ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

Performance & Management

Biden Administration Issues New Guidance Instructing Agencies to Start Tracking Goals Again

Eric Katz, Nextgov

White House reversed last-minute Trump policy to end the practice of developing and monitoring agency objectives.

Lessons From 30 Years of Government Reform Efforts

John Kamensky & Dan Chenok, Government Executive 

There’s much that newcomers to government should learn from the past.

Agencies Face Significant Challenges in Distributing Unprecedented Sums of COVID-19 Relief

Eric Katz, Government Executive

Some agencies are already running into hurdles, while others hope recent experience will ease the process.

The big secret of high-performing agencies

Tom Temin, Federal News Network

Sustaining the motivation for public service is key.

Open Data and Analytics

HHS data collection and sharing continues to evolve with the pandemic

Dave Nyczepir, FedScoop

COVID-19 data collection and sharing has changed throughout the pandemic at HHS to meet the needs of agencies, hospitals, industry and the public, said Kevin Duvall, acting chief data officer, Thursday.

One Year into the Pandemic, Defense Department Data Remains Incomplete

Elizabeth Howe, Government Executive

Outstanding questions include: why are civilians dying at higher rates than troops?

Performance and Management

The Business Case for Investing in Human Capital Management

Howard Risher, Government Executive

The payoff will be improved agency performance—and the gains could be significant.

OPM Modernization is Critical to Building the Federal Workforce the Nation Needs

Terry Gerton and Janet Hale, Government Executive

Rigid and outdated hiring, pay and performance policies and practices are hurting government’s capacity to respond to urgent problems.

How the Pandemic Has Impacted Grants Management

Jeff Myers, Government Executive

A new survey shows that administrative costs have spiked, while funding agencies struggle to measure outcomes.

Open Data and Analytics

Biden Creates Road Map for Equitable State and Local Data

Daniel Castro, Government Technology

Data from marginalized communities is often underreported, meaning their needs are hidden from policymakers. President Biden’s initial actions on equitable data pave a path for state and local governments to follow.

Upskill and tell the story of the data

Peter Musurlian, Federal News Network

A mastery of data literacy could mean a workforce that generates better planning and better decisions.

TMF to fund Labor Dept. data project

Natalie Alms, FCW

The Technology Modernization Fund doled out its first project of 2021 the day after getting $1 billion in the Biden administration’s Rescue Plan legislation.

The Future of AI and Intelligent Automation at Agencies

Phil Goldstein, FedTech

Agencies can go beyond robotic process automation and use artificial intelligence tools to handle more complex tasks.

Opportunity to reskill federal workforce for AI jobs ‘underutilized,’ panel warns Congress

Jory Heckman, Federal News Network

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence is warning that the federal government, at all levels, doesn’t have the workforce it needs to stay on top of this emerging technology.

Government Innovation

GSA kicks off two-year effort to innovate service contracting beyond OASIS

Jason Miller, Federal News Network

The new approach to services contracting aims to shake things up in a way the federal contacting community hasn’t seen in at least five years.

Customer Experience

Digital Government Is Only Successful If It Works for All

Noelle Knell, Government Technology

Government is tasked with the hefty responsibility of doing the people’s business, but what happens when people can’t access services or online systems fail?

A prescription for restoring some of the trust in government

Tom Temin, Federal News Network

Trust has been declining for decades. And the pandemic really blew a hole in that balloon. With more on the survey and some clues to restoring trust, Deloitte’s Executive Director for Government Insights Bill Eggers spoke to Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Government agencies harness RPA ‘bots’ to build capacity, improve services

FedScoop

Federal and state government workers are beginning to benefit from a growing army of digital robots designed to streamline agency workloads and quicken the delivery of public services.

Government vaccine customer experience a mixed bag

Tom Temin, Federal News Network

The speed at which the industry developed vaccines in conjunction with the Operation Warp Speed program was a huge success. The distribution, not so much, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did develop a distribution plan last fall. 

Performance and Management

We Already Have the Tool We Need to Get the Most Out of Federal Contractors

Greg Giddens, Mike Smith and Jim Williams, Government Executive

It’s called CPARS, and we’re just not using it the way we should.

GAO: Federal Human Capital Management has Regressed Over Last Two Years

Erich Wagner, Government Executive

The government watchdog agency faulted a lack of leadership at OPM for the failure to address gaps in critical skills and other federal workforce issues.

Open Data and Analytics

GSA making interagency data and cloud collaboration easier mid-pandemic

Dave Nyczepir, FedScoop

The COVID-19 pandemic has the General Services Administration thinking about how it can reduce barriers to interagency collaboration around data and the cloud.

Data-Driven Ways to Maximize City Budgets Post-Pandemic

Stephen Goldsmith, Government Technology

Officials predict city budgets will be cut anywhere from 15 to 40 percent in the next year. The best way to do more with less is to use data as a tool to find out what works and where there’s opportunity to save.

Disparate agencies encountering similar lessons, pitfalls in prioritizing AI efforts

David Thornton, Federal News Network

As more agencies begin exploring how artificial intelligence can benefit their missions, one question keeps coming up: how to prioritize the potential use cases to get the best return on investment, and best serve their constituents?

Can Good Data Improve Policing and Prevent Excessive Force?

Jed Pressgrove, Government Technology

The police force of Durham, N.C., has teamed up with SAS Institute to create a data system that will put a spotlight on exemplary police work and reveal cases where officers may need training or counseling.

AI Is Killing Choice and Chance – Which Means Changing What It Means to Be Human

Nir Eisikovits and Dan Feldman, Nextgov

Artificial intelligence increasingly shapes the human experience.

Open Government and Innovation

Smaller Federal Agencies Are the Tip of the Spear for Innovation

James Langley, FedTech

Smaller federal agencies (those with under 6,000 employees) drive many critical national operations. However, those agencies are often subject to tighter budgets and fewer resources than their big agency counterparts

Performance & Management

GovExec Daily: Ten Years of Federal Performance Management

Adam Butler, Ross Gianfortune, Government Executive

Georgetown’s Dr. Donald Moynihan joins the podcast to discuss the reasons for optimism after a decade of the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act.

Open Data and Analytics

Federal Data Service looks to borrow from success of agency dashboard projects

Dave Nyczepir, FedScoop

The under-development Federal Data Service is set to focus on accelerating agencies’ data maturity with dashboard projects, like those the U.S. Department of Agriculture has undertaken the past few years.

Open Government and Innovation

Machine learning speeding up patent classifications at USPTO

Dave Nyczepir, FedScoop

Machine learning is helping the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shorten the time it takes to assign patent applications to examiners, instead of having to redo its entire classification process, according to CIO Jamie Holcombe.

Air Force picks 15 airmen-designed projects to automate menial tasks

Jackson Barnett, FedScoop

The Air Force’s Vice Chief’s Challenge yielded 15 winning ideas based on technology to help automate menial tasks and give airmen new opportunities to get their hands on code.

Pandemic has spawned all sorts of government innovations, and not all at the federal level

Tom Temin, Federal Drive, FNN

The IBM Center for the Business of Government has put together a series of essays that examine the lessons learned and the innovation success. Leadership Fellow Michael Keegan joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin with some of the findings.

Virtual Tools Allow Agencies to Onboard New Workers from a Distance

Heather B. Hayes, FedTech

Some of the practices are so efficient that they may become a permanent part of the hiring process

Performance and Management

How to Address the Question Every Program Manager Should Answer: Does It Work?

John Kamensky, Government Executive

In one of his first actions, President Biden encouraged agency heads to support “evidence-building plans,” more commonly called “learning agendas.” Here’s the back story.

The Next Steps in Performance Management are Critical

Janet A. Weiss, Government Executive

The Biden administration should restore and stimulate performance management across the executive branch, encouraging managers doing the hard work of improvement.

Open Data and Analytics

Want better policy? Give more support to federal statistics agencies

Tom Temin, Federal News Network

Without reliable data about industry, about agriculture, about the U.S. population, it’s impossible to form good public policy, much less have a meaningful debate about it. Supplying that data falls to a collection of federal organizations known as the statistical agencies.

How Computer Vision Is Helping Agencies See Their Mission Objectives More Clearly

Ryan Luckay & Gretchen Stewart,  FedTech

Computer vision takes image processing a step further and provides agencies with deep and potentially critical insights.

It’s a fact: Government relies on statistics

Tom Temin, Federal News Network

Nearly every policy decision the government makes is based on statistics.

4 Data Analytics Trends to Watch in 2021

Michael Gormley, Nextgov

Expect more live data dashboards and APIs as a key enabler.

AI Could Quicken Disease Diagnoses and Save Lives

Randy Barrett, FedTech

NIH, DOD and VA are working to add artificial intelligence to pathology and radiology protocols.

Government Innovation

How Forward-Thinking Investments Will Build the Future of Digital Government

Jeremy M. Goldberg, Nextgov

To succeed, governments must create long-term integrated plans that encompass enterprise architecture, funding and policy support.

Why Too Many Government Modernization Efforts Fail

Nina Kern, Government Executive

Technology “solutions” almost never address the organizational issues critical to success.

Customer Experience

How to Use Analytics Data and Smart Experiments to Optimize Agency Services

Piotr Korzeniowski and Ben Rometsch

Those searching for more ways to improve citizens’ digital experiences should look toward setting up experiments and a testing culture to optimize results over time.