IBM Center for The Business of Government

The White House released its long-awaited implementation guidance for President Obama’s Open Government initiative, along with links to ongoing agency initiatives and a “Progress Report to the American People.” The guidance lays out actions and timetables.

I attended the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Senior Budget Officials December 1-2 performance and results network meeting on measuring and evaluating countries' stimulus programs. The countries making presentations at this meeting were: Australia, Canada, Chile, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and United Kingdom.

I was struck by several things.

A series of presentations at the annual conference of the National Academy of Public Administration focused on the complicated management challenges all levels of government will be facing upon the passage of any health care reform legislation. As one participant noted: “There’s too much of a view that programs are self-executing and you just need more inspectors general and audits. . . that happened with the Recovery Act.” The consensus seemed to be that this assumption clearly won't work for health care reform!

The release of a new book, “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon . . . ,” by Bill Eggers and John O’Leary, helped set the stage for the National Academy of Public Administration’s annual meeting that centered on management issues related to health care reform.