John Kamensky

The Obama Administration has championed “open data” by encouraging agencies to make a wider range of agency statistical information available to the public.  Its philosophy is “information is a valuable national resource and strategic asset.” To that end, it has iss

While the headlines about the president’s new budget focus on the big numbers, there is a significant back story about what the Office of Management and Budget says is the expanded use of “evidence and rigorous evaluation to improve policy outcomes”  when it comes to the details of the budget.

Cross-Agency Priority goals address the longstanding challenge of tackling horizontal problems across vertical organizational silos. 15 Cross-Agency Priority Goals were announced in the 2015 Budget, these include 7 Mission-oriented and 8 Management-focused goals with a four-year time horizon.

An earlier post provides excerpts from the seven mission-related cross-agency priority goals.  This post provides excerpts from the management-related cross-agency priority goals:

(UPDATED: 7-1-2014)

New research findings by a team led Dr. Daniel Mullins at American University examine recent state-level trends in the use of performance budgeting or “budgeting for results” approaches. This research, presented at the annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration, offers some insights for any future federal performance budgeting initiative.

The National Geographic periodically publishes updated maps of the contours of the U.S. but there is no institution that takes on a similar task, updating the contours of the ever-changing federal government.   However the Administrative Conference has recently updated a long-forgotten “map” last prepared by the Congressional Research Service in 1980.  The authors are David Lewis and Jennifer Selin, of Vanderbilt University.

Large companies (and governments) cannot ignore the daily demands of running large enterprises that depend on hierarchy and routines, Kotter observes.  These structures and processes work well in stable, predictable environments and their evolution and refinements have contributed greatly to society in the past hundred years.

The 2010 revision of the Government Performance and Results Act requires federal agencies to identify a limited number of two-year Agency Priority Goals.  These action-oriented goals appear in their recently-released fiscal year 2015 budget proposals and are aligned with their newly released strategic goals and objectives.

In 2009, the Australian national government’s Management Adv

So, how do you make PerformancStat meetings effective?  OMB says that these review meetings should be constructive and focus on learning.  Astute observers, such as Harry Hatry at the Urban Institute, say that leaders of these meetings need to be “hands on” and actively engaged in order to convey the