FY 2009 Financial and Performance Reports

If a tree falls in a forest, did it make a sound?

The November 15th release of federal department and agency annual performance and accountability reports went largely un-noticed. Not a mention in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post (even its Federal Page).

Fiscal Sanity: Lessons from Around the World

I attended the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Senior Budget Officials December 1-2 performance and results network meeting on measuring and evaluating countries' stimulus programs. The countries making presentations at this meeting were: Australia, Canada, Chile, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and United Kingdom.

I was struck by several things.

My Mission Statement

Happy New (Fiscal) Year 2010!

Have you made your New Year's Resolution yet? If not, here is an idea . . .

When I was working for Vice President Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government in the 1990s, we were encouraged to craft personal mission statements.

My personal mission statement for more than a decade has been to “help create a government that is results-oriented, performance-based, citizen-focused, and collaborative in nature.”

Five Actions to Improve Military Hospital Performance

This, combined with concerns about adequacy in direct health care support for the readiness mission and quality, has led Congress to direct a major overhaul of the direct care system in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2017, signed into law December 23, 2016.

Tiered Evidence Grants - An Assessment of the Education Innovation and Research Program

Early-stage innovations receive smaller grants; mid-level programs with promising evidence receive larger grants; and initiatives with substantial evidence of success in multiple settings are expanded nationally and receive the largest grants.

Interagency Performance Targets: A Case Study of New Zealand’s Results Programme

New Zealand has been a beacon for government reforms for almost three decades. While the New Public Management Reforms of the late 1980s made agencies more efficient and responsive, they also created a new problem; agencies struggled to organize effectively around problems that crossed agency boundaries. New Zealand undertook a new round of reform in 2012 to address ten important and persistent crosscutting problems.

Performance Partnership Pilots: Increasing Program Flexibility to Improve Outcomes

As part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2014, Congress authorized a limited number of local projects targeted to assisting disconnected youth. The Performance Partnership Pilots program currently involves participation from seven different federal departments or agencies and is administered by the Department of Education.

Call for Research Proposals 2015-2016

The IBM Center for The Business of Government connects research to practice, merging real world experience with practical scholarship. The intent is to spark the imagination—crafting new ways of thinking about government by identifying trends, new ideas, and best practices in public management that can help government executives respond more effectively to their mission and management priorities.

More than two years ago, the IBM Center for The Business of Government put forward a research agenda that identified six trends driving change in government:

Creating a Balanced Portfolio of Information Technology Metrics

Information technology has made possible the availability of real-time data and the tools to display that data, such as dashboards, scorecards, and heat maps. This has boosted the use of data and evidence by government decision makers in meeting their agency and program missions. But what about the use of performance metrics by agency chief information officers themselves?

Strategies to Manage Well Given Scarce Resources

The Center has published a variety of reports and related materials that provide ways for government to succeed in the face of constraints. Accordingly, we have brought key findings on this topic together in this compilation, found in the upper left-hand portion of the page, or as individual articles:

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