John Kamensky

I’m back from my first visit to Saudi Arabia. I can’t say I saw any camels, but I did seen plenty of McDonalds and Starbucks! Conference participants were treated royally and we were treated with great hospitality, including an outdoor banquet with traditional Arabic sword dancing.

While the conference was seen as an international celebration of the Saudi Institute of Public Administration’s 50^th anniversary, it became clear at the final closing session that this was also a serious event for them.

David Osborne, of Reinventing Government fame, keynoted today's session at the Saudi conference on public administration. He said there are two sets of reforms running in parallel across the globe today. The first focuses on getting the basics right: a professional public service, rule of law, prosecuting corruption, a transparent budget and contracting system, etc.

I'm in Riyadh this week, blogging from afar at a conference on public administration. The exotic is in the small things – Google comes up in Arabic with the scroll bar on the left and there's an arrow painted on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing to Mecca.

Yesterday I highlighted Jeff Zients’ testimony before the Senate Budget Committee’s Task Force on Government Performance. But there were two other witnesses who provided some interesting insights, and Senator Mark Warner offered a glimpse of where the Task Force might be heading.

OMB Chief Performance Office Jeff Zients testified today before the Senate Budget Committee’s new Task Force on Government Performance. He laid out a set of five key principles OMB will follow in developing a governmentwide performance management system.

OMB yesterday released its latest guidance on federal acquisition. This new guidance, Increasing Competition and Structuring Contracts for the Best Results, provides guidelines for agencies to move to more competitive and lower risk types of contracts, along with semi-annual reports on progress.

Noted business author Tom Davenport has an article, “Make Better Decisions,” in the November issue of Harvard Business Review . He describes the prevalence, in the business world, of what he calls “decision-making disorder,” but this also has real applicability to government.

This past summer the spectacle of unruly congressional town hall meetings on health care reform played across the media.

The Senate Budget Committee has created a new Task Force on Government Performance, according to a press release issued this morning. To be led by Senator Mark Warner, the task force “will examine the federal government’s management framework and identify opportunities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of federal programs and services.”

WFED’s Jason Miller reports that the Office of Management and Budget wants to change its stripes and “move away from command and control toward a focus on collaboration.”