OMB

It is not clear if the Obama Administration is providing strategic advice to agencies on how to cope with the various management initiatives it has underway or is in the process of launching, but the newly-redesignated Chief Operating Officers in departments and key agencies should quickly see the connections among them, and leverage them to their advantage. 

Here’s one example of what the review found:

A Pipe Dream? 

President Obama’s February 2011 directive, “Administrative Flexibility, Lower Costs, and Better Results for State, Local, and Tribal Governments” instructed agencies to identify opportunities to streamline, reduce, or eliminate administrative requirements imposed on states and localities, and develop a plan of action in 180 days (August 26).  I summed it up in an earlier blog post.  OMB was to produce guidanc

We had no idea what he was talking about when he was describing the Virtual Department of Mary Washington (one of his constituents when he was the senator from Tennessee).  But he was just ahead of his time (and clearly ahead of where the federal government was in the early 1990s).  Since then, several countries have tried to create virtual agencies, most notably Canada, Australia, and Belgium.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed the state of the art in developing and using comprehensive indicator systems in its 2004 report, “Informing Our Nation: Improving How to Understand and Assess the USA's Position and Progress.”  That report sparked an initiative by the National Academies of Science, with the support of several non-profit foundations, to explore the feasibility of developing a national indicator system.  This led to the creation of a non-profit, State of the USA,

Back in 1993, reformers thought that if agencies developed strategic plans, operating plans, and measures of progress, that decision makers would use the resulting information to manage better.  That didn’t work.  In 2001, the Bush Administration thought that if a scorecard of more discrete performance information at the program level was created, that decision makers would use it to manage better.  That didn’t work either.  In fact, a recent article in Public Administration Review by professors Donald Mo

Newcomer’s insight at the Brookings Institution forum on improving government performance was reinforced by OMB deputy director Jeff Zients’ keynote address – where he discussed his new responsibility to lead the effort to reorganize government functions.  He did not address the performance agenda.

So Where Is Waldo?

In the past month, I’ve participated in more than a half dozen forums related to the new law, and gotten feedback from colleagues about the forums that I just wasn’t able to make in person.