create every capability up front--be prepared to start with the basics and move some to a later implementation phase.

Staff and stakeholders must clearly know who is in charge on day one and defined procedures must be in place (for procurements, HR actions, etc.).
Define success for initial stand up (what needs to be accomplished to go-live and what needs to be accomplished at key milestones downstream) day one, day 90, and year one.
Maintain day-one documents in a central repository and track items in progress. Address and communicate nuts and bolts: address, phone, email, website.
Personnel/hiring flexibilities can help, but they typically are only available for a limited time. take advantage of any temporary flexibilities to tap expertise from industry, non-profits, and higher education.
Procurement is a critical function to leverage private sector expertise, services, and systems to enable a rapid standup. Bring on an experienced procurement executive to ensure that key goals (in the form of service level agreements) are part of initial contracts.
Records management and equal employment opportunity functions are also critical for standup.
Work with the general counsel on a process for reviewing legal issues. Ensure that all offices understand the counsel’s role to make fact-based interpretations.
Define what functions and support can be leveraged from a central services organization like the Office of Personnel Management or the General Services Administration, and what functions to operate from within the new agency. Many functions can be developed prior to the initial standup by leveraging from a central services organization

Build a network with key stakeholders. This is critical to proactively addressing problems before they happen and building a constituency of key stakeholders, especially with Congress.

Maintain robust congressional relations.
Identify internal controls for audit and meet with auditors and oversight bodies (e.g., GAO, OMB) early to establish relationships.
Be ready for unexpected hurdles. Every new organization faces challenges, including from existing enterprises that may oppose a new agency as intruding on their terrain—catalogue the risks and contingency plans.

Introduce succession planning. This is critical to long-term success.

Know the process for who takes over after transition and standup. This ensures success for both transition leadership and the longer-term leadership.
Identify key transition leaders who can stay on after standup, so that the new agency has leaders who can build on initial momentum.
Focus on culture and change management.
Build in flexibility as an organic organization to embrace necessary change as new issues will arise over time (and especially over the first two years). Keep a steady watch to resolve them.
Repeatedly discuss the value of change from the status quo, so that staff start believing it as a success factor for the new organization.
Create a brand and culture for the agency and promote and celebrate it.
Ask appropriate questions of new leaders in the interview process, to ensure a good cultural fit.
Celebrate the new culture change as part of on-boarding and other standup activities.
Standardize branding: What does the new agency stand for? What are its vision, mission, and core values? Make sure all offices, including field operations, are in sync.

The roundtable discussion addressed a number of challenges and opportunities for new government enterprises. The Center looks forward to working with NAPA in continuing this dialogue to assist with evolving needs and priorities for all government agencies going through significant change.

Dan Blair, President of the National Academy of Public Administration, collaborated on this piece.

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Effective Governance Begins With an Effective Transition

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze — Mon, 16 May 2016 09:00:00 -0400

In a previous column, we outlined recommendations for how the next administration can get a fast start with sure footing. From strengthening the President’s Management Council, to setting up a triage system for regulatory review, we identified actions that can help jump-start the next administration. However, there is one action that can have more impact than any other—early and effective transition planning.

But what should transition teams focus on? What do past transition efforts tell us about ways to improve? How can transition teams fashion a management agenda that supports the implementation of campaign commitments and improves the operations of government?

The IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service co-hosted a roundtable earlier this year to discuss how transition teams can operate most effectively in service of helping the next administration get a fast start on sure footing. The roundtable brought together current and former senior officials from administrations of both parties, as well as experts from academia and the private and non-profit sectors. Out of the discussion emerged actions that transition teams can take to increase the likelihood of a successful first year.

The roundtable was the final in a series of seven as part of our “Management Roadmap” effort, a Ready to Govern (#Ready2Govern) initiative effort through the Center for Presidential Transition. The Center seeks to improve the transfer of power and knowledge between administrations. These Roundtables addressed the critical importance of strong leadership (see the related report on Executive Talent); the need for agency-specific and governmentwide approaches (read the report on Enterprise Government); and the challenge of decision-making (read the full report) in a time of transition.

The recommendations from the roundtable were clustered around three dimensions—people, structure and process.

People

Be clear that key members of the transition leadership team will themselves transition into the Presidential Personnel Office. Continuity in the appointee selecting and vetting operation is critical to getting the administration fully staffed in the first year.

Identify an experienced management executive. This person needs to have the full confidence of the president and should be brought into the transition team early.

Communicate how personnel selections will be made. Will the White House select and place all people? Will Cabinet and agency leaders select appointees within their areas? Will there be block placement of certain functions such as chief financial officers? Or will a combination of these approaches be used? This is an important decision and should be made early.

Develop a robust process for aligning personnel with the needed skills. This includes needs within agencies and across leadership teams, and in alignment with administration priorities. Personnel selection is a multi-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, but it should start with clarity around what skills the position demands.

Select individuals to be on leadership teams. High-performing teams have a mix of skills. Transition personnel should look at appointee selection through the lens of team formation. For example, attendees noted that deputy secretaries are the chief operating officers for departments. When they are selected primarily for their policy expertise or to be “secretaries in waiting,” the administration may miss an opportunity to create balanced leadership teams that can effectively operate departments and implement policy priorities.

Select the OMB Deputy Director for Management during the transition. That person could then be in charge of developing a management agenda to rollout at the start of the administration.

Create a pool of vetted candidates from which appointees can be selected. This could significantly speed up the time it takes to get appointees into place.

Identify people and positions the new administration may want to retain. Appointees noted that several Bush appointees were held over to help deal with the financial crises until the new team could be put into place.

Structure

The transition team should reflect how the administration wants to govern. Making the shift from transition to governing more seamless can decrease churn in the opening days of an administration, when the President’s influence is at its peak.

Prior to the election, determine the roles, responsibilities and lines of communication between the transition team and the campaign staff. Consider how campaign staff will be integrated into the transition operation after the election. The campaign-transition relationship can be fraught with tension and needs to be carefully managed.

Establish a team to focus specifically on the regulatory review process.

Establish a team to focus on creating an enterprise approach to governing. Additionally, integrate the responsibilities of that team with other policy teams so that the enterprise perspective gets incorporated into implementation plans across a range of policy areas. Cross-agency approaches can yield more effective methods to solving difficult challenges. Conducting policy implementation planning in the transition with an enterprise perspective will increase the likelihood of success.

Create links between personnel and policy teams. The effective flow of information within the transition teams can improve the selection of appointees by better aligning needs with potential candidates.

Take care when selecting team deputies. Deputies are critical to making transition teams function effectively—they make the trains run on time. Attendees suggested creating a deputies council to improve cross-team information flow and overall coordination.

Tools

Develop management principles. These can frame a detailed management agenda to be rolled out early in the administration. Getting a fast start on management can drive improvements across all four (or eight) years of the administration, which can provide multiple benefits—operationally and politically.

Set up decision-making processes during the transition. Think through how to approach routine (e.g. budget) and non-routine (e.g. crisis) decisions during the transition.

Harness existing processes and tools to implement priorities. These include the budget, cross-agency priority goals, acquisition and financial management cycles. Attendees advised that the next administration spend more time thinking about how to implement priorities using existing processes than how to change processes and organizational structures.

These recommendations and more emerged from the roundtable, and we are grateful for the insights of the exceptional group assembled across administrations and parties. These actions, along with recommendations from previous roundtable reports, can help a new administration get a faster start and be more effective in implementing its priorities.

Dan Chenok is executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Alan Howze, a fellow at the IBM Center, is a senior adviser and project manager for the Management Roadmap initiative.

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How to Get Off to a Strong Start: A Guide for the Next President

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze — Tue, 10 May 2016 12:59:08 -0400

Every President wants to get off to a fast start, but success is challenging. It’s akin to launching a startup business while simultaneously conducting the largest corporate takeover in the world.

When the transition is completed and the next President sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017, the new administration will get to work. But what actions should be prioritized? How can the wheels of government be leveraged most effectively? How can the new team avoid re-inventing the wheel?

To seek answers to these questions, the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service co-hosted a roundtable earlier this year to discuss how the next administration can get off to a strong and fast start. The Roundtable brought together current and former senior officials from Administrations of both parties, as well as experts from academia, the private and nonprofit sectors. The robust discussion surfaced a number of practical actions that a new administration can take, starting with the transition, to increase the odds of success.

The meeting was the sixth of seven planned roundtables in our “Management Roadmap” series, part of a multi-pronged Ready to Govern (#Ready2Govern) initiative, through which the IBM Center is supporting efforts to improve the transfer of power and knowledge between administrations. These Roundtables addressed the critical importance of strong leadership (see the report on Executive Talent) the need for agency-specific and governmentwide approaches (read the report on Enterprise Government), and the challenge of decision-making (read the full report) in a time of transition.

From the sixth roundtable came recommendations across three dimensions—people, structure and process. Among the dozens of recommendations were actions for the White House, appointees and career staff.

People

Ensure continuity from the leadership from the transition operation to the Presidential Personnel Office. PPO is critical to getting key staff into place and to helping align appointee priorities and performance measures with key administration priorities. Turnover within PPO leadership can have ripple effects across the President’s entire first term.

Appoint key management leaders in the first wave of appointees. Set an explicit expectation that they will work together as a management team. Into this group, appointees put the heads of the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration as well as the OMB Deputy Director for Management (DDM), the White House chief information officer, and a newly created White House chief operating officer (a recommendation suggested in previous roundtables as well). Attendees noted the eight-month delay in confirming a DDM at the start of the Obama administration, which in turn delayed action on a range of government management and operations initiatives.

Integrate appointees and career leaders. The faster the new administration can build trusted relationships with career staff, the more effective they will be. This can occur in a number of ways—through joint training and orientation; creation of integrated senior leadership teams in agencies and departments; town hall style meetings with SES and career staff within the first 100 days; and through regular joint political and career meetings.

Leverage the senior advisor role to put people into place quickly. Attendees pointed to the key role that Ed DeSeve played as a senior advisor, who had a trusted relationship with Vice President Joe Biden and was put into place to coordinate the implementation of the Recovery Act. While the confirmation process is playing out, senior advisors can help the administration move forward on priorities.

Structure

Formalize the role of the President’s Management Council. The PMC is comprised of the chief operating officers of the major agencies (typically the deputy secretaries) and it provides enterprisewide leadership on management priorities. Among the first actions of the administration should be the issuance by the President of a directive that reconstitutes the PMC. Such an order could identify positions on the PMC, and expectations for its focus. The Clinton and Bush administrations constituted the PMC via a presidential memorandum to help lead their management initiatives.

Create task forces around key priorities and include career staff. Cross-agency or intra-agency priorities can be more effectively addressed through task forces that bring together functional and policy expertise, and consist of political and career staff.

Establish performance goals in key policy and management areas early. Performance management is important to driving results on administration priorities. The new administration should quickly build on the performance framework led by OMB to move forward with key, measurable goals (the transition team can work on this prior to inauguration). If policy implementation and budget get too far out in front of performance management it can be hard to drive alignment.

Tools

Quickly set up a regulatory review process. New administrations often come in and freeze the process. Attendees noted that the vast majority of regulations that pass through OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs are non-controversial. Freezing all rules can slow down processes that would support a new administration’s priorities. Attendees suggested setting up a triage system to identify which rules to freeze, which to review quickly, and which to allow to move forward, and to use the transition to plan for an effective regulatory review process.

Develop a management agenda early. The new administration can signal its management priorities in the opening days of the administration and should rollout a management plan at the same time as the first budget is released. Delay in releasing a management plan can have detrimental ripple effects across the administration’s term.

Drive alignment around clear goals. Do this through performance management and through written performance plans for appointees, with key elements also reflected in career SES performance plans. PPO, OPM, a new White House COO and Cabinet leaders would all play a role in driving alignment.

Provide agency leaders with a plan for their first six months. Leaders who enter an agency without a roadmap will take longer to get up to speed and have a higher likelihood of a disappointing tenure. Multiple levers can help new leaders implement such a plan, including reaching out to former office holders on a bi-partisan basis, engaging career staff, setting decision making processes, getting out into the field to talk with customers and staff, and much more.

The collective experience of the extraordinary group of people who participated in the roundtable surfaced a wealth of ideas on how the next administration can get a fast start. Acting upon these recommendations can provide a significant and lasting boost to the next administration—regardless of who emerges as the next president.

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How to Make Smart, Timely Decisions

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 09:00:00 -0400

On Wednesday, Nov. 9, the President-elect and his or her transition team will face an unrelenting barrage of decisions.

For the duration of their time in office, the president and members of the administration will seek to make smart and timely decisions that advance the administration’s agenda and respond to emerging challenges.

Some decisions, such as those that inform the budget, will follow well-worn processes and timelines. Others will require processes to address emerging challenges. How incoming leaders make decisions will significantly influence the effectiveness of their choices.

Improving decision-making for the next administration—and for the transition team that precedes it—is the subject of a new report released jointly by the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service. Enhancing the Government’s Decision-Making: Helping Leaders Make Smart and Timely Decisions, by former White House official Ed DeSeve, provides actionable recommendations that include:

Clearly define and articulate how the new administration will make decisions in different situations. This advice falls into the category of easy to say and hard to do. By being deliberate and thoughtful about how they approach decision making, leaders can help their organizations be more responsive and effective.
Adopt an “enterprise” approach to decision making. A recent report on Enterprise Government laid out why priorities should be approached from a cross-agency perspective. The same is true when it comes to establishing processes for decision-making. Choices should be made in their local context and placed within the context of the larger enterprise, lest agencies make locally optimal decisions that sub-optimize the governmentwide results.
Take advantage of existing analytic capabilities. Across the government, functions such as risk management, benchmarking and strategic foresight can bring analytic rigor to decision processes. Incoming leaders need to be aware of analytical capabilities, and use them in the design and execution of decision processes.

The report is part of a joint effort by the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service to develop a Management Roadmap for the next administration. The Management Roadmap is a piece of the Partnership’s Center for Presidential Transition Ready to Govern initiative.

The recommendations stem from a roundtable discussion held in November 2015 with current and former career and political government leaders from varied backgrounds and political affiliations. A clear theme from the discussion was that both existing decision processes and emerging challenges can be addressed more effectively given clarity on how decisions are made. There are processes that can deliver timely and accurate information and insights to leaders.

The complex, varied and sheer number of impactful decisions that will face the new Administration can swamp even experienced leaders. By taking advantage of early transition planning to develop deliberate approaches to decision making, the next administration can be better prepared to make smart and timely choices, starting on Nov. 9.

Dan Chenok is executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Alan Howze, a fellow at the IBM Center, is a senior adviser and project manager for the Management Roadmap initiative.

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How to Set Priorities That Sustain Innovation

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 15:31:03 -0400

Earlier this year, the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service co-hosted a roundtable on innovation. The focus was how the next administration can use innovation to support the achievement of their priorities, how new agency leaders drive and sustain innovation, and how to enhance customer experience and support empowerment of citizens and businesses.

In an earlier post, we described challenges to innovation. Here, we present key ideas, findings and recommendations that emerged from the discussion.

Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness

Make innovation a key expectation of every agency leader–career and political.
Use innovation in contracting.
- Allow vendors to bring ideas into RFPs and to bring a forward looking perspective, not just responding to where an agency is today but where they are heading.
- Include innovation as an element of RFPs.
- Use contracts that promote collaboration between government and industry around innovation.
- Create centers of excellence for operational improvement.
- Expand the use of machine learning to free up people to solve problems.
- Use the power of analytics, not only to provide innovative solutions but to identify areas of focus for innovation.
- Use data to measure improved performance from innovation.

Customer Experience

Make customer experience a priority for agency leadership in carrying out the agency’s mission.
Create streamlined service for sharing and integrating data and using predictive analytics.
Empower employees to improve the customer experience.
Identify opportunities for the auto-delivery of services.
- For example, within the IRS, there could be opportunities to allow customers to download additional forms based on reported income level. However, there are privacy concerns and legal barriers with sharing tax information between agencies.
- Shift incentives to deliver better service.
- Incoming leaders need to quickly understand the contract landscape as it can be a barrier or solution to customer service goals.
- Alter performance plans to measure SES performance by customer satisfaction.
- Create a customer service office within agencies.
- Include incentives for innovation into state and local grants for services.
- Identify the 10-20 most public-facing agencies in government and focus on improving them first.

Customer Empowerment

Set a leadership tone in organizations by celebrating successes in better engagement.
- Move beyond engagement as a “check the box” exercise to a way to get closer to customers and understand pain points.
- Create a strong link between engagement, user experience, and agency mission.
- Tackle regulatory barriers and inflexibilities that make it difficult for customers to engage with agencies.
- Pull together and share engagement best practices across agencies.

Innovation Goals and Governance

Set clear goals around outcomes.
Create a chief innovation officer role to set long-term goals and delegate short-term projects.
Create a White House office of Transformation and appropriate a $100-200 million fund available for best innovative ideas.
Ground innovation in evidence-based approaches.
Create a “what works” clearinghouse with successful innovations.
Focus on audience research and observations to align innovation to real customer needs.
Use one-year rotations for focused innovation–this could be part of an SES rotation program.
Reinforce relationships with the oversight community to promote and support innovation. Move from “gotcha” to helping.
Agencies need a strategic plan for innovation.

Enablers—Getting it Done in Government

Apply a net-centric mentality with institutions that are transparent and easy to plug into; networks that are multi-directional; and standardization of infrastructure and a language.
Create a “Tinder” for government to match people with the skills and needs of organizations.
Establish a structure for innovation–name initiatives and designate accountable leaders, develop bottoms-up and outside-in communication channels.
Create clear expectations around innovation for incoming appointees.
Create a book of innovation successes and failures.
Create a Peace Corps model where people come in and out of government for 1-2 year terms. Expand that model to federal employees in other agencies.
Embed innovation in transition planning and the execution of campaign commitments.
Be ready for a crisis. Leaders can use a crisis to drive changes that would otherwise be unattainable and at the same time drive real innovation in the delivery of services

Innovation can be a critical tool for the next administration to achieve presidential priorities and improve government operations. The transition teams can accelerate these efforts by thinking strategically about how to implement an innovation agenda within agencies and through government-wide initiatives. The transition team can also make innovation a priority in the selection of appointees and in providing clear marching orders. By building upon progress that has been made and effectively utilizing the tools and levers in the federal government, the next administration can drive a new wave of government innovation.

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How the Next Administration Can Make Government More Effective

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 08:00:00 -0400

This is the first of a two-part post on encouraging and sustaining innovation in government through the presidential transition.

Government has made great strides in creating pathways for innovation over the last several years. The next administration faces the challenge of how to leverage the continuously accelerating pace of change to make the government more effective. Disciplined and replicable models of innovation will help new leaders drive better customer service, increase citizen engagement, deliver efficiencies and improve outcomes.

The IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service recently co-hosted a Roundtable to discuss how agency leaders can continue to bring innovation into government in a way that integrates with agency activities to drive successful outcomes for the next administration. An exceptional group of current and former senior officials from prior administrations of both parties, leaders from Capitol Hill, as well as experts from academia and the private and non-profit sectors participated in a robust discussion. The focus of the session was how the next administration can use innovation to spark progress on the administration’s goals and priorities, and in-turn, how transition teams and incoming leaders should incorporate innovation into how government carries out key missions.

The meeting was the fourth of six planned roundtables in our “Management Roadmap” series, part of a multi-pronged Ready to Govern (#Ready2Govern) initiative, through which the Partnership seeks to improve the transfer of power and knowledge between administrations.

The roundtables addressed the critical importance of strong leadership (along with the related report on executive talent), the need for agency-specific and governmentwide approaches, and the challenge of decision-making in a time of transition.

Background

Under the Obama Administration, agencies have prioritized innovation in many different ways. The administration pioneered business model innovations such as the U.S. Digital Service, the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies and 18F, and a new GSA Unified Shared Services Management governance model. Challenge.gov and “idea labs” such as those at the Health and Human Services Department and the Office of Personnel Management brought new approaches to program delivery and government operations. There has also been innovation in talent acquisition such as the introduction of the Presidential Innovation Fellow.

When the next president takes office in 2017, a new administration will have the opportunity to embark on their own innovation agenda, building upon past efforts and setting new goals. How can new agency leaders drive and sustain innovation? How can the next administration enhance customer experience and support empowerment of citizens and businesses? These and other questions served to frame a rich discussion at the Innovation Roundtable.

The discussion highlighted that innovation is the means to an end—and not an end-goal per se. Roundtable participants focused on three desired objectives for how innovation can improve outcomes:

Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness—using technology to improve government operations.
Customer Experience—enhancing customer service and improving the user experience.
Engagement—empowering citizens and businesses to participate in the development of government policies and programs.

In each of these areas, innovators must address the challenges of leadership and talent, process, and scale in order to sustain and grow an innovation culture. The roundtable noted that meeting these challenges can be facilitated by a focus on innovation goals and governance—how to set outcome goals and establish governance structures—at the agency and governmentwide levels. Specific challenges include:

Leadership and Talent

Bringing in new talent remains a challenge across government, not just for innovation but across the board. Agencies can look at new models for acquiring talent, often using existing authorities that may not be fully utilized.
Top leadership needs to signal support for innovation, and tolerance for failure,while understanding that innovation needs to emerge from within the organization (not top-down).
Bringing in people from outside the organization can bring in new ideas and ways of thinking, but they need to work closely with existing career staff for innovation to stick.
Innovation is one of many priorities competing for the time and attention of staff and leaders. To highlight the importance of innovation, it needs to be part of how people are measured.

Process

Current law and policy can inhibit innovation. For example, the Paperwork Reduction Act could be reformed to promote communicating with citizens around innovative ideas.
A long and complex acquisition process can limit the manner in which government and industry innovate together.
The private sector can be a source of innovation but it can also be a source of resistance if innovation disrupts current business.
Innovation is not one-size-fits-all. Efforts to drive innovation must recognize this reality.
OMB and other “center of government” agencies are often viewed as adding processes that inhibits positive change, however, they can also drive innovation forward across government.
The oversight community (e.g., IGs, GAO) can limit innovation, but they could—and should—be a partner in helping agencies identify ways to improve.

Scale

Scaling innovation across the government, an agency, and even a bureau is a real challenge and requires concerted effort and support by leadership.
Agency leaders can foster innovation at scale by removing real and perceived barriers to change.
Innovation in management structures is important (for example, establishing a cohesive shared services governance model) and needs to accompany innovations at scale.

The IBM Center is pleased to collaborate with the Partnership to help the next Administration get off to a strong start, and build sustained management excellence thereafter. We are grateful for the many distinguished leaders who contributed their time and insights to the Enterprise Government session, and to Steve Goldsmith, director of the Innovations Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and former deputy mayor of New York and mayor of Indianapolis, for his expert facilitation of the session.

(Image via Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock.com)

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Transition Teamwork: Helping New Leaders Make Smart Choices

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 09:00:00 -0500

On Nov. 10, the IBM Center for the Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service co-hosted a roundtable on how transition teams and new agency leaders can implement structures that enable managers to make smart and timely choices by incorporating data and evidence into their decision-making process.

By being thoughtful and intentional in in their approach, leaders can accelerate the achievement of the new elected president’s priorities, reduce risk and increase the capacity of agencies to deliver on mission objectives.

Our earlier blog on decision-making highlighted a number of challenges for the next administration to address. Here we present key findings and recommendations in four areas:

Decision Processes – finding ways to harness government decision processes and not getting bogged down.

Define clear parameters. Use career staff to help incoming appointees translate governing priorities into clear goals and action plans that take into account budget and statutory constraints.
Open the aperture and use decision processes not as a compliance exercise but as a tool to bring in stakeholders and to identify and resolve problems in a way consistent with organizational culture.
Identify which decisions should be made at which levels of the organization. Free up time and focus by ensuring that decisions are not automatically “kicked upwards” when they can be made at lower levels in an organization.
Set deadlines – real or artificial – to drive decisions and processes, in light of precedents and constraints.
Look for early engagement between transition teams and career staff on key decisions.

Decision Support Systems – using frameworks such as strategic foresight and risk management to make better decisions.

Improve the staff capacity to clearly define what information is important and to ensure that organizations leverage objective analysis effectively in decision-making.
Hire engaged leaders – political and career – who have management experience and understand how to collect, synthesize and use information to make decisions.
Use maturity frameworks to assess the information analysis capabilities within an organization.
Establish an evidence-based function in an agency, with clear roles and responsibilities that can be a clearinghouse for information analysis.
Create organizational “learning agendas” in which organizations systematically identify areas for improvement in data collection and analysis. This creates a roadmap for improving the overall capacity and capability of the organization.
Create a framework to address issues. For example, how to engage in the budget process, the strategic priority development process and the performance management process.
Show active support for bottom-up decision-making processes. Leaders should signal their support for innovation and data-driven decisions at all levels of the organization.
Get clarity on who has the power to decide – this is especially important in cases where statutes provide overlapping authorities.

Frameworks and Governance

Start with clarity about vision and priorities, as well as an understanding and analysis of what unit of analysis (department, program, enterprise, etc.) will be affected by decisions.
Establish cross-agency teams that focus on strategic goals rather than individual organizations – with the express intent of using data to coordinate across stakeholders and drive decisions, rather than assessing information in organizational silos.
Recognize the need for flexibility. Different decisions are better suited to selected processes and leaders should be flexible in applying different frameworks, including risk management, strategic foresight, and performance measurement.
Coordinate with policy councils and Congress to support the enhanced use of data and information to drive decisions.

Enablers – getting it done in government.

Leaders’ actions set the tone for the organization. Leaders should, early in their tenures, signal the importance of data in decision-making around key mission needs and create open organizational cultures that foster the sharing of information (good and bad).
Make consistent use of both existing and new data and information as part of the performance agreements for political and career executives.
Communicate regularly with stakeholders – internal and external –who are critical to good decision processes.
Transition teams should identify political executives who bring strong management experience.
Establish the agencies risk philosophy and identify the appetite for risk – make it acceptable for staff to raise risks and problems early.

Decision-making can be a challenging topic to wrap our minds around. There are lots of people touching lots of parts, but it can be difficult to put all the pieces together into an integrated picture. Leaders in the next administration can be more effective if they, and the transition teams that follow them, give thought to how decisions are made and how information can be used to drive better choices. In doing so, they can accelerate delivery on the president’s priorities.

(Image via wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock.com)

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Making Decisions in a Time of Transition

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 09:00:00 -0500

In 2017, the next administration will face many significant and simultaneous decisions on an array of issues, and mountains of data to inform these choices.

How can new leaders quickly gain situational awareness? How can they harness ongoing processes like budget formulation and performance reporting as inputs for decision-making?How can they use and integrate expertise such as risk management and strategic foresight into actionable information? Are there decision-making frameworks and models that leaders can adapt to produce faster decisions based on evidence?

These were among the questions that an expert group discussed at a November roundtable, co-hosted by the IBM Center for the Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service. The session focused on how a new administration can implement decision frameworks to help them turn campaign promises into policy and included actionable recommendations for transition teams and future agency leaders.

The roundtable convened an exceptional group of current and former senior officials from administrations of both parties, as well as experts from academia and the private and nonprofit sectors for a robust discussion. The meeting was the fourth of six planned roundtables in our Management Roadmap series, part of a multipronged Ready to Govern (#Ready2Govern) initiative, through which the Partnership seeks to improve the transfer of power and knowledge between administrations.

While the discussion centered on decision-making, it frequently touched upon topics that have arisen in previous roundtables, such as the importance of strong leadership and clear goals (see discussion of the first roundtable, second roundtable, and third roundtable Part I and Part II). Our recently released whitepaper on Executive Talent also explores challenges of leadership in a new administration.

The IBM Center is pleased to collaborate with the Partnership to help the next administration get off to a strong start and sustain management excellence. We are grateful for the many distinguished leaders who contributed their time and insights to the roundtable and to former Veterans Affairs Deputy Secretary Scott Gould for his expert facilitation of the session.

Why Leaders Should Focus on Decision-Making

Upon taking office, leaders must quickly decide what to focus on, what information they need and how to get it, and what processes to use for making decisions. This sounds simple and straightforward, but in reality can be extraordinarily complex in the federal environment, and can swamp even experienced leaders.

By being thoughtful and intentional about how to approach the multiple facets of decision-making, leaders can make smart and timely choices that are based on data and evidence. In doing so, they can accelerate the achievement of the president’s priorities, reduce risk and increase the capacity of agencies to deliver on mission objectives.

The roundtable focused on:

Governmentwide decision frameworks and processes
Best practices for individual agency leaders
How a new administration can adapt and implement decision frameworks that support the ability of leaders to focus on the right issues and make the right choices
Identify decision-making tools, processes, best practices, and analytic capabilities

Roundtable participants identified a variety of challenges facing leaders when it comes to making smart decisions.

Sifting Through Information

Information overload. The vast quantity of information can overwhelm. Sifting through the noise and staying focused on priorities is essential to effective decision-making.
Information obfuscation. As one participant noted, “the best way to say nothing is to keep talking, and the best way to keep someone out of your business is by giving them too much information.”
Three-dimensional chess. Recognize that decision-making takes place in a broader context where evidence is important, but so is policy and politics. Leaders need to look at decisions through all three dimensions.

Prioritization

Agencies are often faced with a bewildering array of decisions and need to focus on priorities and identify what decisions can be made at different levels of the organization.
Evaluation is not precision. There is no such thing as perfect information. The challenge is to use the information available and then identify information gaps that the organization can focus on in the future.
Balanced perspectives about data. There needs to be a balance between dispassionate analysis of data and having analysis (and people) who are close enough to understand the data in the context of an agency’s mission and real-world effects.
Best alternative to negotiated agreement (BATNA). The first choice outcome isn’t always possible so it is useful to think of the BATNA when considering the range of choices.
Just do it. Don’t wait for precision and perfect information before integrating data and evidence into decision-making. Use an iterative approach to data and remember, data and evidence are the means to better decisions – not the end in itself.

Collaboration

The Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list is full of issues that cut across organizational boundaries. Effective collaboration, within and between agencies, requires leadership engagement and can be a powerful tool drive better decisions and deliver faster results (see the summaries – Part I and Part II – from an earlier roundtable on enterprise government).
Stakeholders and process. It is a challenge to figure out how best to bring together decision-makers and the plethora of different voices – at the right points in a decision process to distill information and make good choices.
Trust. The most effective organizations are those with high trust. Trust is a cultural value more than a policy.
People first. Processes are a way of engaging people in decision-making. To effect outcomes and have meaningful changes in a process, you need to change the hearts and minds of people.
Respect information-sharing. Understand that no data set is perfect and that getting better data is a continuous process that never ends. People and organizations need to be encouraged to share information and not be punished when errors arise in data sets.
Defining the enterprise. One of the challenges noted by participants was defining what portion of the enterprise should be optimized. Often the enterprise is defined by where a person sits. However, optimizing decisions at lower levels can sometimes sub-optimize the whole organization.
Aligning the enterprise. Having clarity around organizational goals and objectives is critical to helping people within the organization understand what they should be doing. It can also unleash potential by giving objectives to strive for and allowing for more autonomous action in support of goals.

Leadership

Leaders set the tone. Messages from senior leaders can be quickly absorbed by an organization. If a leader signals early-on that negative information is met with recriminations and punishment, then you can be certain that information will be tucked out of sight. Conversely, if a leader, through words and actions, signals a genuine desire to use data and information and create a culture of trust, people will begin to respond accordingly.
Making it safe to share bad news. “You can’t manage a secret,” was the paraphrase from a participant who emphasized the importance of a culture of trust and open information in revealing information – even bad news – in a timely manner so that little problems don’t become big problems.
Top-down and bottom-up. It is important for leaders, starting in the White House, signal that evidence should be part of the conversation on decisions – and it is also important that employees at the outer edges of an organization be given the tools, training and flexibility to use evidence and data to improve operations – in short, to innovate.

In our next blog, we will examine the key findings and recommendations from the roundtable participants for addressing these challenges.

(Image via SFIO CRACHO/Shutterstock.com)

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