John Kamensky

John Kamensky

A Side Benefit of DATA Act.  Adam Mazmanian, Federal Computer Week, writes that the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act signed by President Obama back in May, may be an added impetus for agencies to move to financial shared services.

Since 2001, Dr. Behn has visited dozens of governmental organizations that are using the PerformanceStat model – some well, and some poorly.  His bold objective was to answer the research question of whether PerformanceStat really makes a difference in improving performance, and how it works.  In short, his answer is:  it depends, and it’s complicated.

Staffing the U.S. Digital Service Office.  According to Jason Miller, Federal News Radio: “The Office of Management and Budget today announced Mikey Dickerson will be the administrator of the U.S.

Creating Organizational Self-Defense

Gadi Ben Yehuda

State Tech Magazine publishes an article by Lindsay Crudele, Boston's digital engagement director for in their Department of Innovation and Technology, "Why Governments Should Adopt a Digital Engagement Strategy"  Related: In FCW, Colby Huchmuth asks: "Beyond BYOD: Who oversees the apps?" 

So government, by nature, oftentimes puts itself at financial or reputational risk on a regular basis. Risk is not necessarily bad. After all, avoiding risk might mean that the FAA would ground all flights to prevent crashes! So, finding ways to manage risk is essential.

work in practice? Do busy citizens actually get involved? Inspired by successful efforts in Brazil and other countries around the world, several U.S. communities have undertaken pilot efforts to allow citizens to directly decide how monies are spent in their neighborhoods. However, one of the biggest concerns raised by critics of this approach is that not enough citizens actually participate to make the efforts meaningful and legitimate. A new report for the IBM Center by Dr.

Other federal agencies also face a wide range of risks. Some are external, others are internal. Some are financial (such as having to deal with managing under Sequester or the market impact on external investments in pension funds, which could affect federal pension guarantees). Some are operational, such as those faced by FERC, or cybersecurity threats, or even insider threats. And some are reputational, such as the recent accusations of Patent Office telework abuse, or the General Services Administration’s lavish conferences scandal.

Government and non-profits have already been pioneering the use of collaborative networks over the past two decades to solve complex societal challenges such as clean waterways, reducing child abuse, serving the mentally ill in the community, and reducing smoking. Much of this pioneering work has been done without a roadmap of what works and when using networks is more effective than relying on traditional hierarchies or the marketplace to achieve public goals.

One former federal leader, Todd Grams, observes that agencies that ignore risk are actually creating risk. Not surprisingly, there has been increasing interest in agencies in recent years in developing a risk management function. So what does it look like? The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) in the Department of Education undertook efforts a decade ago to create a risk management function, which may serve as inspiration for other agencies considering the same.