IBM Center for The Business of Government

We are pleased to announce our latest round of awards for new reports on key public sector challenges, which respond to priorities identified in the Center's research agenda. Our content is intended to stimulate and accelerate the production of practical research that benefits public sector leaders and managers.

We expect the following reports to be published later in 2017.  Short summaries of each report follow:

Increasingly, Supreme Audit Institutions in most countries (e.g., the US Government Accountability Office, the UK’s National Audit Office) are allocating a greater share of their resources in order to conduct Performance Audits of government entities. Yet serious academic work examining the methodological foundations of Performance Auditing is conspicuous by its absence in the extant literature on Performance Auditing. In what follows, I will argue that it is time to rethink the Performance Audit Methodology and offer a possible way forward.

Michael Keegan

Trump's pick for OMB sounds enthusiastic about the Data Act. Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) stressed the importance of getting accurate and useful data in order to inform his and President Donald Trump's decision-making during his confirmation hearings to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

AI is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of capabilities that allow a computer system to perform tasks normally done by humans. Many people are also familiar with the term Cognitive Computing. Cognitive leverages several AI components, such as Machine Learning, to understand, reason, and learn much like the human brain. Cognitive complements Artificial Intelligence, enabling computers to both think like humans and understand how humans think. Current AI systems and subsystems are able to learn, make decisions, and solve complex problems.