John Kamensky

City police departments across the country are turning traditional police officers into “data detectives.”  Police departments across the country have adapted business techniques --  initially developed by retailers, such as Netflix and WalMart, to predict consumer behavior -- to predict criminal behavior.  A new IBM Center report, by Dr. Jennifer Bachner at Johns Hopkins University, tells compelling stories of the experiences three cities -- Santa Cruz, CA; Baltimore County, MD; and Richmond, VA – are having in using predictive policing as a new and effective tool to combat crime.

“Interagency coordination is an essential ele­ment of effective public leadership,” writes Dr. Andrea Strimling Yodsampa in a new report for the IBM Center on effective practices for interagency coordination, using U.S. civil-military coordination efforts in Afghanistan between 2001- 2009 as a case study.

The topic of performance budgeting has been talked about for decades.  Most state governments claim to be doing it.  The Government Accountability Office and others have written numerous studies about how it could and should be done at the federal level.  But the City of Baltimore has put in place an outcome-oriented budgeting system that is now in its fourth year of operation.  What does it look like?

A timely new book by veteran public finance experts at the International Monetary Fund describes how budget and finance reforms have evolved over the past two decades in more advanced countries.  While their book doesn’t contain any magic formula for success, it does provide a useful context for understanding what is going on in the field.  It also provides some poor comfort for the fact that what the U.S. is facing is not uncommon and that there may be some avenues for being more successful in the future.

But it has been a long road.  In 2011, two European academics conducted a meta-analysis of 519 studies on performance-oriented management reforms undertaken across Europe in the previous two decades to determine if they resulted in improved processes, outputs, or outcomes.  They concluded the answer was “yes,” but not a resounding “yes.”  Their analyses showed 68 percent of the studies found improvements in administrative processes and activities, 44 percent in programmatic outputs, and 53

Since the late 1950s, after the Russians launched Sputnik to the surprise of America, the federal government has promoted the development of a national workforce skilled in the sciences as a national security priority.  But the government also invests in developing similar skills for the federal workforce, given the hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, computer specialists, and doctors its employs.

The Famine Early Warning System is an interagency network among federal agencies and the United Nations that began in 1985, using scientific data to target about $1.5 billion in food aid from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to those who need it most.  Participating federal agencies include the U.S.

Dr. Rosenzweig says in his article this is not because executives don’t want to make good decisions, but rather the research has focused predominantly on one type of decision – and this type is not the one most challenging for leaders to make.

Twenty-five years ago, federal agencies typically did not have key executives leading mission support functions. These functions were largely seen as administrative transaction services. However, ineffective mission support operations can be quite costly. For example in 2010, there were $641 million in grievance settlements at the Postal Service because of poor management training and inadequate labor-management relations.