Recently, Matthew Burton, former Acting CIO and Deputy CIO of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, posted an excellent series of blog posts documenting his experiences and lessons as a CFPB IT executive. While the technical details and personal insights are the most valuable aspects of his posts, I’d like to focus on a couple ofRead… Read more »
What inspired me at the Excellence in Government Conference? I liked the emphasis on innovations underway in different places around the government. Sometimes we get caught up in buzzwords of the day: Total Quality Management, Lean Six Sigma, Agile, Business Process Reengineering, or Reinventing Government. But the bottom line in each of these types ofRead… Read more »
This article was originally published on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s online MPA program blog, Inside the MPA@UNC. — When people think of bureaucracy, thoughts of rules, regulations, “red tape,” or slow-moving actions may come to mind. But there can be benefits to bureaucratic approaches to management, and these benefits can resultRead… Read more »
Social Connect via: I’ve always been bad at introductions and this blog post will not be any different. The idea for this post has been floating in my head for several months but I’ve only realized the inspiration for it recently. I’ve always said that this blog will be on subjects as they come toRead… Read more »
Frank Kendall, DoD’s Acquisition Executive, published a preliminary version of Better Buying Power 2.0 on Nov 13 “to ensure affordability and increase productivity in defense spending to deliver better value to the taxpayer and Warfighter”. Better Buying Power 2.0 encompasses 36 initiatives across seven focus areas: Achieve Affordable Programs Control Costs Throughout the Product LifecycleRead… Read more »
The Government Man has been pretty quiet lately, save for an occasional blog or You Tube posting. The GSA scandal has been long out of the news. My insiders tell me that GSA has taken disciplinary action against those implicated in the alleged wrongdoing. As I said before, I am not attempting to defend thoseRead… Read more »
The Atlantic published a great piece last week by Eric Garland entitled Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber, here’s a particularly powerful excerpt: “Hierarchical organizations have a very different logic than smaller firms. In less consolidated industries, success and failure are largely the result of the decisions you make, so intelligenceRead… Read more »
Information wants to be free may be a slogan that is en vogue with technology activists but it is also a slogan that diametrically opposed to how bureaucracy actually works. Le triangle des bermudes On the Internet information is omnidirectional; it is easy to find, verify and re-purpose. Whereas in the bureaucracy, information is atRead… Read more »
Controlling an organization is difficult. The larger the organization, the more complex is the process of control. We don’t think about it too much, but what we are trying to control are changes that naturally occur. The drivers of changes are many and can be hidden in the layers of the organization. The internal driversRead… Read more »
In my book, Confessions of a Government Man, I offer some tongue-in-cheek negotiating advice. My chapter on negotiating is appropriately called, The Sport of Negotiating, not only because negotiating is a sport to some, but because I draw many lessons from the sporting world. In one of my career assignments with GSA I headed aRead… Read more »