Performance Management

Eliminating middle managers was the vogue in 1990s-style reforms. Flatten the organization! After all, it was the middle managers who “sucked the life out of an organization” by filtering information, gatekeeping decisions, and smothering innovation.

But today, we’re beginning to hear praise for middle managers as being the connecting glue and the nodes of cross-organizational networks.

What’s going on here??

The Congress has passed and the President has signed the new health care reform legislation. But, will it work?

Government Executive’s Elizabeth Newell writes that a bipartisan congressional Transparency Caucus has been formed. Led by Republican Representative Darrell Issa (CA) and Democratic Representative Michael Quigley (IL), the Caucus will advocate greater government transparency and provide support and oversight of government efforts.

Almost three years ago, I blogged on the need for a Key National Indicator System so we, as a nation, could track our progress using data, not diatribe. It’s happened. A provision buried on page 1,489 of the health insurance reform bill makes it real!

Another Harvard Business Review article in the March 2010 issue is worth highlighting. A piece by Richard McDermott and Douglas Archibald examines informal and formal networks in companies, such as Fluor and ConocoPhillips, but their insights are relevant to public agencies as well. And they may be helpful to the Obama Administration’s efforts to create its proposed set of “problem solving networks.”

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!

opportunity to re-design the eligibility determination process for health care benefits provided to citizens in need.

A Canadian think tank has released a report on how senior government executives can support innovation by their employees as a way of solving societal problems and delivering better value to citizens. The report’s insights have some useful application to U.S. government executives, as well.

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 IBM Center for The Business of Government hosted a forum in November 2009 to examine the Obama Administration’s themes for a high-performing government and to frame a public management research agenda.

Participants included nearly 50 of the nation’s top public management researchers, scholars, and distinguished practitioners.  The forum was an effort to help bridge the gap between research and practice, and to collectively develop a research agenda that would help government executives move things forward.