Leadership

Advice to Chief Operating Officers: Connect the Dots!

When Donald Rumsfield was in the Pentagon, his staff talked about his incessant memos asking for information or direction action as “snowflakes.” Well, there’s a blizzard of memos and guidance coming from the White House on a range of management improvement and cost-cutting initiatives. Is this an opportunity to connect the dots? It is notRead… Read more »

Program Manager Defined

Guest post by Denis Geoghegan As a program manager the second most common question I’m asked is “what is the difference between a project manager and a program manager?”. The first most popular question I’m asked is “what is a program manager anyway?”. Deliverables Versus Benefits The classic explanation of the difference between project managersRead… Read more »

The Federal Coach: Recently Promoted? How to Get Trust and Respect for Your New Role

This week’s question comes from a federal manager who was promoted to a management position after the previous manager was terminated. She shared, “Although I didn’t know in advance of the termination, I was accused in a managers meeting of getting him fired. Some staff are supportive. Others are distrustful. I understand that respect andRead… Read more »

The Growing Need for Information Professionals

AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) is now taking the bold step of introducing a new information management certification for IT and information professionals, and I have below tried to describe the objectives of this new certification. Market Trends A number of trends are converging to dramatically change Enterprise IT: Social – The spreadRead… Read more »

Technology Megatrends – Where will we be in 10 years?

Phil McKinney, VP and CTO for HP’s Personal systems group, recently gave a fascinating presentation on the future of technology at the DoD Enterprise Architecture conference. You can see the video of his full presentation on DodEA’s website via this link: http://afei.kzoplatform.com/swf/player/767/chapter:1 . It’s a little on the long side (over an hour) so IRead… Read more »

Work-Life Balance

As I get ready to turn my computer off and head home – breathing a sigh of relief that today at least I have no evening activities – I wanted to share a little conversation I just had with one of my agency heads about balancing work with being a real human being. I recentlyRead… Read more »

This Friday: Forum on geospatial/place-based public management

Geospatial technology has become a reality of everyday life. We map out locations on Google, send tweets with geotags, and find food trucks nearby (especially the last one). But increasingly, these capabilities are proving to have profound potential for reshaping how government delivers services. With that in mind, the National Academy of Public Administration willRead… Read more »

Conservatives and Liberals (Feb 2010 listserv discussion)

Here is the transcript of a rich conversation we had on NCDD’s Discussion list in February 2010 with the subject “Conservatives and Liberals,” initiated by Pete Peterson. A big thank-you to Martin Carcasson for keeping track of these posts and sharing his archive! All, For those who may be interested in how Conservatives see theRead… Read more »