collaborative networks

Little did I realize that the future would come so quickly, with President Obama’s announcement that he was appointing Ron Klain as the Ebola Czar! Klain, who was chief of staff for both vice president Al Gore and Joe Biden, was a key player in the implementation of the Recovery Act.

The forum on the Recovery Act, Five Years Later was kicked off by Klain’s former point person, Ed DeSeve, who in 2009 and 2010 led the day-to-day efforts to coordinate the oversight of $787 billion in spending across 26 major federal agencies via more than 200 programs.

Cross –agency collaboration is a critical element to solving many of the hardest challenges that government faces in providing effective services to citizens.  In his report, “The Next Government of the United States,” noted public administration scholar Don Kettl writes that “effective 21^st century government requires new mechanisms for coordinating government agencies to ensure they can connect organically as they seek to solve the manifest problems they confront.”

Former Vice Presidential National Security Advisor Leon Fuerth, working with Evan Faber, has released a white paper that has been a decade in the making.  The paper describes how the federal government is increasingly facing challenges of greater complexity that demand faster action than the current institutional structures can respond to effectively.

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 since the

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 police, emergency

In 2013 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) embarked on an ambitious effort to modernize its information technology infrastructure, transforming from an agency with 207 different IT systems to one with a cloud-based common data platform that would play a signifi- cant role in creating a more dynamic and agile enterprise.

These are very important questions and a recent IBM Center report,Effective Leadership in Network Collaboration: Lessons Learned from Continuum of Care Homeless Programs tackles these questions by examining collaboration within the context of homeless policy networks,an area receiving significant policy attention in recent years.

President Obama issued a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government following his inauguration in early 2009. The memo outlined his commitment to greater transparency, increased citizen participation, and more collaboration. This commitment acknowledges that government cannot solve by itself the challenges facing our nation.