Making Decisions in a Time of Transition

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 upon evidence? 

Announcing the IBM Center’s Visiting Fellow—Patrick Lester

Over the past decade, the federal government has systematically increased the use of evidence-based, data-driven approaches in decision making, sometimes called “Moneyball for Government.” These efforts embrace traditional fields such as program evaluation, but now include the use of open data, business analytics, and social and behavioral sciences for describing problems, predicting needs, and testing new approaches.

The IBM Center’s Research Priorities: Supporting Key Missions of Government from the Transition to a New Administration

The IBM Center for The Business of Government is committed to helping identify and distill the lessons learned from the past, identify current and new management initiatives and capacities that will be needed to address key challenges facing the country in the next administration, and offer ideas on implementation.

Enhancing Decision-Making: Helping the next administration make smart and timely 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 a presidential agenda and respond to emerging challenges.

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

The Management Roadmap: How the Next Administration Can Hit the Ground Running from Day One

On November 8, the President-elect will begin the next phase of the transition to power that culminates with Inauguration Day on January 20, 2017.  The next Administration will have a tremendous opportunity to drive change that improves mission performance across government, in ways that can positively impact millions of lives across the Nation across a broad range of mission areas – including health care for citizens, stewardship of natural resources, and delivery of benefits with financial integrity.

Analytics and Risk Management: Tools for Making Better Decisions

Decisions based on bad information can lead to poor results and be quite costly to organizations. This may culminate in the squandering of opportunities, taking on unnecessary risk, misallocating resources, and ultimately not achieving strategic goals or objectives. At a time of shrinking budgets and increasing expectations to do more with less, making better decisions based on informed judgment has taken on even more significance for both private sector and government organizations.

Making Government Work for the American People

The success of an administration can rise—and fall—based on its competence in managing the government. As history demonstrates, strong management can enable rapid and positive results, while management mistakes can derail important policy initiatives, erode public trust and undermine confidence in the government.

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