Most performance measurement efforts in government are partial: they focus on a project, policy or a few select government departments. In my experience, this approach hardly ever succeeds.
You can’t solve “horizontal” problems with “vertical” solutions, warns University of Maryland professor Don Kettl. And the country of New Zealand – a forerunner of government reforms – learned that the hard way.
About 75 percent of the federal IT budget goes to maintaining outdated legacy computer systems, according to GAO. Some are over 50 years old, yet critical – such as the main IRS tax data base and the nuclear missile launch system.
For at least three decades, politicians and the public have called for “civil service reform” without a strategic view of what that might look like. Some see it as increasing accountability, others see it as streamlining and empowering employees, while ye