Dan Chenok

co-authored by guest blogger Andras Szakal, Vice President and CTO, US Federal, IBM Benefits from FedRAMP FedRAMP has made great strides in operationalizing the federal security C&A process. FedRAMP brings commercial best practices standardization of the process for cloud security, and does across agencies in a way that also provides consistency across the entire federal government.

On September 16, the IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service co-hosted a Roundtable to discuss how agency leaders can coordinate and integrate activities to drive successful outcomes for the next Presidential term. An exceptional group of current and former senior officials from Administrations of both parties, leaders from Capitol Hill, as well as experts from academia and the private and non-profit sectors participated in a robust discussion.

This blog is a continuation of our first blog on Enterprise Government, which presented an introduction on Enterprise Government and highlighted a number of challenges for the next Administration to address.  In this blog, we will present the key findings and recommendations in each of four areas to spur a government-wide approach to solving problems.  These action areas include:

This blog post is co-authored by Alan Howze In 2017, for the first time in eight years, a new President will be sworn into office. Regardless of which party wins, a new set of political appointees will serve as executive leaders across the government. The decisions that the new administration makes about who to appoint – which starts during the transition process -- will set a path forward for the administration.

The U.S. Government spends nearly $500 billion every year on contracts, where purchases range from office supplies and automobiles to professional services, information technology, and complex weapon systems. The efficiency and effectiveness with which the government makes acquisitions increasingly determines mission success. Perhaps nowhere is this more important than at the Department of Defense (DOD), which accounts for over two-thirds of all federal contract spend­ing, and where sound acquisition enables mission accomplishment and saves lives.

The scenario: A House government oversight subcommittee chairman and ranking member have a strong interest in how agencies are managing technology, in light of a new law that gives agency CIOs more leverage over operations. The subcommittee leaders ask the Government Accountability Office to assess agency performance in key areas, and the subcommittee then takes the assessment and assigns grades that come back with far more Ds and Fs than As and Bs.

How can new leaders quickly gain situational awareness?  How can they harness ongoing processes like budget formulation and performance reporting as inputs for decision- making? How can they use and integrate expertise such as risk management and strategic foresight into actionable information? Are there decision-making frameworks and models that leaders can adapt to produce faster decisions based upon evidence? 

This post is a continuation of our first blog on decision making, which highlighted a number of challenges for the next administration to address. In this blog, we present the key findings and recommendations in four areas. These action areas include: Decision Processes – finding ways to harness government decision processes and not getting bogged down. Define clear parameters - use career staff to help incoming appointees translate governing priorities into clear goals and action plans that take into account existing budget and statutory constraints.

Over the past decade, the federal government has systematically increased the use of evidence-based, data-driven approaches in decision making, sometimes called “Moneyball for Government.” These efforts embrace traditional fields such as program evaluation, but now include the use of open data, business analytics, and social and behavioral sciences for describing problems, predicting needs, and testing new approaches.

Innovation plays a key role in government transformations at all levels. Over the past several years, governments have increasingly established chief technology officers, chief innovation officers, chief data officers, entrepreneurs-in-residence, and simi­lar roles to promote new approaches to innovation.