Michael J. Keegan

Over the past 15 years, the IBM Center for The Business of Government has sought to connect public management research with practice.

Most agencies in the U.S. government rely on products—goods and services—acquired through contracts to perform core functions, pursue agency objectives, and achieve mission success. In FY12, the federal government acquired $517 billion worth of products through contracts.

This week marks the 8th annual National Health IT Week --a virtual event offering all healthcare stakeholders an opportunity to unite under one banner, expressing the benefits that health information technology (IT) brings to U.S.

Governments today face serious, seemingly intractable public management issues that go to the core of effective governance and leadership -- testing the very form, structure, and capacity required to meet these problems head-on.

The recent IBM Center report, ‍A County Manager’s Guide to Shared Services in Local Government, by Eric Zeemering and Daryl Delabbio explores the trend amongst local governments to pursue various shared services arrangements. 

In meeting varied missions, government executives confront significant challenges. Responding properly to them must be guided and informed by the harsh fiscal and budgetary realities of the day. It can no longer be simply a wishful platitude that government do more with less. Leaders need to change the way government does business to make smarter use of increasingly limited resources—leveraging technology and innovation to be more efficient, effective, anticipatory, adaptive, and evidence-based in delivering missions and securing the public trust.

Over the last 12 years, the U.S.

We stand at a pivotal moment in space exploration. There are plans to further extend our reach into the solar system, and NASA is leading the way.  An orbiting outpost, the International Space Station (ISS), is home to a crew of astronauts from across the world conducting research and learning how to live and work in space.

The American healthcare system is complex. It was not created complex and expensive from its origins, but evolved to become this way over a period of about 100 years. There is nothing inherent in the way it evolved. It could have been different. But many decisions, often made for reasons having nothing to do with improving healthcare, shaped the healthcare system we have today. Explaining how it works and doesn’t work, its problems, attempts to reform it, and how recent reforms may transform it requires considering an unusual combination of topics.