Technology advances have become drivers and inspiration for actionable strategies to change the manner in which businesses, consumers and government organizations devise policies, make decisions and implement practical plans around energy use. The Three I's: Instrumentation, Interconnection, and Intelligence

Building Relationships and Detailed Planning Smart logistics does not merely focus on reduced savings and low-hanging fruit, but also aims to provide a roadmap for larger, transformational improvements. We have found that one way to fulfill these more substantial goals, is that organizations need to foster strong relationships with business partners and work together to thoughtfully deploy logistics solutions. The tools and ideas that we discussed in the previous blogs work well, but they must be implemented the right way. 

Once you’ve made all these changes to your procurement organization and processes, you want them to last, right? The last principle of IBM’s Smarter Spending approach, “Control”, helps organizations sustain the value found in "Visibility" and secured by the "Leverage" techniques.

The next contribution is based on a Center report by Professor James Bailey, Strengthening Control and Integrity: A Checklist for Government Managers. It follows Hardy’s piece on enterprise risk management and focuses on managing risks to strengthen the financial control and integrity process that may lead to better decision making. Taken together these two articles provide state-of-the art overviews on how governments at all levels can improve their control and risk management activities, which in turn, can lead to better decision making.

A Canadian think tank has released a report on how senior government executives can support innovation by their employees as a way of solving societal problems and delivering better value to citizens.  The report’s insights have some useful application to U.S. government executives, as well.

General James Cartwright, U.S. Marines, served as commanderof the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) from2002 to 2007 and introduced a number of innovative managementapproaches, including the use of blogging. Bloggingis an online journal of regular entries that users post andreaders can comment upon. In mid-2007, he became thevice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In June 2007, the IBM Center hosted an event on bloggingand Web 2.0 technologies. General Cartwright was asked to