Accountability and Performance Weekly – July 20-26, 2013

Posted on August 2, 2013 by aspacap

Analytics/Evaluation
How Non-Profits and Foundations Support Evidence-Based Government
John Kamensky, Business of Government
Non-profits, foundations, and universities are enthused by government’s growing interest in the use of evidence and evaluation. They are chiming in with either support for government initiatives or undertaking their own.
The launch of J-PAL North America: An interview with Lawrence Katz, Harvard University
Andy Feldman, GovInnovator Blog
The Jamal Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL, was established in 2003 at MIT and is today a global network of researchers who use randomized evaluations to answer important questions within anti-poverty policy.

Efficiency/Reorganization
Multiprong support comes for strategic sourcing
Mark Rockwell, Federal Computer Week
Legislation and a new GSA contract could bolster practices intended to amplify federal buying power.

Leadership
VA, OPM implement promising practices for next generation of SESers
Jason Miller, Federal News Radio
A new report by the Partnership for Public Service and McKinsey and Company found inconsistencies among agencies in how they recruit and develop their SESers. That lack of standardized leadership development is causing some to question whether senior executives will be prepared to replace long-time managers.
Report: New Urgency for Building Pipeline of Future Leaders
Charles Clark, GovExec
The expected retirement of two-thirds of the Senior Executive Service in the next five years makes urgent the task of building a federal leadership pipeline.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Accountability and Performance Weekly – July 20-26, 2013
Performance Management
DorobekInsider
A roundtable discussion with five experts in government management, including Chris Mihm, on management challenges in the federal government, the administration’s management agenda, and what managers can do to manage and inspire better public service.
 
Analytics/Evaluation
John Kamensky, Business of Government
The federal government is not the sole player in the growing movement toward the use of evidence and evaluation in the policy decision-making process.
Sean Reilly, Federal Times
From weather predictions to chasing fraudsters, agencies and their partners are placing far more focus on collecting and crunching massive volumes of data to improve operations and performance.
 
Collaboration
Jason Miller, Federal News Radio
The Office of Personnel Management and the American Federation of Government Employees are teaming up to change the state of governmentwide mentoring and knowledge sharing. OPM and AFGE are speeding up progress on a year-long initiative to create a governmentwide mentoring hub.
Jeffrey Edgell, Federal Computer Week
Best practices to help the government overcome obstacles to sharing information.

Innovation
Emily Jarvis, GovLoop
Philadelphia has hired its first ever Director of Civic Technology. San Francisco, Boston and New York already have them. But what exactly do they do? And what about cities that can’t afford to have their own Civic Innovation Officers or Innovation hubs?
InnovateGov
DARPA takes potentially overwhelming and dazzling concepts but envisions them as concrete projects with palpable milestones. It also selects and scopes projects with a series of seven questions.
 
Open Government
Cogan Schneier, Federal News Radio
The new design for Data.gov, the website that offers a public portal into government data, should make it easier to access and use government data.
Gadi Ben-Yehuda, Government Executive
The benefits of opening data stores to consumers.
 
Posted on July 19, 2013 by aspacap | Comments Off on Accountability and Performance Weekly
Performance Management
Jason Miller, Federal News Radio
President Barack Obama met with his mostly new Cabinet Monday to detail how he wants agencies to continue improving federal services, making the government more efficient and opening up federal data to the public.
 
Adam Mazmanian, Federal Computer Week
White House plans to leverage Cabinet, OMB director and innovation fellows for smarter government management.
 
John Kamensky, Business of Government
A recent GAO report on the executive branch’s approach to new requirements in the Government Performance and Results Act recommends that “OMB improve the implementation of the act.” But a sub-theme in the report describes how agencies are actually building a long-term, solid foundation for a performance-driven government.
 
Emily Jarvis, GovLoop
Interview with Jitinder Kohli on how the GPRA Modernization Act is changing performance management within the federal government.
 
Analytics
Natalie Lauri, Federal Computer Week
Although most managers report that taking stock of their program performance is helpful, they’re not doing it very often.
 
John Kamensky, Business of Government
OMB’s guidance to agencies on the development of their FY 2015 budgets promises that “OMB will issue a separate memo at a later date that encourages the increased use of evidence and evaluation, including rigorous testing of innovative strategies to build new knowledge of what works.” This encouragement comes on top of a foundation already under development in many agencies.
 
John Kamensky, Business of Government
The Obama Administration has built on efforts from the Bush Administration to embed the use of evidence and evaluation in making funding decisions. There are now four different types of initiatives underway, or proposed, in a range of federal agencies.
 
Efficiency/Reorganization
Andy Feldman, GovInnovator Blog
Continually improving service delivery is a critical ability for high-performing public agencies at the federal, state and levels — whether it’s innovating to better meet program participants’ needs, increasing efficiency, and solving problems in service delivery. A concept that public managers have borrowed from the private sector to improve service delivery is Lean Six Sigma.
 
Innovation
Stephen Goldsmith, Better, Faster, Cheaper
Some cities are finding ways to create the urgency and political will to produce permanent pipelines of innovation.
 
Posted on July 13, 2013 by aspacap | Comments Off on
Performance and Accountability Weekly: June 15 to 28, 2013
 
Performance Management
Cogan Schneier, Federal News Radio
Agency leaders must do more to fully implement provisions of the GPRA Modernization Act, according to a new report from GAO. Includes excerpts from, and a link to, an interview with Robert Shea, a former performance executive at OMB. 
 
Charles Clark, Government Executive
Though the Obama administration has made progress implementing the 2010 update to the central federal management performance law, agency managers continue to face obstacles in measuring improvements and the Office of Management and Budget has delayed issuing needed guidance, a new audit found.
 
Cory Bennett, FedScoop
Federal agencies still have ways to go in creating satisfactory performance metrics and making that information accessible and useful, a new report from the Government Accountability Office found.
 
Stephen Goldsmith, Better Faster, Cheaper
Louisville, Ky., is showing how a performance metrics initiative can transform a government’s operational culture.
 
Analytics
John Kamensky, Business of Government
There is a small, but growing effort to take a longer, more strategic look at how to manage austerity by finding what works and targeting dollars there instead of to programs that cannot demonstrate effectiveness.
 
John Bridgeland and Peter Orszag, The Atlantic
How a new era of fiscal scarcity could make Washington work better
 
Collaboration
Andy Feldman, GovInnovator Blog
Interview with Theresa Reno-Weber, Chief of Performance Improvement with the City of Louisville on initiatives to strengthen the city’s ability to improve on results and address challenges that span traditional agency silos.
 
Efficiency/Reorganization
Adam Mazmanian, Federal Computer Week
Montana’s junior senator has taken the helm of a new subcommittee overseeing the efficiency and effectiveness of federal programs.
 
Dan Chenok, Business of Government
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on June 18 entitled “Reinventing Government”. Several leaders with great experience in Federal government leadership and management issues presented testimony and engaged in an extensive discussion with the Committee on both the general topic, and on the proposal for a Commission on Government Transformation.
 
Innovation
Michael Fletcher, Washington Post
Six states are moving to develop so-called social impact bonds, marking a broad expansion of an experiment that taps private investors to fund capital-hungry social programs.
 
Frank Konkel, Federal Computer Week
A new group of private-sector leading lights has been assembled to try to outdo last year’s class.
 
Open Government
Emily Jarvis, GovLoop
Interview with Hudson Hollister, Executive Director for the Data Transparency Coalition, on the administration’s Open Data Directive, which was released in May.
 
Emily Jarvis, GovLoop
Interview with Dennis D. McDonald, who has written a white paper on web-based performance metrics, “Developing Digital Strategies for Web-based Public Access.”
 
Posted on June 28, 2013 by aspacap | Comments Off on Performance and Accountability Weekly – June 15 to 28, 2013
Government Performance Community of Practice Update for May 18 to 24, 2013
 
This list, as well as lists from past weeks and other resources, is also available through the Performance CoP wiki athttp://wiki.gao.gov/wiki/index.php/Government_Performance_Community_of_Practice.
 
Performance Management
Adam Mazmanian, Federal Computer Week
Federal CIO will take over while a permanent replacement for Jeffrey Zients is found.
 
Jason Miller, Federal News Radio
The Office of Management and Budget is finalizing a new directive to change federal financial management processes.
 
Analytics
Stephen Goldsmith, Better, Faster, Cheaper
The ever-growing volume of information created and captured by the modern digitized world is an opportunity for government to reinvent itself.
 
Mark Rockwell, Federal Computer Week
Big data isn’t the deep well of critical information it’s cracked up to be if the person or systems peering into it don’t know what they’re looking for.

Efficiency/Reorganization
Molly Bernhart Walker, FierceGovernment
GAO’s annual report on overlap and duplication identifies 380 actions to make government more efficient. Despite White House efforts to make meaningful progress in this area, it is hamstrung, said GAO Comptroller General Eugene Dodaro.
 
John Kamensky, Business of Government
Benjamin Franklin famously said that “time is money.” But does government know how to implement this maxim seriously? Now there is a new study that shows how they can do it!
 
Amber Corrin, Federal Computer Week
A GAO report, echoing longstanding criticisms, diagnoses the causes of DOD’s sputtering modernization progress.
 
Charles Prow, ICM Center for the Business of Government
Through fast government, public-sector leaders make time a key performance metric in government efficiency and effectiveness initiatives—time saved by streamlining operations, improving the quality of government services, and reducing barriers to citizen engagement.
 
Open Government
Adam Mazmanian, Federal Computer Week
U.S. CTO Todd Park believes the government’s Digital Government Strategy will create a ‘treasure trove’ of economic opportunity. One year in, that benefit is in short supply, but other gains are emerging.
 
Emily Jarvis, GovLoop
An interview with Sheila Campbell, the Director for Excellence in Digital Government at GSA, on how Challenge.gov is a place where government and the public can come together in an innovative way.
 
Posted on May 24, 2013 by aspacap | Comments Off on Government Performance Community of Practice Update for May