Reinventing Government

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Reinventing Government

Fire All the Managers

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 - 17:10
By: 
John M. Kamensky
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 - 16:07
Hamel says “management is the least efficient activity in your organization.”  He says direct management costs in most organizations account for about one-third of the payroll and that “management is expensive.”
1 comments
Denise

So nice to finally read an article that is a real possible option for saving (cutting) money from bureaucracy and layers in government. It will take a direct order from the White House to get the government executives to cut those layers upon layers they've built up since the reinvention days of yore.

12/07/2011 - 00:24
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Improving Customer Service

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 - 9:24
By: 
John M. Kamensky
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - 08:20
In the 1990s, the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government effort thought the answer was “yes.”  President Clinton issued a customer service executive order in 1993 followed up in 1995 with a memo to institutionalize the initiative.
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Regulatory Partnerships: Good or Bad? (Part 1)

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 - 13:55
By: 
John M. Kamensky
Tuesday, September 28, 2010 - 13:53
Three recent IBM Center reports present a different perspective, showing the value of regulatory partnerships.  These reports offer lessons learned on how to create and effectively maintain regulatory partnerships so they don’t result in the failures highlighted in a penetrating Washington Post article “
2 comments

John,
There is an overlooked obstacle to improving compliance with regulations on safety, environment, drugs, and other issues. It is that, while the regulators are experts on their subject matter, too few have any experience on the public's side of the regulations (the receiving end). This lack of understanding of the business world, especially small business, leads them to write rules that the regulated do not understand. Similarly, with regards to benefit programs, the rules may be too difficult for potential beneficiaries to grasp. It brings to mind the Biblical injunction against putting a stumbling block before the blind. -- Ed Stern

09/29/2010 - 09:29
JKamensky

Hi Ed - You're right! And what's timely is that the Senate passed the Plain Writing Act earlier this week. The House has already passed similar legislation. Maybe the two bills will be reconciled after Congress returns from the mid-term elections since support for this is bipartisan.

Asking citizens to voluntarily comply means they have to understand what they are to comply with!

John Kamensky

09/30/2010 - 16:09
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John M. Kamensky

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 - 12:46
Mr. Kamensky is a Senior Fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government and an Associate Partner with IBM's Global Business Services. During 24 years of public service, he had a significant role in helping pioneer the federal government's performance and results orientation. Mr. Kamensky is passionate about helping transform government to be more results-oriented, performance-based, customer-driven, and collaborative in nature.


Related links

Business of Government Blog
Presidential Transition 2008-2009 Blog
John's Published Articles


This expert has

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Defense Reform: The Gates Speech

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 - 13:31
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - 13:14
Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a much-ballyhooed speech this past week about the urgent need to cut defense spending by at least $15 billion. It is worth reading!   Government Executive editor Tom Shoop featured it in three separate blog posts (Part One,
1 comments

Decide if IT is management or money for the next
fiscal year. Then decide on the smart system from
IBM.
Respectfully
Dr Ricky Brown MD
IBM

07/14/2010 - 16:54
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Calling on Corporate Leaders: Now vs. Then

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 - 16:25
The White House sponsored a forum last week of about 50 corporate executives to seek  insights about how to successfully transform large organizations.  These included the leaders of Facebook, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, and Whirlpool.
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Reinventing Saudi Arabia

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 - 16:18
David Osborne, of Reinventing Government fame, keynoted today's session at the Saudi conference on public administration.  He said there are two sets of reforms running in parallel across the globe today.  The first focuses on getting the basics right: a professional public service, rule of law, prosecuting corruption, a transparent budget and contracting system, etc.  A key to this appro
2 comments
M. L. Johnson

In my experience, "customer driven", is not an easy goal to define in Government nor is it an easy "value" instilled in the culture and it's DNA, even harder to have that DNA to outlive one agencies leadership cycle to make it to the next. Difficult but not impossible I feel.

Reading your blog today was refreshing. The 5 C's are seeds of thought for me to revisit implementations past of parts of Agencies that succeeded to some extents and withered in others.

Again from my perspective, for "it" to "take" now, better intentional strategic implementation planning including more and better use of informal leaders in an organization could stand a great chance of the DNA being instilled into the culture.

I am glad to hear and see that Peters and Osborne are still at it.

11/04/2009 - 22:35
John Kamensky

Yeah, the "customer" element can be difficult to translate in government programs, especially regulatory and law enforcement. The rule of thumb I learned was that just saying "the public" is the customer isn't a good answer, that you need to be able to look whoever is the intended customer in the eye when you deliver a government service.

11/05/2009 - 23:55
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Dispatch from Saudi Arabia

Monday, November 2nd, 2009 - 16:04
I'm in Riyadh this week, blogging from afar at a conference on public administration.  The exotic is in the small things – Google comes up in Arabic with the scroll bar on the left and there's an arrow painted on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing to Mecca.
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Recognizing Civil Servants

Friday, September 18th, 2009 - 12:41
One of the things I learned working on the Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s for Vice President Gore was that civil servants do some pretty amazing things.  And they get little recognition for it.  But now it's time to make government cool again!
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Will UK Government Reforms Inspire Obama?

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 - 13:46
Some of the initiatives undertaken in the early days of the Clinton-Gore reinventing government initiative were inspired by reforms underway in Britain. This included customer service standards, performance contracts, audited financial statements. That might well happen again!
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