John Kamensky

Agencies facing increasingly challenging fiscal environments are looking for ways to make each dollar go further. The interagency councils for “chief officers” are no exception!  In fact, they found that a move toward cost efficiencies is also leading to greater collaboration.

The interagency councils were created by Congress over the past 20 years to foster cross-agency coordination, collaboration and idea sharing. The councils formed under the aegis of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)  include:

A 2015 survey of federal employees reports that 39 percent fear reprisals if they report violations of rules or laws. This potentially has serious implications for their willingness to identify and report serious programmatic risks in their day-to-day jobs, and the tendency is to avoid or ignore risks.

John Kamensky

Playbooks Are the Latest Fad.  The Bush Administration was famous for scorecards.  The early Obama Administration created lots of “-Stat” dashboards.  Now it is generating a pile of playbooks as it nears the finish line:

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.  . . .