Collaboration

Greg Godbout, the chief technology officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, suggests as much when he keynoted an AFCEA roundtable in Bethesda a couple weeks ago. According to Federal Times, he told the audience how Walt Disney World delivers a seamless experience: “Visitors to the theme park who are staying at a connected hotel can get a "Magic Band," a wrist band that unlocks the hotel room, grants admission to the park, reserves access to certain attractions and allows the guest to buy items at shops and charge them to the room.” He went on to say that it is “. . .

GovConnect is an initiative sponsored by the Office of Personnel Management that reflects broader trends in the workplace toward the use of project-based work.  It allows federal employees to share knowledge, collaborate, and apply their skills to address challenges that may be beyond their traditional job classification or organizational or geographic location.  Announced a year ago, it is currently being piloted within several agencies and is poised to be spread across the government in coming months.

On September 16, the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service co-hosted a Roundtable to discuss how agency leaders can coordinate and integrate activities to drive successful outcomes for the next Presidential term. An exceptional group of current and former senior officials from Administrations of both parties, leaders from Capitol Hill, as well as experts from academia and the private and non-profit sectors participated in a robust discussion.

This blog is a continuation of our first blog on Enterprise Government, which presented an introduction on Enterprise Government and highlighted a number of challenges for the next Administration to address.  In this blog, we will present the key findings and recommendations in each of four areas to spur a government-wide approach to solving problems.  These action areas include:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has developed an inventory of “mechanisms that the federal government uses to lead and implement interagency collaboration,” along with a self-assessment checklist to consider when using them.

GAO’s latest study on collaborative governance is based on an analysis of more than 300 past GAO reports covering issues such as homeland security, agriculture, and health, as well as a series of interviews with experts on the topic.

 - to move to a new model of managing activities from a cross-program view, leveraging resources to more effectively serve a citizen or business.

How is eDiplomacy moving State from a culture of need to know toward a culture of a need to share?

IBM Center author David Witzel examines the evolution of the Internet over the past four decades in a new report, looking for lessons in the use of open project design that could be applied in other policy domains.  He explores how a wide range of autonomous, overlapping, and interconnected open projects ini­tiated by government staff, techies, entrepreneurs, and students around the world resulted in one of the most profound changes in society across the globe since the

Professors Jane Fedorowicz and Steve Sawyer have authored a new report, “Designing Collaborative Networks:  Lessons Learned from Public Safety,” for the IBM Center.  Their report sums up a multi-year, multi-university research effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation and others.  The broader research effort examines the evolution of public safety networks in communities across the country.  These ground-level networks link police, emergency

Drs. Rosemary O’Leary and Nidhi Vij presented a paper at the recent annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration, “Collaborative Public Management:  Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?”  They surveyed the literature (so you wouldn’t have to) to find the most important issues facing the field, at least from the perspective of academia.  They identified ten that kept surfacing in the literature: