Dan Chenok

Given budget austerity and increasingly complex challenges facing government executives, managing risk in the public sector has increasingly taken on new significance. Risks take on many forms, including national security risks via cyber­attacks, economic risks from natural disasters, budget and program risks, or privacy risk. However, government leaders lack an accepted culture and framework in which to properly understand, manage, and communicate risk.

This report, written by Shannon Howie Tufts and Meredith Leigh Weiss at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses major issues to address in cloud contracts.

Fiscal austerity will be an enduring challenge for public managers for the foreseeable future, but it can also create an environment and incentives to rethink traditional approaches to mission support and service delivery. In this environment, identifying innovative ways to reduce costs across multiple catego­ries of government spending (e.g., appropriations, user fees) while maintaining and improving performance will be a critical catalyst. Pursuing efficiency as a way to drive change in government identifies opportunities for savings across agency budgets.

In this report, the authors look back at history, noting that the Department of Defense (DoD) has made numerous attempts to reform its acquisition system over the last 50 years, but that these and similar reforms have pro­duced only modest improvements.

Many complex IT programs are encumbered by requirements that continually change over lengthy timeframes. The results are often cost overruns and schedule delays. As a result, desired mission objectives are not achieved.

This report, written by Kevin Desouza, Arizona State University, provides a clear and useful introduction to the concept of big data, which is receiving increasing attention as a term but also lacks a commonly understood definition. In describing big data, Prof.

As the world becomes more digitized and interconnected, the door to emerging threats and proprietary data leaks has opened wider. The number of security breaches affecting enterprises across numerous industries continues to grow, seemingly day-by-day. Once a topic restricted to the IT organization, it is now unquestionably a C-suite priority. A strong plan for risk management throughout the organization has become essential.

On behalf of the IBM Center for The Business of Government, we are pleased to present this report, Managing Budgets During Fiscal Stress: Lessons for Local Government Officials by Jeremy M.Goldberg, University of San Francisco, and and Max Neiman, University of California at Berkeley.

Engaging leaders in protecting an organizations’ cyber, IT, and information assets is a critical starting point to effective security. A next logical step for any government or commercial organization is to leverage risk management and analytics to implement a mission-based security program. As organizations move forward, guidance from NIST and evolving capabilities in industry are merging to paint a path forward for agencies to follow.

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
Subject: Contracting

In addition to managing your own workforce, you will be responsible for managing a large contingent of contractors. You will need to ensure that contractor performance is high and that contractors are meeting and hopefully exceeding your agency’s expectations, as set forth in your contracts.