This report, written by Shannon Howie Tufts and Meredith Leigh Weiss at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses major issues to address in cloud contracts.
Innovation touches every facet of our lives, from transportation to communication, from personnel management to office automation. This is especially evident in the public sector in how agencies provide services and meet their missions. As it happens, technology has enabled much of this innovation, but it also requires smart leaders who apply these technologies and drive change within their agencies.
Weaving Innovation into the Fabric of Government Agencies
Dr. Rosenzweig says in his article this is not because executives don’t want to make good decisions, but rather the research has focused predominantly on one type of decision – and this type is not the one most challenging for leaders to make.
Twenty-five years ago, federal agencies typically did not have key executives leading mission support functions. These functions were largely seen as administrative transaction services. However, ineffective mission support operations can be quite costly. For example in 2010, there were $641 million in grievance settlements at the Postal Service because of poor management training and inadequate labor-management relations.
Twitter has published a "best practices" guide for government users. Though there are a lot of good tips to be found, the list of activities is heavy on talking and light on listening.
That's a shame, because few media offer a better way to break so much noise into so much signal. Here is a modest list of three additional ways to wring the most out of Twitter by using it to listen:
Fiscal austerity will be an enduring challenge for public managers for the foreseeable future, but it can also create an environment and incentives to rethink traditional approaches to mission support and service delivery. In this environment, identifying innovative ways to reduce costs across multiple categories of government spending (e.g., appropriations, user fees) while maintaining and improving performance will be a critical catalyst. Pursuing efficiency as a way to drive change in government identifies opportunities for savings across agency budgets.
Mobile technology can act as an accelerator to help communities in developing countries raise their standards of living and offer their residents more opportunities to realize their potential. It’s a message that’s been overlooked these past few years from the spirited debate on the roles for technology and innovation in international development. Wide-spread use of mobile technologies will also have extensive economic benefit, but the focus of this investigation is their extra-econom
