Collaboration

OMB deputy director for management ,Jeff Zients, released a 12-page memo, “Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government.”

Don Sull, of the London Business School writes about “why execution stalls,’ in the March 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review. He also offers a set of steps to take to ensure successful execution of programs. While he focuses on the private sector, the lessons seem equally relevant to the public sector!

President Obama issued a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government following his inauguration in early 2009. The memo outlined his commitment to greater transparency, increased citizen participation, and more collaboration. This commitment acknowledges that government cannot solve by itself the challenges facing our nation.

Over the past two decades, a series of trends have resulted in a chorus of voices in Congress, the media and the public concluding that the current federal contracting system is broken. Between 1989 and 2000, Congress mandated deep cuts in the Defense acquisition workforce. During the 1990s, the federal government shifted its contracting approach from one focused on buying supplies to one buying services, using new flexible contracting vehicles. Beginning in 2000, federal contracting increased from $220 billion to over $530 billion in 2008, with no increase in contracting staff.

Since the enactment of the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993, all agencies now have strategic plans and performance measures supported by an infrastructure of staff and processes build to collect and deliver performance data. The Obama Administration took office promising to appoint a “chief performance officer” to improve performance.

The Obama Administration’s favorite think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has launched a new project, “Doing What Works.” Led by Reece Rushing and Jitinder Kohli, it has three objectives:

Do you have “guerilla employees” in your organization who work around (or against) their leadership? How do you deal with them?

This is the focus of a provocative article in the current issue of the Public Administration Review by Maxwell School professor Rosemary O’Leary, “Guerilla Employees: Should Managers Nurture, Tolerate, or Terminate Them?”

“Where is Obama’s big-bang reform of government?” laments an insightful article by University of Maryland public administration dean, Donald Kettl, in a forum on President Obama’s management initiatives in the current issue of The Public Manager. He says that President Obama is quietly reshaping the way government works and dubs it a "stealth revolution."

Two dozen federal agencies are running on-line dialogues between now and March 19^th to gather insights on what citizens would like to seen them include in their OMB-required Open Government Plans. These first-ever open dialogues are an important symbolic step toward better engaging citizens in their government. But in the end, how will agencies make sense of thousands of comments and ideas?

With little fanfare, the While House announced that 29 agencies launched their Open Government weblinks on schedule (per an OMB directive), on Saturday, February 6^th. 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.