John Kamensky

No, this isn’t an early Halloween blog! I had the privilege of sharing lunch with Harvard Business School’s legendary

Rosabeth Moss Kantor last week during her whirlwind tour of DC where she is promoting her latest book: “SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good.”

Last week, Senator Tom Carper held an important hearing based on a key finding from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) released last year. GAO’s 2008 report summarized a survey it conducted of agency program managers on their use of performance information.

Yesterday, Jeff Zients testified before a Senate Committee on an ambitious agenda to reform governmentwide performance management. Zients is President Obama’s Chief Performance Officer and the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget.

According to the Washington Post’s Al Kamen, “President Obama's personnel operation, which got off to a record-breaking start early this year in filling top administration jobs, has stalled a bit in recent months. In fact, it's well behind the pace set by the Bush administration in 2001 for the top 500 or so administration jobs -- and time is quickly running out to close the gap.”

Sixteen years ago in the heyday of reinventing government, if the White House wanted good ideas, it had to go look for them. The reinvention team had a team of 250 career civil servants and a network of teams in each agency that did the looking.

There’s a great lead article by Elise Castelli in this week’s Federal Times, “Feds to Empower ‘Citizen IGs’ to Watch Stimulus Spending.” This is a real experiment in the ultimate use of crowdsourcing – providing the data on spending via recovery.gov and letting on-the-ground citizens to help interpret and make sense of it in their communities.

One of the things I learned working on the Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s for Vice President Gore was that civil servants do some pretty amazing things. And they get little recognition for it. But now it's time to make government cool again!

Optimists believe that two data points constitute a trend. So here’s a trend. Ask employees why things don’t work and how to fix them!

For years, democracy advocates have promoted the notion of engaging citizens in their government. There are different ways of doing this (public hearings, debates, dialogue panels, etc), and at different points in the policy cycle (proposing, debating, implementing, reviewing, etc.).

Increasing participation in government by citizens is a key element of President Obama’s Transparency and Open Government initiative. He signed a directive his first full day in office to create guidance for agencies on how they should go about implementing the principles in the directive, but delays in appointing officials have led to a delay in the development and release of the guidance.