Command Performance
I attended a two day session put on by The Performance Institute and Association of Government Accountants this week on the subject of performance management in government. It was a great session ( and I managed to knock out 14 CPEs) with some interesting insights on measuring performance in Federal, State and Local agencies. We heard from David Walker (former Comptroller General), Mark Reger (Acting Comptroller at OMB), Lisa Danzig (Associate Director for Personnel and Performance at OMB) and a host of other performance gurus. I came away thinking that although there has been a lot of...
Read MoreThe High Risk List: So What?
The Washington Post had a great little piece over the weekend on the number of reports required by the Congress this year. The article, “Unrequired Reading” states that the Congress is expecting no less than 4291 reports from 466 Federal agencies and non-profits this year. Of course one wonders who the heck reads those reports and more importantly, what gets done about them. As far as who reads them, my guess is that even the people who write them don’t bother to read the whole report, so that means probably one of the 18,000 employees on Capitol Hill (638 of whom owe...
Read MoreFixing Acquisition
The DoD Process Simplified I ran across an article from the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) the other day by Sandra Erwin on Congressional frustration on how the Pentagon buys things. Not being satisfied with the progress being made by the DoD Acquisition guru’s, Congress has decided that more legislation is needed to fix things (Really? Congress is going to fix something?). The Congress has asked nine of the industry associations around the Beltway to provide comments on how to make it better, with inputs due in July. I belong to several of those and I’m glad...
Read MoreDemographics and Aging Systems: At the Confluence of Change
by John Radford, Former Oregon State Controller; Chair of the Institute for Modern Government, Willamette University; Senior Advisor, Executive Team, H.J. Steininger PLLC I’m as frustrated with the pace of change along with everyone else in the country, but as a retired government employee, I know and understand it’s not the employees; it’s the overwhelming lack of consistent applied research and development in core government-systems that is at the heart of the problem. Efforts to modernize government typically run into the financial chopping block for a wide variety of reasons. Budgets...
Read MoreWhat to Drive today? Porsche or Maserati?
Let’s see…..What do I drive to work this morning? My Porsche or my Maserati? Gosh, it’s such a tough choice. When I read all the rhetoric coming out of the Pentagon theses days about the tough choices they are making over there, I tend to think that’s their definition of a “tough choice.” Granted they do make a few hard choices, but none of them are the budget choices they are making for the FY15 budget that’s on the Hill right now. They have so much money to deal with that the normal ways in which you or I would deal with problems is not possible....
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