Management

In January 2017, the next administration will begin the hard work of implementing the President’s priorities. Regardless of the specific policies, implementation in many cases will require working across agency boundaries. By taking an “enterprise government” approach – starting in the transition and continuing into the White House – the next administration can deliver on their promises more effectively.

Incident reporting systems are an integral part of many agencies’ operations. For example, the Veterans Health Administration collects data on incidences of errors made during surgeries, the Food Safety and Inspection Service collects data on incidences of errors in meat inspection plants, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration collects data on incidences of work­place injuries.

In our 2011 report on analytics use in the federal government, "From Data to Decisions: The Power of Analytics," we wrote about the tremendous budget pressures federal agencies face at a time when there is great public demand for government to be more effective and efficient. This report’s release sparked an overwhelmingly positive response from agency leaders and federal performance management practitioners who asked, “Where do we go from here?

The transition from campaign to governing requires that presidential policies be transformed from rhetoric into an actionable agenda and then into concrete results. Neither good policies nor sound investments are likely to work, let along succeed, if undermined by poor implementation. Too often, however, federal management issues are considered somewhere between “uninteresting” and “a waste of time.” The reason: Washington is a policy town. If you are focused on politics or policy, “management” is often ignored or simply left for someone else to figure out.

Government leaders are deluged with thousands of streams of data about the performance of their agencies and programs.

One approach the Obama administration has latched onto to make sense out of the deluge of data is the use of on-line “dashboards” of performance data that track the key performance metrics of various federal agencies and programs.  The administration has touted the benefits of dashboards as a way of organizing and filtering performance data so it makes sense to decision makers so they can understand and act on it.

Periodically the IBM Center staff steps back and reflects on the insights provided by its authors of more than 300 research reports and by some 300 senior government executives interviewed over the past 13 years.  Through our research and interviews, we identified several broad societal trends that we believe are changing the game for successful leadership at all levels of government.

The IBM Center for The Business of Government hosted a forum in November 2009 to examine the Obama Administration's themes for a high-performing government and to frame a public management research agenda.

Participants included nearly 50 of the nation's top public management researchers, scholars, and distinguished practitioners. The forum was an effort to help bridge the gap between research and practice, and to collectively develop a research agenda that would help government executives move things forward.

Professors Cassell and Hoffmann observe that the public debate to date over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has focused primarily on the policy issues involved, with significantly less attention paid to operational issues. Their report focuses on the challenges the federal government now faces in implementing a series of financial relief programs. To gain insight into how the federal government might act upon these operational challenges, they took an historical look at how the federal government responded to previous financial crises.

Carefully monitoring and managing chronic conditions, such as diabetes, is a critical component in reducing emergency care and hospital stays.