Weekly Round-up: April 4, 2014

John Kamensky

The DATA Act Moves Forward

Across the government, agencies are working under leadership from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Department of Treasury to implement the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act).

Ten Success Factors in Implementing Large Initiatives

However, last month the federal government managed a quiet, yet successful, implementation of a key element of the DATA Act. A website of financial data from across the government went
“live,” and nothing bad happened! What lessons were learned that could be applied to other large-scale, government-wide initiatives in the future? A panel sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration recently explored this question.

The Open Government Dialogue

With little fanfare, the While House announced that 29 agencies launched their Open Government weblinks on schedule (per an OMB directive), on Saturday, February 6th. Virtually all of them also invited citizens to participate in a dialogue on how they could improve their approaches to transparency, participation, collaboration, and innovation.

Health Care Reform Implementation (Part 2)

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!