IBM Center for The Business of Government

Guest Blogger:  Alayna Kennedy, with Tatiana Sokolova, and Claude Yusti

Government leaders and stakeholders find that agencies would benefit from increased sharing of effective practices and lessons learned.

The Wright Brothers pursuit of flight is chock-full of leadership lessons – the dos and don'ts perhaps – that are as useful for today’s leaders as ever.  Many of these lessons and insights can be gleaned from historian David McCullough’s book on the Wright Brothers. Typical leadership books prescribe sets of actions or admonish readers to follow specific effective qualities.

One path to address this imperative involves a buying reform widely used in the commercial world and other countries – notably the United Kingdom – called “category management.”   Given its potential for driving reform and reducing unnecessary spending, category management is increasingly seen as one of the U.S. federal government’s top Cross-Agency Priority Goals.

Regarding technology modernization, U.S. federal agencies have fallen behind that they will have to work aggressively just to catch up with basic private sector practice. On many levels, inertia has long plagued government IT, slowing modernization, and preventing the federal government from achieving IT advances and efficiencies commonplace in the private sector. However, things are beginning to change.  New legislation, funding opportunities, and technologies are here to turn the tide.