Efficiencies and Government — Is that an oxymoron?
Tackling the biggest problem at your agency first is a great way to make things more efficient. But agencies can’t seem to get their priorities straight.
Janet Hale is the former undersecretary for management at the Homeland Security Department and now a director of Deloitte.
They’ve just released a new survey of more than 600 feds on increasing the efficiency of federal operations.
The study, “Cutting Costs: Inside the Effort to Improve the Efficiency of Federal Operations” was conducted by the Government Business Council and sponsored by Deloitte.
She told Chris Dorobek on the DorobekINSIDER program what makes efficiencies so hard to enact.
“Not surprisingly technology and acquisition ranked as the areas that needed to have the most improvements,” said Hale.
No More Low Hanging Fruit
“We are working to drive efficiences, make no mistake about it, but we’ve accomplished a lot of the low hanging fruit. The tough areas are what needs to be our next priority. We need to drive efficiences out of both sides of Pennsylvania Ave.
No More Silos
“In order for efficiences to take you have to align the CIOs, CFOs, CHCO, CPOs — basically the entire c-suite. You can’t accomplish anything without across the board cooperation,” said Hale.
Leadership
- Starts at the top. Need the C-Suite Aligned and on board.
- New policies need to be embraced by the entire staff.
- Listen to frontline employees – they are the ones actually executing.
Rethink the Workforce: Ask yourself…
- Is Telework a possibility?
- Who do you actually need in the office/shared workstations?
- Is the workforce more efficient if you deploy them in a different way?
- What kind of training do you need?
Biggest Obstacle: Competing Priorities
Reducing inefficiencies is challenging for federal managers, and competing priorities is viewed as the most
common impediment. Eighty-five percent of managers agree that competing priorities is a challenge to reducing
inefficiency in their agency.
Great report! Thanks for sharing! I am still a big fan of a previous Deloitte study on the “Fed Cloud” (not to be confused with cloud computing), which Deloitte published months ago. That has the best potential for making us truly efficient in providing support services to our lines of business.