IBM Center for The Business of Government

The big news for many was the announcement last week that Shelley Metzenbaum, who is the Office of Management and Budget official spearheading the Obama Administration’s performance management initiatives on a day-to-day basis, will be leaving to return home to Boston.  “She arrived with a plan and gave us a set of priorities,” notes Jeff Zients, who serves as President Obama’s chief performance officer.

In order to keep The Center for The Business of Government’s research current, we host occasional roundtable discussions with leaders from the public sector, the academic research community, and across industry; these discussions help to challenge current assumptions about what matters for government today, and to frame new areas for investigation going forward.

Sometimes we get caught up in buzzwords of the day:  Total Quality Management, Lean Six Sigma, Agile, Business Process Reengineering, or Reinventing Government.  But the bottom line in each of these types of management improvement initiatives is:  how do we create a culture of innovation?

What is “innovation?”  There are plenty of different definitions, but one I’ve found to be practical is: “New ideas, or current thinking applied in fundamentally different ways, resulting in significant change in operating models, business processes, or products and services.” 

The FOSE convention was held this month, and I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on the future of the workforce—specifically how technology is changing the work environment and will enable people to succeed within it.