By: Jon Desenberg
Jon Desenberg is the policy director of The Performance Institute.
It’s a
pleasure to be back and blogging for AGA. Rather than talking about one
particular theme or issue this time around, I decided to go with everyone's
increasingly short attention spans and time constraints and just briefly
mention five trends that I'm seeing here in Washington this fall. Government
2.0—A few years
back it would have been hard to imagine Google opening a big office on New York
Avenue in the heart of D.C., completely decked out with foosball tables,
cappuccino machines and all the trappings of Silicon Valley. It would have been
harder still to imagine the room full of government types who were not just
keeping up with the Google people, but actually wow-ing them with new ideas on
social networking and cloud computing. Yet, late this summer, there it was, FDA
was talking about a virtual widget they created and then gave to thousands of
websites, local governments were talking about their pioneering use of social
networking for crime reporting. The true “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf was on hand to discuss his take on
government and interactive networking. I found the work of Rita King in
international affairs to be particularly innovative and fascinating; she is
using virtual reality to discover the realities of the Muslim world, amazing
work that has been awarded a 2.0 prize. Her main concepts have begun
to be discussed in the State Department in just the last few weeks. Program
Evaluation Reborn—For
many years those of us working in strategic planning and performance management
were uneasy about the absence of an emphasis on truly rigorous program
evaluation. The Government Performance and Results Act actually called for
regular evaluation, as did the Bush Administration’s Program Assessment Rating
Tool. Yet for years it languished, even as planning and measurement were
greatly improved and ramped up throughout government. What was the sense of
planning and measuring if the impact of the program was never understood? It
was a mystery and something that we at the Performance Institute regularly
worked on with federal, state and local government. Finally in the last couple
weeks, we’ve seen a major policy announcement by Federal Budget Director Peter
Orzag. By the way, Mr. Orzag was recently rated the fifth most powerful person
in Washington, so this is a major shift. I had a chance to
comment more fully on the new policy announcement last week on Federal News
Radio. R.I.P
National Security Personnel System (NSPS)—Even if you don’t work for the Department of Defense
(DoD), the congressional decision this month to end the controversial DoD pay
for performance system will impact everyone who works for a government
organization. Tying pay to performance is
difficult and angers many people, particularly those who don’t feel they are
getting fair treatment. Yet what is the alternative? Pay increases for every
year of work? Increases for everyone, regardless of what was actually
accomplished and by whom? What are we saying about our government and to the
bright and innovative people we need to recruit if we stick with such outdated systems?
More specifically, what was the return on all of our taxpayer money for the
millions and millions of dollars spent training and converting tens of
thousands of employees to NSPS, only to see it scrapped. Was this the change
our country voted for last November? The
Quadrennial Review Boom—For years, the Department of Defense engaged in something called the
QDR, or Quadrennial Defense Review, to assess the threats and challenges the
nation faces and re-balance DoD's strategies, capabilities and forces to
address those changes in four-year increments. This effort seemed particularly
well-suited to the long-range planning needs of the massive DoD effort and
complemented more traditional strategic planning exercises, and was tightly
tied to budget. The whole effort must have sounded intriguing to other
organizations, because today we are in the midst of a quadrennial review boom,
with players ranging from the State Department to the Department of Homeland
Security getting in on the act. It seems
very logical; but do we need another layer on top of the mountain of plans and
measures already in place? Aren’t the legally required strategic plans supposed
to be three- to five-year plans? Why another plan? The result is more planning
sessions and documents left to gather dust on the top of an already big pile.
The QDR worked well at DoD for specific reasons, the jury is still out on its
rapid spread elsewhere. The
Performance Improvement Council—We have many inter-agency councils, from CFO to CHCO to CIO
and more, yet the newest council has been ramping up in the last few months and
it’s a welcome addition. President Obama could have eliminated the Performance
Improvement Council (PIC), after all it was founded under an executive order of
President Bush. Yet, he put politics aside and both Budget Director Orzag and
Chief Performance Officer Zients are emphasizing the importance of bringing
agencies together to develop cross-programmatic measures, understand best
practices and uncover which program strategies work and which don’t. This is
some of the most unheralded work in Washington and importantly shows that
performance management is a bi-partisan, long-term effort. The Performance
Institute applauds the work of OMB and the PIC and look forward to more results
in the months ahead.
Comments