IBM Center for The Business of Government

The fiscal year 2016 consolidated appropriations bill was signed in mid-December, averting a potential government shutdown, but the bill was over two thousand pages long, with even more details in the accompanying committee reports.  The amount of detail is amazing, including a provision authorizing breastfeeding of babies in federal buildings (p. 582), but there are also five provisions that have potential long-term effects on government performance and management.

Improving Performance Management. Liam Ackland’s op-ed in Federal Computer Week identifies six steps that agency chief human capital officers could take in 2016 to address three major challenges:  the retirement tsunami, the skills gap, and improving employee engagement. https://fcw.com/Articles/2016/01/15/oped-performance-management.aspx?Page=1

This week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a new report with support from the IBM Center for The Business of Government. The report, “New Tools for Collaboration: The Experience of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” is authored by Gregory Treverton, who conducted the study as an independent research effort prior to his returning to government service as Director of the National Intelligence Council. Treverton draws upon but reshapes the results of a RAND project done for the Center for the Study of Intelligence.

The recent history on government reorganization efforts hasn’t been too good.  President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union offered a fairly mild proposal to reorganize the federal government’s trade functions.  This was a Republican proposal from the 1990s, but the only bipartisan response it generated was opposition to any large-scale reorganization.