John Kamensky

John Kamensky

People First. NextGov reports: “To combat the growing skills gap metastasizing across the federal government, agency leaders should incorporate human capital strategies into their long-term strategic plans, Chris Mihm, the Government Accountability Office’s managing director for intergovernmental relations and strategic issues said in Washington Tuesday.”

For years, government policymakers encouraged workers to increase their investments in tax-free retirement savings.  But they were baffled by how many workers were leaving “free money” on the table by not signing up to participate in employer-matched 401K pension plans. However, when some companies changed their enrollment process from having workers “opting in” to the program vs. automatically enrolling them (and allowing them to opt out), enrollment rates increased by 50 percent.

John Kamensky

Joint Governance – At Last!  Federal News Network reports: “The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs said they’ve finally settled on a joint management structure to make sure the multibillion-dollar electronic health record systems they’re buying are integrated and interoperable.”

Blog Author:  Bernie Kluger

John Kamensky

Data Strategy – At Last! FCW reports: “The Trump administration on June 4 released a draft of the "Year-1 Action Plan" for implementing the federal data strategy. The plan outlines 16 steps -- some agency-specific, others governmentwide -- to "establish a firm basis of tools, processes, and capacities to leverage data as a strategic asset."

IDEA Deadlines. Federal News Network reports: “With deadlines fast approaching for the implementation of the 21^st Century Integrated Digital Experience (IDEA) Act, agency officials see a clearer path forward on making .gov websites more user-friendly and able to provide more services online to the public. . . . The IDEA Act . . .

Last year, I met Kendra Parlock, the head of Baltimore’s performance and innovation office, at a periodic informal meeting of local government performance officers in the mid-Atlantic region.  I was intrigued by her upbeat update to her fellow local government peers.  After all, in the Spring of 2017, Governing magazine raised a warning flag, questioning whether the nearly two decade-old award-winning CitiStat management system in Baltimore, installed by Martin O’Malley, was dying of

GAO’s Duplication & Overlap Report. The Government Accountability Office’s ninth annual report: “presents 98 new actions for Congress or executive branch agencies to reduce, eliminate, or better manage fragmentation, overlap, and duplication and achieve other financial benefits.”

 Interestingly, a hopeful article in Harvard Business Review concludes that in the private sector, “Employees are eager to embrace retraining” and that organizations need to take advantage of this opportunity. My guess is that this is the same in the government.