Periodically the IBM Center staff steps back and reflects on the insights provided by its authors of more than 300 research reports and by some 300 senior government executives interviewed over the past 13 years.  Through our research and interviews, we identified several broad societal trends that we believe are changing the game for successful leadership at all levels of government.

Here is a simple way of expressing value in terms that we intuitively understand:          

Globalization, increasing and asymmetric threats, technological advance, fundamental changes in demographics, amazing innovations in healthcares and emerging environmental considerations --- all are changing the world around us, our daily lives, our ecosystem and even our patterns of thinking.  

Jennifer Main(Jenni) is the Chief Financial Officer, Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the Department of the Treasury.

Prior to that she was named Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in October 2005, after serving as the Deputy Chief Financial Officer for three years. Prior to joining SBA, she was a Senior Manager with KPMG Consulting's banking practice where she worked with private and public sector financial institutions. She is also a successful entrepreneur, having started a small business in 1998 that provided financial analysis to lenders nationwide. The company was sold to a venture capital firm in 2000.

Collaboration is a way of creating institutional change. As relationships are developed among government agencies and across sectors, existing organizationalstructures, processes, and norms are changed, and new practices are adopted. In this context, collaborative work can become a catalyst for transcending existing institutional structures and approaches.

One of the aspects that makes the 2008-2009 transition sucha well thought out one is the groundwork laid by governmentactions taken to enhance national security. The Congress andthe president viewed a smooth transition a national securitynecessity and both branches took action on issues relatedto getting a new administration up and running as soon aspossible. The impetus for much of their preparatory workwas the events of September 11, 2001. The attacks on theUnited States that day had a substantial impact on the shape

Transparency is one of the current buzzwords, which is notnecessarily bad. A keystone of democracy is accountabilityand transparency, i.e., providing information is one way forthe government to be accountable. Since no one wants tolook bad, transparency can be a major impetus for programimprovement.

The most effective way to access an agency’s accountability is with information about the performance of its programs: whether and how the agency is managing its resources to avoid waste, fraud, and abuse; the important amounts in its financial statements, their significance to the agency’s programs, whether and why these amounts have changed from the prior year; and conditions, trends, events, both existing today or likely in the future.

In August 2007, five urban regions were selected by the USDOTSDOT to participate in a path-breaking federal transportation initiative. Known as the Urban Partnership program, the initiative funded a total of $1.1 billion in grants for integrated transit, highway pricing, technology, and telecommuting strategies aimed at reducing traffic congestion in major urban areas. The Minneapolis - St. Paul region was selected to receive one of the five grants.

The Department ofDefense (DoD) is one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. DoD’s budget dwarfs that of the world’s largest corporation, it employs millions of people that operate worldwide, and the Department carries orders-of-magnitude more inventory items than the largest retail corporations. Yet its business systems are far from world class; they are still based on several thousand, non-integrated, non-interoperable legacy systems.