John Kamensky

But there are answers out there.  Author Daniel Pink, in a 2009 best seller, Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says that focusing on three job elements is the secret to improving engagement: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

John Kamensky

When Congress and Administration Agree to Save Billions. According to Federal News Radio, Congress gave a boost to the Administration’s IT category management initiative by passing the MEGABYTE Act (Making Electronic Government Accountable By Yielding Tangible Efficiencies) that requires agencies to inventory their software licenses and consolidate them where possible.

A couple of recent pieces of research may provide some insight-- and caution -- in attempts to implement performance budgeting.  The first piece looks at challenges raised internally within agencies by professional tensions between finance, performance, and budget personnel in cities in North Carolina, and the second piece looks at the perspectives of local elected officials in Denmark.

Reforming the Budget Process.  Many of the key elements in the federal budget process have not been re-examined in a half a century.  Senate budget committee chair has made the case for fixing a broken process and proposes a set of 10 recommendations. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analyzes these recommendations and provides context 

Why?  Because prizes are effective.  Under the right circumstances, they can be more effective than traditional investments in research and development.

Lowery says: “After falling out of favor for decades, such high-publicity, fat-reward contest came into vogue again in the aughts in the wake of the 1996 Ansari X Prize for advances in commercial spaceflight” which Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne won in 2004.

Safe Place for Ideas? FedScoop reports: “Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott would like to see a better system in place by which the government could solicit ideas for improvement without those ideas being stolen by competitors looking for an edge in landing a lucrative federal contract.  . . .

Instead of the bike, I got a note from the postman saying it was too big for the delivery truck and I had to pick it up at the local post office.  But which one?  There were three in the local Zip Code.  Calls to each referred me to a national 1-800 number which said there was a 20-minute wait.  After 40 minutes, a very polite and very helpful person came on the line and gave me the right post office (which wasn’t one of the three).

Was I satisfied with my customer service?  Yes.  Was I satisfied with my customer experience?  No.

Professor Alfred Ho, at the University of Kansas, recently surveyed 65 mid-size and large cities to learn what is going on, on the frontline, with the use of Big Data in making decisions.  He found that Big Data has made it possible to “change the time span of a decision-making cycle by allowing real-time analysis of data to instantly inform decision-making.”  This decision-making occurs in areas as diverse as program management, strategic planning, budgeting, performance repo

DOD Acquisition Reform Panel. In an Op-Ed in Federal Times, Dee Lee and Hannah Oh write: “Repealing or amending outdated provisions that bog down the acquisition process is long overdue.

Darcie Piechowski