The President’s fiscal year 2014 budget was released last week and emphasizes the creation of “a culture of performance improvement.”  This is also the theme of a new  IBM Center report, by University of Wisconsin professor Donald Moynihan who is a close observer of the international performance movement.

In this report, Professor Moynihan describes the evolution of the federal performance management system over the past 20 years since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA). He reports recent progress in achieving meaningful performance results within targeted pro­grams and describes anticipated future changes over the next few years as a result of the new requirements of the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010, which significantly amended the earlier law.

With Valentine’s Day approaching, there are all sorts of advice columns about improving relationships.  Well, A new IBM Center report by Dr. Jane Fountain, Implementing Cross-Agency Collaboration: A Guide for Federal Managers, offers advice on successful cross-agency relationships.  She says there is a recipe for success, but that it depends on a number of factors.

This report provides useful insights into how the government can proceed in creating effective cross-agency collaborations that can improve outcomes significantly.

IBM Center author David Witzel examines the evolution of the Internet over the past four decades in a new report, looking for lessons in the use of open project design that could be applied in other policy domains.  He explores how a wide range of autonomous, overlapping, and interconnected open projects ini­tiated by government staff, techies, entrepreneurs, and students around the world resulted in one of the most profound changes in society across the globe

Today’s conditions require government executives to go beyond simply doing more with less—to find smarter ways of doing business, using resources more efficiently, and investing them more wisely. The dramatic nature of this historical moment cannot be overstated. It is fully revealed by the depth of the vicissitudes being faced. How government leaders respond matters and the conditions require more than vague changes. It is to be understood that today’s actions affect future choices and lost opportunities result in ubiquitous costs.

Professors Jane Fedorowicz and Steve Sawyer have authored a new report, “Designing Collaborative Networks:  Lessons Learned from Public Safety,” for the IBM Center.  Their report sums up a multi-year, multi-university research effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation and others.  The broader research effort examines the evolution of public safety networks in communities across the country.  These ground-level networks link poli

The recent trends toward open economies, global supply chains, and the migration of people and intellectual and financial capital all combine to undermine the concepts of comparative advantage that have traditionally served as the underpinning of what we understand as competitiveness. For example, the design and production of a Ford Taurus or a Toyota Nissan can occur simultaneously in 40 locations around the world with a mix of geographic centers of excellence for components—some different but many the same. Based on these developments, the following questions arise:

Key 1: Live the SLA

Change does not happen quickly in government institutions. Indeed, some argue that change should not happen too swiftly—that stability is more important than agility—and government should evolve slowly and deliberately rather than shift rapidly with political agendas.