New Transparency: Recovery.Gov

There were lots of complaints that the initial Recovery.Gov website was not very helpful.  That’s changed.  The newly-refreshed website now has lots of new ways of finding and looking at information that is due to pour in next month when the first quarterly reports are due from about 90,000 sources.

Government Executive’s NextGov reporter, Aliya Sternstein provides a good review:

The site offers translations in more than 50 languages, a handful of tutorials, basic and advanced mapping capabilities and feeds from the Federal Business Opportunities Web site and the application site Grants.gov.

Visitors can enter their ZIP codes into a text box on Recovery.gov’s home page to view street maps and aerial views of the locations of the projects in their neighborhoods. Colored maps indicate the concentration of contracts that have been awarded in a certain locale by the intensity of color.

Currently, the site does not have the ability to let users search pages by contractor name, although officials plan to make that functionality available in a couple of months. Future iterations of Recovery.gov will offer intuitive links that, for example, can route users to the recruitment sites of the top 10 contractors based on the amount of money they were awarded. “I think the site will help them get a job,” Devaney said. “I’m not promising that on launch date, but it’s definitely a goal to have that up by the second quarter.”

Other planned improvements will allow outside Web sites and programmers to grab updates and specific data sets for deeper analysis or for paid services such as commercial publications.

She also reports that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board believes the initial reports may be spotty in terms of quality but, after being subjected to reviews and comments by millions of citizens, the second round in January 2010 will likely be much cleaner.

OMB Watch has also written a review of the upgraded Recovery.Gov site, calling it “less than revolutionary,” but then goes on to catalog the improvements. In parallel to the Recovery Act data sharing effort on spending information, OMB Watch plans to undertake a “proof of concept” project that would mash up this new spending data and its visual display tools with an overlay of data that describes the needs in a geographic area (e.g., poverty, toxic wastes, unemployment) and the performance of the Recovery Act programs (jobs, paved roads resulting in reduced traffic congestion, etc.).

Creating Spirit Communities

No, this isn’t an early Halloween blog!  I had the privilege of sharing lunch with Harvard Business School’s legendary

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Rosabeth Moss Kantor last week during her whirlwind tour of DC where she is promoting her latest book: “SuperCorp:  How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good.”

Initially, I had trouble figuring out how her book related to government.  It is about how some large corporations are changing their business models to incorporate a more explicit link between their corporate performance and community and social needs.  As Kantor puts it:  “Doing well by doing good.”  She says this approach both embraces the values and expectations of the new generation of professionals as well as generates growth by stressing organizational values and collaborative partnering.

But she helped me make it click.

Governments, like large corporations, are struggling to figure out how to work across boundaries (This phenomena has been explored by other business scholars, such as Charles Heckscher).  Kantor says that successful organizations develop clear purpose, values, and principles to guide their business strategy. . . that these have to be at the center of a common conversation among employees and partners.  She says that you start with building relationships, not changing organizational structures.

One way of building relationships is to work together on projects with a common objective.  She says that working together on non-work related projects, like community service projects, is a good way to begin this in a non-threatening environment.  She calls these efforts “spirit communities” where people self-organize and self-monitor around a project of interest.  Large corporations, she has found, are using this as an approach for building collaborative team skills in their future leaders.  In fact, these projects are becoming ways of providing leadership training!

Translating this to a federal government environment, she encourages an ethos that allows a degree of self-organizing, and providing mentoring, as a way of developing collaborative leadership skills. 

This might happen via Federal Executive Boards, which are located in 28 areas around the country and are networks of agencies that happen to be co-located in a common geographic area such as Denver or Oklahoma City.  These boards already sponsor community efforts such as blood drives and Combined Federal Campaigns.  But thinking more strategically of “spirit communities” and collaborative leadership skill building is a different approach to why agencies should encourage their employees to participate.  And it is a way for public servants to extend their already-existing “doing good” efforts!

Jumpstarting Performance Management

Last week, Senator Tom Carper held an important hearing based on a key finding from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) released last year.  GAO’s 2008 report summarized a survey it conducted of agency program managers on their use of performance information.  It found wide differences between agencies and that, over time, some agencies increased their use and others infrequently used performance information that they collected.

Senator Carper had asked GAO to conduct a study “to better understand the barriers and opportunities for more widespread use.”  It did this by evaluating what was being done differently in agencies that used performance information to make decisions vs. those agencies where managers said they did not use performance information. 

GAO conducted case studies of four agencies’ use of performance information.  Leaders from these agencies were also invited to testify:

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Department of Health and Human Services
• National Park Service, Department of the Interior
• Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior
• Federal Emergency Management Administration, Department of Homeland Security

The testimony of CMS acting deputy director Michelle Snyder, was particularly inspiring.  She described clearly how CMS uses performance information to not only implement its programs and improvement management, but also to monitor the delivery and quality of the overall healthcare system for CMS beneficiaries.

GAO’s Bernice Steinhardt testified that key management practices “can contribute to the use of performance information in management decision making.” These practices include:

• Demonstrating leadership commitment
• Communicating the importance of using performance information frequently and effectively
• Creating a clear “line of sight” linking individual performance with organizational results
• Improving the usefulness of performance information, and
• Developing the capacity to collect and use performance information

Deputy Director of Management at the Office of Management and Budget, Jeff Zeints, also testified and committed to greater use of performance information by federal agencies in coming years.

 GAO has been monitoring agencies’ development and use of performance information for over a dozen years and, while the availability of measures has increased significantly, their use hasn’t.  Hopefully, this new congressional, GAO, and OMB attention to performance information in agencies will jumpstart their use in decision making.

The New Obama Performance Team

Yesterday, Jeff Zients testified before a Senate Committee on an ambitious agenda to reform governmentwide performance management.  Zients is President Obama’s Chief Performance Officer and the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget.

He said:  “It is my initial sense after three months on the job that important groundwork for government-wide performance management has been laid both by Congress and previous Administrations, including the Clinton Administration’s implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) and the Bush Administration’s implementation of the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART). But too much emphasis was placed on producing performance information for the purpose of complying with reporting requirements, and too little attention paid to analyzing and acting on this information.”

He said he wants to develop a new performance framework and that he has hired Dr. Shelley Metzenbaum, “a leading expert in performance management,” to help.

Dr. Metzenbaum has written several reports for the IBM Center.  Her most recent report, “Performance Management Recommendations for the New Administration,” may serve as a guide for Zients’ new performance framework. She was asked to brief the governmentwide Performance Improvement Council earlier this year when that report was first released.   Following is a short video clip where Dr. Metzenbaum summarizes several key points in that report:

Two other Metzenbaum reports for the IBM Center are worth noting.  A report she did in 2006, “Performance Accountability:  The Five Building Blocks and Six Essential Practices,” was well received.  In fact, she was asked to brief the President’s Management Council and it was posted on OMB’s website as recommended reading.

And a 2003 report, “Strategies for Using State Information: Measuring and Improving Performance,” examines how federal agencies and states can work better together to collect performance information useful to both.  This may hold some useful lessons for the ongoing efforts to collect information related to the Recovery Act.

So, if you are trying to read the tea leaves to figure out where the Obama Administration’s performance agenda may be going, these reports may be helpful hints!

Falling Behind on Appointments

According to the Washington Post’s Al Kamen, “President Obama’s personnel operation, which got off to a record-breaking start early this year in filling top administration jobs, has stalled a bit in recent months. In fact, it’s well behind the pace set by the Bush administration in 2001 for the top 500 or so administration jobs — and time is quickly running out to close the gap.”

To date, the Senate has confirmed 48 percent of the top 504 positions the Post’s Head Count website is tracking.

Kamen says the reasons for the slow-down vary, including the focus on policy issues, the departure of the head of White House personnel, and the tightened vetting process.

Getting people in place before agency budgets get locked down this fall for fiscal year 2011 will likely be a challenge.  This leaves senior career executives in acting roles even longer.

ISO Good Ideas: Ask Employees Part II

Sixteen years ago in the heyday of reinventing government, if the White House wanted good ideas, it had to go look for them.  The reinvention team had a team of 250 career civil servants and a network of teams in each agency that did the looking.

But today, we have the Internet!  The Washington Post reports the “Search is On for Cost-Cutting Ideas.” Employees on the front line with good ideas can send them directly to the White House.  What kind of ideas are they looking for?  Anything that saves money, of course.  It’s called the “President’s SAVE Award,” for “Securing Americans Value and Efficiency.”

Federal employees can go to www.saveaward.gov and provide their ideas.  You’ll notice it is on the OMB website (no surprise) and they have a deadline (again, no surprise) of October 14^th.

The winner (to be announced in November) doesn’t get any money, but does get to present their idea to the President in the White House sometime in November.

According to an OMB memo to agency heads, there are five criteria that will be used to judge each idea:

Does the idea reduce costs in a way that is concrete and quantifiable?

• Does the idea improve the way that government operates by: Improving the quality of output at lower costs;  Simplifying processes to reduce administrative burden; or Improving the speed of government operations to improve efficiency?
• Does the idea have a tangible impact on citizens’ lives or environment?
• Is there a clear and practical plan for implementing the idea?
• Will it be possible to begin realizing savings immediately?

P.S. – Okay, for the puzzled, “ISO” stands for “in search of . . .” NOT “International Standards Organization!”

Engaging Citizens in Oversight

There’s a great lead article by Elise Castelli in this week’s Federal Times, “Feds to Empower ‘Citizen IGs’ to Watch Stimulus Spending.”  This is a real experiment in the ultimate use of crowdsourcing – providing the data on spending via recovery.gov and letting on-the-ground citizens to help interpret and make sense of it in their communities.

Recovery oversight chairman Earl Devaney realizes that even with a boost of $355 million in spending for the inspectors general across the government, this would not be enough to keep track of the $787 billion in stimulus monies. He was quoted as saying “My inclination is to throw everything up there for everyone to see.”

But Devaney is not just reacting to citizen reports.  Castelli notes that IGs are “employing data-mining tools to find patterns in data that may flag a problem.”  And she quote Devaney saying “Police departments have Officer Friendly, who comes around and suggests things to do to prevent your house from getting burglaraized. We’re adopting that approach.”

While the Inspectors General are seemingly revolutionizing their approach, this “new way of doing business” is reinforced by Vice President Biden who, according to Government Executive, is encouraging “federal agencies to incorporate into their daily operations the business practices they have instituted to meet the Recovery Act’s transparency, efficiency and accountability requirements.”

A Federal Times editorial (which is only in their hardcopy), however, says that these initiatives are “not without risk.  No one knows how many leader and accusations could emerge from greater public access to government spending data. .  . the risk, on the other hand, is that the public, whether intentionally or inadvertently, overwhelms auditors and inspectors general with frivolous, inaccurate or potentially malicious accusations.”

This will be a grand test of “the wisdom of crowds!”

Recognizing Civil Servants

One of the things I learned working on the Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s for Vice President Gore was that civil servants do some pretty amazing things.  And they get little recognition for it.  But now it’s time to make government cool again!

There has long been recognition for top career senior executives, called the Presidential Rank Award.  The very top level winners are often personally presented their awards by the President.  There is also a monetary award that goes with this recognition.

Vice President Gore created Hammer Awards, which were given to teams of employees whose work exemplified the principles of reinvention:  putting customers first, cutting red tape, and empowering employees to get their work done.  There was no money, just a hammer.  There hasn’t been a similar award since 2001.

While having government recognize its own is important, it is equally important if not more so when the recognition comes from outside the executive branch.  Interestingly, there has been an increase in recognition for civil servants in recent years.

Since 2002, the Partnership for Public Service has sponsored the prestigious Service to America Medal, which will be presented later this month.  Last year, eight civil servants who have made a difference in the lives of others were recognized.

While it isn’t an award, the IBM Center started a weekly radio show ten years ago to learn from, and recognize, leaders and innovators in government.  It also publishes a magazine twice a year with excerpts from these interviews that it then shares widely with their peers in government.  The radio show has interviewed over 350 public managers over the years.

The Washington Post began a new weekly feature earlier this year, “Federal Players,” where it profiles a little-known civil servant who has a big impact.

The latest – and possibly the most interesting – addition to this field comes from Senator Ted Kaufman, from Delaware.  He has committed to tell the story of “Great Feds” — individual civil servants who are making a difference.  And he is telling these stories weekly from the floor of the Senate.

Sen. Kaufman was a former civil servant and an aide to Vice President Joe Biden before being selected to complete the last two years of Biden’s Senate term.  He has announced that he will not run for a full term, so he has nothing to prove.  The Washington Post has dubbed him a “Champion of Civil Service” and quoted him as saying:   ”It’s bothered me for the last almost 30 years that people just feel it’s perfectly okay to denigrate federal employees,” Kaufman said yesterday. “It really, really bothers me, because they do make incredible sacrifices.”

The IBM Center has decided to re-post on its homepage a link to the short bios of civil servants selected by Sen. Kaufman for recognition.  We hope you find a way to recognize them as well!

Ask Employees How to Fix It

Optimists believe that two data points constitute a trend.  So here’s a trend.  Ask employees why things don’t work and how to fix them!

TSA Idea Factory. A couple years ago, the Transportation Security Administration asked its employees how to make the airport security operation better.  It dubbed this effort the “TSA Idea Factory.”  It allows all 43,000 employees spread across hundreds of airports to raise ideas on-line and share them with colleagues who then can rate them as good ideas, or not.

The system has been declared a success and 300 new ideas are submitted every month.  Four staff sort through the ideas and will bring in the individuals with winning proposals to have them participate in implementing them.

VA Benefit Process Reengineering. The Veterans Benefits Administration has been criticized for years for its slow benefits decision-making process.  Veterans can wait years for a decision on their applications for benefits.  There have been task forces, congressional hearings, critical news stories, and angry veterans – all demanding change.

A few weeks ago, the VA decided to ask the people who work in the system what needs to be fixed.  In a Federal News Radio interview, Chief Technology Officer Peter Levine said the Department has launched an Innovation Competition, where the 19,000 employees in the Benefits office can offer their solutions.  While there is no prize for the winner, there is a promise to fund the winning project  This approach mimics the crowdsourcing efforts of InnoCentive and others in the private sector.

Do you have examples to add?

Using Crowdsourcing in Government

For years, democracy advocates have promoted the notion of engaging citizens in their government.  There are different ways of doing this (public hearings, debates, dialogue panels, etc), and at different points in the policy cycle (proposing, debating, implementing, reviewing, etc.).

The New York Times recently did a nice piece on “digital democracy” that focuses on the use of “crowdsourcing” as a way of engaging citizens.  The classic example of crowdsourcing was developed in the private sector by a drug company, of all places.  In 2001, Eli Lilly decided to open up its research and development process to a broader community of contributors by posing research questions to a group of scientists and others outside the company.  These contributors competed or collaborated to come up with a solution, and the winning solution received a monetary prize. This spawned a new company, InnoCentive, which offers this approach to other companies as well.  The approach has expanded and being used by a wide range of industries.  For example, a similar contest has been underway to identify innovative ways to reduce traffic congestion.

As the Times article describes, this approach – turning to either a defined or undefined audience for ideas, and ranking and sorting these ideas – was used by the Obama Administration during its transition and during its first few months in office.  As a result, this idea is now being used in mainstream government agencies.  For example, the Department of Homeland Security is using this approach to get input into its Quadrennial Review.

As the Administration develops its policy on Open Government, crowdsourcing will likely be one of its more visible tools.  The next step will be to develop an understanding of when it works best, as well as a set of best practices.

I’m interested in learning more, so I’ll be participating in an IBM-sponsored crowdsourcing effort – which it calls “Jams” — over the next few days. Dubbed the “Smart Work Jam,” it will explore the future of work and how technology, the Millennial Generation, and teamwork will likely change how its gets done.  If you’d like to participate, feel free to join in!