New Transparency: Recovery.Gov

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:55

There were lots of complaints that the initial Recovery.Gov website was not very helpful. That’s changed. The newly-refreshed website now has lots of new ways of finding and looking at information that is due to pour in next month when the first quarterly reports are due from about 90,000 sources.

Government Executive’s NextGov reporter, Aliya Sternstein provides a good review:

Creating Spirit Communities

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:54

No, this isn’t an early Halloween blog! I had the privilege of sharing lunch with Harvard Business School’s legendary

Rosabeth Moss Kantor last week during her whirlwind tour of DC where she is promoting her latest book: “SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good.”

Jumpstarting Performance Management

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:25

Last week, Senator Tom Carper held an important hearing based on a key finding from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) released last year. GAO’s 2008 report summarized a survey it conducted of agency program managers on their use of performance information.

The New Obama Performance Team

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:23

Yesterday, Jeff Zients testified before a Senate Committee on an ambitious agenda to reform governmentwide performance management. Zients is President Obama’s Chief Performance Officer and the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget.

Falling Behind on Appointments

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:22

According to the Washington Post’s Al Kamen, “President Obama's personnel operation, which got off to a record-breaking start early this year in filling top administration jobs, has stalled a bit in recent months. In fact, it's well behind the pace set by the Bush administration in 2001 for the top 500 or so administration jobs -- and time is quickly running out to close the gap.”

ISO Good Ideas: Ask Employees Part II

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:11

Sixteen years ago in the heyday of reinventing government, if the White House wanted good ideas, it had to go look for them. The reinvention team had a team of 250 career civil servants and a network of teams in each agency that did the looking.

Engaging Citizens in Oversight

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:09

There’s a great lead article by Elise Castelli in this week’s Federal Times, “Feds to Empower ‘Citizen IGs’ to Watch Stimulus Spending.” This is a real experiment in the ultimate use of crowdsourcing – providing the data on spending via recovery.gov and letting on-the-ground citizens to help interpret and make sense of it in their communities.

Recognizing Civil Servants

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:07

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!

Ask Employees How to Fix It

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:05

Optimists believe that two data points constitute a trend. So here’s a trend. Ask employees why things don’t work and how to fix them!

Using Crowdsourcing in Government

Submitted by on Wed, 12/20/2017 - 08:03

For years, democracy advocates have promoted the notion of engaging citizens in their government. There are different ways of doing this (public hearings, debates, dialogue panels, etc), and at different points in the policy cycle (proposing, debating, implementing, reviewing, etc.).

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