John Kamensky

Three years ago, Government Accountability Office was required by law to annually publish a report detailing duplicative, overlapping, and fragmented federal programs. It will be issuing its third report in early 2013. But it is preparing its list now for potential government reorganizers.

The “Memos to National Leaders” project – jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Society for Public Administration — recommends a reorganization commission, and it also offers suggestions for “virtual reorganizations” of programs, as an alternative. An earlier IBM Center blog series raised the issue as to whether the federal government should reorganize. Keep reading →

Using analytics to make better decisions is taking root in agencies across the government, notes a new report, which explores how a dozen pioneers did it. The report, by the Partnership for Public Service and the IBM Center, also offers advice from leaders of some of those organizations that shows how others can make better decisions using analytics as well.

Investing in, and using, program evaluation has been a hard sell in many agencies for years. While evaluation is important for long-term program assessments, it can be expensive and take years to complete. But with new technology and greater availability of data, many agencies are beginning to take advantage of the value of existing real-time administrative data. This movement is called “data analytics.” And the immediacy of results is appealing to many executives. Keep reading →

The IRS, FEMA and a growing number of other federal agencies are turning the art of analytics into an increasingly powerful workplace discipline that is helping agencies and their employees improve their collective performance. Keep reading →

Government Executive magazine’s cover story, “A Thousand Cuts,” by Joseph Marks, paints a graphic picture of what it is like to be in government today. Here’s a list of the various directives that direct many of these cuts.

President Obama’s Campaign to Cut Waste was launched in June 2011, but it started earlier than that. It was presaged in his 2011 State of the Union address, when he said the government needed to be reorganized. While that hasn’t happened yet, there are a number of initiatives federal managers have been inundated with to develop plans and implement. Keep reading →

The use of dashboards in the federal government took off when President Obama released his Open Government initiative in early 2009. Here’s a snapshot of where they are today, and some lessons learned from the pioneers.

Vivek Kundra is leaving the federal government after having served as its first chief information officer. Probably one of his most visible initiatives was to create the IT Dashboard which he used to publicly track the performance of information technology investments across federal agencies. There’s even a picture of President Obama studying Vivek’s on-line IT Dashboard! Keep reading →