Enhancements to the Center's Website (www.businessofgovernment.org)

Over the last 15 years, the IBM Center for The Business of Government has worked with more than 300 authors, from large and small academic institutions and non profit organizations across the globe, who have written reports with deep research and many recommendations about improving government effectiveness.  The Center is pleased to announce a new element of our website that links to this extensive network of experts more directly, by linking to a page for each author along with their publications and areas of expertise.  To locate an author and view the corresponding publications written,

Looking ahead at key challenges and opportunities for government

The Center’s new report is the result of multiple interviews with government leaders, an assessment of research and reports on challenges and opportunities from the Center and many other sources; and a roundtable involving key government, academic, and industry officials last May.  

Trend 2: Risk

Given budget austerity and increasingly complex challenges facing government executives, managing risk in the public sector has increasingly taken on new significance. Risks take on many forms, including national security risks via cyber­attacks, economic risks from natural disasters, budget and program risks, or privacy risk. However, government leaders lack an accepted culture and framework in which to properly understand, manage, and communicate risk.

How Can the Government Buy Cloud Computing Most Effectively?

This report, written by Shannon Howie Tufts and Meredith Leigh Weiss at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses major issues to address in cloud contracts.

Trend 5: Efficiency

Fiscal austerity will be an enduring challenge for public managers for the foreseeable future, but it can also create an environment and incentives to rethink traditional approaches to mission support and service delivery. In this environment, identifying innovative ways to reduce costs across multiple catego­ries of government spending (e.g., appropriations, user fees) while maintaining and improving performance will be a critical catalyst. Pursuing efficiency as a way to drive change in government identifies opportunities for savings across agency budgets.

Eight Actions to Improve Defense Acquisition

In this report, the authors look back at history, noting that the Department of Defense (DoD) has made numerous attempts to reform its acquisition system over the last 50 years, but that these and similar reforms have pro­duced only modest improvements.

Achieving Success with Agile Delivery

Today, the Center is pleased to release a new guide on how Federal agencies can leverage Agile development methods to achieve success.

Many complex IT programs are encumbered by requirements that continually change over lengthy timeframes. The results are often cost overruns and schedule delays. As a result, desired mission objectives are not achieved.

Implementing Big Data Projects: Lessons Learned and Recommendations

This report, written by Kevin Desouza, Arizona State University, provides a clear and useful introduction to the concept of big data, which is receiving increasing attention as a term but also lacks a commonly understood definition. In describing big data, Prof.

Using the C-Suite to Manage your Risky Business

As the world becomes more digitized and interconnected, the door to emerging threats and proprietary data leaks has opened wider. The number of security breaches affecting enterprises across numerous industries continues to grow, seemingly day-by-day. Once a topic restricted to the IT organization, it is now unquestionably a C-suite priority. A strong plan for risk management throughout the organization has become essential.

What Can We Learn About Managing Through Tight Budgets?

On behalf of the IBM Center for The Business of Government, we are pleased to present this report, Managing Budgets During Fiscal Stress: Lessons for Local Government Officials by Jeremy M.Goldberg, University of San Francisco, and and Max Neiman, University of California at Berkeley.

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Executive Director
IBM Center for The Business of Government
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Dan Chenok is Executive Director of the IBM Center for The Business of Government. He oversees all of the Center's activities in connecting research to practice to benefit government, and has written and spoken extensively around government technology, cybersecurity, privacy, regulation, budget, acquisition, and Presidential transitions. Mr. Chenok previously led consulting services for Public Sector Technology Strategy, working with IBM government, healthcare, and education clients.

Mr. Chenok serves in numerous industry leadership positions. He is a CIO SAGE and member of the Research Advisory Council with the Partnership for Public Service, Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, Member of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Policy Committee for the Senior Executives Association, Member of the Government Accountability Office Polaris Advisory Council for Science and Technology, and Member of the American University IT Executive Council. Previously, he served as Chair of the Industry Advisory Council (IAC) for the government-led American Council for Technology (ACT), Chair of the Cyber Subcommittee of the DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, Chair of the NIST-sponsored Federal Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and an Adjunct Associate Professor with the U of Texas LBJ School of Public. He is also a three-time member of Cyber and Cloud Computing commissions with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mr. Chenok also generally advises public sector leaders on a wide range of management issues.

Before joining IBM, Mr. Chenok was a Senior Vice President for Civilian Operations with Pragmatics, and prior to that was a Vice President for Business Solutions and Offerings with SRA International.

As a career Government executive, Mr. Chenok served as Branch Chief for Information Policy and Technology with the Office of Management and Budget, where he led a staff with oversight of federal information and IT policy, including electronic government, computer security, privacy and IT budgeting. Prior to that, he served as Assistant Branch Chief and Desk Officer for Education, Labor, HHS, and related agencies in OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Chenok began his government service as an analyst with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and left government service at the end of 2003.

In 2008, Mr. Chenok served on President Barack Obama’s transition team as the Government lead for the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform group, and as a member of the OMB Agency Review Team.

Mr. Chenok has won numerous honors and awards, including a 2010 Federal 100 winner for his work on the presidential transition, the 2016 Eagle Award for Industry Executive of the Year, and the 2002 Federal CIO Council Azimuth Award for Government Executive of the Year.

Mr. Chenok earned a BA from Columbia University and a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.