by Tracy M. Maylett and Julie Nielsen

Few would deny that the dramatic economic shifts of recent years have had tremendous impact on most organizations’ management practices. Those current economic realities have reduced headcount, decreased ability to provide quality and timely service, and limited employee development. But a greater concern has emerged: an “engagement exodus.”

Economic factors and other organizational dynamics have taken a toll on all levels of employee engagement within agencies and departments in the public sector. Due to budget reductions, an increased number of employees reaching retirement age, and myriad other factors, many public employees are left alone to “hold down the fort” previously occupied by two, three, or even four additional colleagues. Further compounding the engagement dilemma, employees within public organizations have faced multiple years of pay freezes. It’s certainly understandable that employees might be less engaged in doing their best work than in the past.

Some disengaged employees leave. Others stay. However, employees may be mentally leaving workplaces long before they exit the building for good.

Quit and Stay
A decade ago, the quickest resolution for employees disengaged in their jobs was to toss out a résumé because there was decent likelihood that it would be picked up by an interested party. However, the uncertainties inherent in today’s economy and a lack of job prospects have caused a large proportion of employees to be more cautious about trying to jump ship.

Apparent job security has significant value. Large numbers of employees remain with organizations they may have typically left in the past. This situation has created an organizational quandary—how to address the reality that an increasingly large number of employees “quit and stay” in their jobs. These are employees, as one agency manager described it, who “mentally retired two years ago and forgot to tell anyone.”

DecisionWise, a management development firm conducting engagement research, recently analyzed 9.2 million employee survey responses from organizations within both the public and for-profit sectors as part of a longitudinal engagement study. The results were interesting, but not altogether surprising. The study found lower levels of engagement among public employees than in private companies, and this trend has grown alarmingly worse in the past two years.

Five years ago, there were generally clear separations between fully engaged employees and fully disengaged employees. These separations were clearly identifiable by their favorable and unfavorable survey responses on a five-point scale. Generally speaking, a large percentage of the 2006-2007 survey responses—64 to 72 percent, depending on the organization—fell within the favorable range (a four or five on the five-point scale). A smaller percentage of responses were neutral (three on a five-point scale), with unfavorable responses (one and two) making up the minority. However, the study found that in 2010 and 2011, neutral responses replaced a large number of favorable-and even unfavorable—responses. For example, on some questions relating to employees’ level of engagement with their jobs, neutral responses accounted for nearly half of all responses—a significant departure from the 20 percent typically carried by neutral responses in the past.

The bottom line? Public employees are much more likely to quit and stay than ever before.

For many organizations, employee engagement has become the elusive Holy Grail because of the major role engagement plays in the success of an organization. Various firms, as well as numerous books, claim that they can definitively tell organizations what engages employees— an almost cookie-cutter approach to engagement. These firms and books report to have found the magic bullet that has blanket application across organizations, functions, industries, and employees. Organizations looking for the solution are quick to jump onto these claims and with little wonder as to why or how.

Numerous studies tie engagement to organization performance metrics, such as attrition, customer service, and profitability. A major step in combating the engagement exodus has simply been to acknowledge the concept of employee engagement as a true business performance indicator. This becomes particularly important when one considers some of the challenges faced by government entities. Although not unique to government, some factors, like underperformance, may be more challenging. One agency manager spoke of “shifting employees to the boneyard,” that is, moving employees to a responsibility or position where they could do the least amount of damage. While certainly not a common practice (at least one would hope!), it does illustrate a particularly common concern.

Terminating underperforming employees becomes complicated if there is fear that a vacancy left by dismissing the employee (or group of employees) will result in a vacancy that may not get filled due to hiring freezes or other practices. The something-is-better-than-nothing philosophy is, unfortunately, becoming more pervasive when it comes to terminating employees.

Quit-and-stay employees are particularly poisonous and highly contagious. These disengaged workers’ attitudes and work habits often result in customer apathy, poor quality, reduced levels of service, and decreased team performance. “Cells” of disengaged workers can create a cancerous effect on the overall health of the organization. Agencies and departments with little new blood also are deprived of fresh and innovative thinking. Disengaged employees breed disengaged organizations, which in turn further creates disengaged employees. It’s a dangerous, downward spiral. Organizations may be deeper into the engagement exodus than they suspect.

No Cookie-Cutter Approach
Many organizations have searched for the panacea for their engagement woes. The previously mentioned study found that engagement drivers—those factors that contribute to or detract from engagement—vary greatly by industry and sector. Factors that engage a manager working in the legal department of an environmental organization may relate to one set of circumstances, while a scientist in a research organization may find engagement in a completely different set of factors. Even within similar industries, sectors, or agencies, engagement drivers can vary.

Consider study findings from within the food service industry. Engagement surveys conducted across a fastfood chain with 400-plus locations identified key factors contributing to this company’s engagement levels:

• the ability to associate with friends on the job
  
• the opportunity for flexible schedules
  
• the fact that they were given half-off the price of two lunches per week (that half-off bargain resulted in a minimal cost—about $.78 per employee each week).

Compare that to results on the same set of survey questions applied to a separate restaurant chain of approximately 110 upper-scale restaurants. Survey results indicated ability to grow, develop, and advance throughout the company was at the top of the list of its engagement drivers—factors rarely noted in the fast-food survey responses for the other chain. Additional key drivers included trust from managers and rewards from guest satisfaction. Although both restaurant chains were in the same industry, engagement factors differed significantly. Just as the cookie-cutter approach to managing engagement could not have been applied uniformly across these two companies operating within the same industry, a definitive set of factors cannot be applied universally across all public-sector employees.

The Organization’s Contribution
Where is the source of engagement found? Organizations generally begin with the question, “How do we engage our employees?” This implies that motivation is something done to employees—something inflicted upon them—and that the executive suite has the power to pull the levers to increase engagement. This line of thinking also assumes that employees are extrinsically engaged. In other words, they are engaged through extrinsic reward (or punishment). While the overall organization does have an impact on engagement, the reality is that the top of the organization chart plays only a minor role.

Upon finding that engagement levels are slipping within the ranks, some organizational leaders set out to determine what can be done organizationally. They embark in such efforts as nationwide salary surveys to ensure compensation is fair. They look at working conditions and benefits as well as other organization-wide factors.

These ideas are not without merit. Employees are not likely to find satisfaction in a job where they don’t have basic tools for their job, where they are underpaid, or where they worry about whether they will be employed tomorrow. These areas fall within the purview of the senior management team.

Organizational leaders also must ask, “Is our direction clear?” One common organizational denominator found throughout this DecisionWise engagement study was the need for the organization to clearly establish and communicate direction. Employees who report a low level of understanding of the direction of the organization typically displayed much lower levels of engagement. Understanding the direction of the organization helps employees feel part of the organization’s overall mission and allows them to tie their own aspirations and goals to that mission.

Engage With Development
One positive side effect stemming from reduced resources can be found in the area of employee development. Rather than bemoaning reduced training budgets, some savvy organizations use added responsibilities created by the economic environment as opportunities to develop their employees. Training and development opportunities abound now, and many don’t have to involve taking a course. New methods to increase employee learning, such as communities of practice, also improve employee engagement.

However, what may engage one individual in his or her job may not engage another individual, and vice versa. These findings may not be surprising, but they present a management challenge. If engagement factors vary across sectors, organizations, departments, functions, and employees, how does an organization go about addressing the inexact art of engagement, which is needed to slow or even halt the engagement exodus? The answer lies with the manager.

A Manager’s Role in Engagement
Managers play a critical role in creating a culture of engagement. Engagement survey responses related to managers consistently show significant correlation to engagement, or lack thereof. The first role for a manager, therefore, becomes creating a culture in which employees can choose to be engaged. Many managers fall into the same trap as the organization in which they belong, spending time and effort on how to engage their employees, when the reality is that this time is better spent in creating the environment where employees can choose engagement over disengagement.

One of the most interesting correlations found in the study was the relationship between levels of engagement of a particular manager and that of his or her employees. Engaged managers typically had engaged employees. Disengaged managers had disengaged employees. While that may appear intuitive, many managers fail to put that concept into practice.

Managers must understand the key drivers of engagement within their unique team, as well as their own level of engagement. Creating and participating in a culture where employees will want to be engaged becomes a manager’s first variable in the engagement equation.

Second, great managers focus on, as Jim Collins states in his classic Good to Great, “getting the right people on the bus.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that the most engaged employees are those that rise to the top spots in the recruitment pool. There are plenty of examples of strong employees who eventually become disengaged in their roles. However, the “right people” assume responsibility for their own engagement. Many organizations and managers spend a great deal of effort attempting to engage employees who have simply chosen to be disengaged. Instead, a manager must hire and develop the type of people who can engage in that culture. This is the second responsibility a manager has for engagement.

Third, don’t blow it. A manager cannot cause an employee to be engaged. However, a manager’s actions can certainly contribute quickly to an employee’s disengagement. Despite the fact that an engagement choice always resides with the employee, managers have the ability to affect disengagement faster than they can facilitate engagement. In the DecisionWise engagement study, it quickly became clear that some of the greatest contributing factors in lack of engagement during the past three years tie directly to the employee’s manager. Failing to build trust, set the vision, lead with integrity, and develop employees were among the fastest ways managers contributed to their employees’ lack of engagement. Set the environment, hire the right employees, and then don’t blow it up.

Addressing the Exodus
The potential for the engagement exodus is real, and many are feeling its effects. With external factors beating hard against today’s public organizations, it’s becoming even more critical than ever before that public managers stand up and take notice of the factors that contribute to engagement. The willingness of employees to contribute minds, hands, and hearts to their work dictates the success of the organization.

Engagement isn’t something that is “done to employees.” It doesn’t begin in the offices of agency heads and corporate officers, although there are certainly areas where the senior team can contribute. Managers, too, have the power to create an environment in which employees can choose to be engaged or disengaged. But ultimately, engagement is a choice—the employee’s choice.

Tracy M. Maylett, EdD, is CEO of DecisionWise, a firm specializing in employee engagement. Contact him at tmaylett@decision-wise.com.

Julie Nielsen is the senior director of human resources and organizational learning at ASTD, the nonprofit international association that owns The Public Manager. Contact her at jnielsen@astd.org.

by Shaun Donovan

In the current political climate, the debate over government’s role has often been about “more versus less”—more government services, programs, and taxpayer dollars, versus reduced services, fewer rules, and less federal investment. But my two decades of experience in the public and private sectors tells me that families sitting around the kitchen table and sending their kids to school every morning aren’t interested in abstract theories about whether government should be big or small. They simply want to know whether it can be smart and whether their tax dollars are producing results that impact their lives and communities in a positive way.

Of all the challenges I’ve faced as President Obama’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) these past three years, few illustrate this point more clearly than the issue of homelessness. America pays an extraordinary price for homelessness: from the tremendous human toll it takes on the men, women, and especially children caught up in the nightmare existence of life on the streets, to the costs associated with the revolving door of shelters, emergency rooms, and jail cells that result. Perhaps the steepest cost associated with homelessness is the mistaken belief that nothing can be done to stop it.

Less than a decade ago, it was widely believed that people we often refer to as “chronically homeless”—those who struggle with chemical dependency and mental illness and cycle through the shelter, criminal justice, and healthcare systems—would always be homeless. Some even suggested these people wanted to be homeless.

But leaders outside Washington—from rural Mankato, Minnesota, to urban San Francisco—refused to believe the chronically ill, long-term homeless population couldn’t be helped. More than 300 communities committed themselves to ending chronic homelessness, partnering with local and state agencies and the private and nonprofit sectors. By combining housing and supportive services, they led a remarkable fight that has reduced the number of chronically homeless by more than a third in five years.

These communities are proving what just a few years ago seemed nearly impossible: that homelessness can be solved in America. Not reduced or managed, but actually ended.

That is why President Obama’s bold commitment to ending homelessness is so important. In releasing Opening Doors: the Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness in 2010, President Obama made clear that ending homelessness is the right thing to do for America’s homeless population and the smart thing to do for taxpayers.

The most far-reaching and ambitious plan in our history to put the nation on a path toward ending all types of homelessness, Opening Doors, represents the culmination of more than a decade of testing new approaches and implementing new strategies in communities around the country. It commits our country to ending chronic homelessness and homelessness among veterans in five years, and ending homelessness for families, youth, and children within a decade, while putting us on a path to end all homelessness—breaking down bureaucracy and funding what works to get results.

Doing What Works

Over the past three decades, we’ve learned a lot about homelessness. The most important lesson is that in almost every case, homelessness isn’t an intractable problem, but one that can be solved with the right tools and approaches.

Second, we’ve learned that one size doesn’t fit all: different populations have different needs that sometimes require very different solutions. For instance, where a veteran returning from Afghanistan might need treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder to stay stably housed, the solution to homelessness for a family may be something as simple as paying a security deposit or a utility bill.

At a time when we should be using every taxpayer dollar as effectively and efficiently as possible, we need to focus our resources on doing what works—on evidencebased solutions that have been tried, tested, and have produced results. The two approaches that have shown the most success for the largest number of people are permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing.

Permanent Supportive Housing

Over the last five years, and beginning with the Bush administration, the emergence of permanent supportive housing—housing connected with health and social services—has literally changed the face of homelessness in many communities. Working in collaboration with the federal government, localities have created thousands of units of permanent supportive housing and reduced the number of chronically homeless people across the nation by more than a third.

The number of beds for permanent supportive housing has increased by 34 percent since 2007. Because affordable housing with necessary services generally costs less than those associated with multiple emergency room visits and stays in jail, this shift in focus to permanent supportive housing has saved significant money for the taxpayer.

Armed with this proven success, HUD, with support from President Obama and Congress, has made an unprecedented commitment to permanent supportive housing to end homelessness for people with severe disabilities and long histories of homelessness.

Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing

Another proven solution to ending homelessness that we’ve embraced is the combination of prevention and rapid re-housing. In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP), and earlier this year, the program marked an important milestone, saving more than 1 million people from homelessness.

HPRP has helped homeless men and women transition into permanent supportive housing—often providing those at risk of homelessness with something as simple as a security deposit. For the majority of the people assisted by HPRP to date, it was the program’s ability to help them find or stabilize housing arrangements quickly and effectively that made the difference.

Grantees report that fully 90 percent of people assisted by HPRP in its first year successfully found permanent housing. In a state like Michigan, 94 percent of homeless persons in rapid re-housing didn’t fall back into homelessness. That’s an impressive record.

We’ve seen similar successes across the country. These funds have helped speed progress in states like Utah, which over the last few years has invested in permanent supportive housing—helping reduce chronic homelessness by nearly 70 percent since 2005. By targeting its HPRP resources to rapid re-housing, Utah was able to reduce chronic homelessness an astounding 26 percent over the last year alone.

In addition, HPRP introduced a new federal commitment to help people avoid homelessness altogether. According to the report, more than three out of every four people assisted by HPRP received homelessness prevention services.

While the lives of those who were homeless or at risk of homelessness have been helped dramatically by the HPRP approach, just as significant is how HPRP is “fundamentally changing” the way communities respond to homelessness, as the U.S. Conference of Mayors put it.

For instance, Cleveland’s Continuum of Care program is using HPRP funds to create a central intake system that provides customized services to those entering the shelter system. This helps the community not only manage beds and services more effectively but also ensures that households are transitioning to permanent housing as quickly as possible.

Cleveland provides a good example of how a federal program like HPRP is helping communities move from fragmented, duplicative programs to a comprehensive 21st century system that targets resources to those most in need—not with top-down rules, but with flexible tools from the ground up.

Using Existing Resources More Effectively

In times of economic uncertainty, existing resources often fail to match the scale of need. Again, getting better results is not necessarily about more resources, it’s about using the resources we already have better and smarter.

In addition to using HUD resources that already target our homeless population, we are reaching out to our Public Housing Agency (PHA) partners and our private and non-profit assisted housing sponsors to guide and support them to become full partners in the effort to end homelessness.

We are encouraging peer-to-peer mentoring by PHAs that are already deeply involved in the effort to end homelessness in their communities. Plus, we are working with federal partners to improve coordination between social service agencies and PHAs to ensure formerly homeless residents have the support they need to stay in their new homes and maintain their health.

But using resources more effectively isn’t only about doing more with less. Just as often, it is also about small investments that yield big savings.

One study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, centered on Seattle’s 1811 Eastlake supportive housing project. Researchers examined 75 of the center’s chronically homeless residents—half of whom had serious mental illness and all of whom struggled with alcohol addiction. In the year before participants in the program entered supportive housing, the 75 residents collectively spent more than 1,200 days in jail, and visited the local medical center more than 1,100 times at a cost to Medicaid of more than $3.5 million.

In the year after entering 1811 Eastlake, days spent in jail were cut almost in half. Medicaid costs dropped by more than 40 percent because hospital visits dropped by almost a third.

Another study in Chicago reached a similar conclusion. Housing assistance provided to homeless patients suffering from HIV, AIDS, or other chronic illnesses made medical services that were available so much more effective that the days in the hospital dropped 42 percent, days of required nursing home care dropped 45 percent, and most critically of all, the number of emergency room visits dropped 46 percent.

These kinds of studies have an impact on what is possible, even in tight budget environments. When I was the housing commissioner in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg and I worked with Governor George Pataki, to enter into NY/NY III—a billion dollar investment to create 9,000 new units of supportive housing for the homelessness.

Given his background in business, Mayor Bloomberg was motivated by data proving that supportive housing successfully kept people off the streets. Governor Pataki was attracted to the long-term savings—the fact that that the real cost to the taxpayer wasn’t the cost of housing the homeless, but what resulted if we didn’t.

Focusing on a Clear Set of Measurable Results

These examples show us that government can’t produce results if it doesn’t measure success. Already, HUD collects extensive data on homeless men, women, and children through annual on-the-street “point-in-time” (PIT) counts and through housing and shelter counts in almost every county in the nation. In addition, this year VA and HUD released a first-ever supplement to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report that specifically focuses on veterans.

This data shows declines in urban homelessness and increases in rural and suburban. Importantly, it allows us to target our efforts to the communities with the greatest need.

At the HUD headquarters building in Washington, DC, we have a map that visually represents where veterans are homeless in our country, and another map that shows where HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (VASH) vouchers are being used—and they are virtually identical.

To build on this progress, we kicked off a new process called HUDStat to hold our programs accountable for their performance.

HUDStat is already paying dividends when it comes to homelessness. Last year we partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to establish joint goals and monitor progress in the fight to end veterans’ homelessness. HUDStat helped identify promising practices and problems. Where problems arose, HUD staff quickly began to address those issues, often in collaboration with their counterparts at VA. As a result of focusing on performance and problem solving the number of veterans housed under the interagency HUD-VASH program increased by nearly 20 times in just two years. By June 2011, HUD and VA assisted nearly 30,000 veterans— surpassing the program’s target by 50 percent. Because of this progress, we’ve requested another 10,000 vouchers for HUD-VASH in our proposed FY2012 budget.

In the coming year, we will continue to track performance on our efforts to end veterans’ homelessness while adding performance measures around both family homelessness and homelessness among persons with disabilities.

With data that shows the real progress we’re making— and the challenges that still remain—we can make the case, even in a tough budget environment, that this investment works and actually saves taxpayers money.

Coordinating Across Partners

As our work with the VA reminds us, homelessness is far more than simply a “housing” problem. Certainly, every homeless person living on the street lacks affordable housing, but just as often, they lack access to health and social services, and employment opportunities as well.

That’s why our efforts at HUD to end homeless have included partnerships with the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor (DOL), VA, and Education. One partnership with DOL and VA prevents homelessness among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Another partnership includes HUD, HHS, and the Department of Education designing a program for homeless families. Even though new funding has not yet been provided, the partnership is focusing on ways to collaboratively accomplish the goals using existing resources.

As the HUD-VASH partnership has proved, new partnerships can be challenging at first, but communities have shown us they can be overcome and are leading the way.

For example, the Greater Kansas City area is developing a Housing Sustainability Plan that integrates many of the strategies in Opening Doors—forging partnerships at the metropolitan level among governments, local businesses and nonprofits, philanthropies, and the investment community. Nashville is using some of its HUD neighborhood stabilization grants, which help communities buy up vacant and abandoned properties, to provide rental housing to families that have lost their homes to foreclosure.

As these communities prove, ending homelessness won’t be accomplished by the federal government alone— or government at any level—but rather by partners across the spectrum.

Ending Homelessness in our Time

As we finish the first year of the Obama administration’s effort to end homelessness under the Opening Doors strategic plan, there is much work left to be done. But already we are beginning to see results—even in the midst of the most difficult economy in decades—as we work to end homelessness among families and children by 2020, end chronic and veteran homelessness by 2015, and put ourselves on a path to end all types of homelessness.

In this age of budget deficits, some say we can’t afford to be that ambitious, but I believe we can’t afford not to. Whether it’s Utah ending homelessness for 7-in-10 of the hardest-to-house members of the population or HUD-VASH beating its goal of housing homeless veterans by nearly 50 percent, these efforts demonstrate that the real issue isn’t big or small government, but smart government.

With smart government, we can solve big problems. Few problems are bigger than homelessness. And to be sure, we will have to make our case for resources in not just this budget cycle, but in every one.

By focusing on approaches with proven success, by finding new and better ways to use existing resources, by building partnerships to provide comprehensive solutions, and by holding ourselves accountable for producing results, we can make that case—and we can end homelessness in our time.

Much work remains to be done. But with President Obama in the White House, we not only have a president who believes that no one should experience homelessness, we also have the leadership, tools, and plan in place that we need to see a day in which no one will.

Shaun Donovan is U.S. Secretary for Housing and Urban Development. He is committed to make quality housing possible for every American. He previously was commissioner of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, where he created and implemented the largest municipal affordable housing plan in the nation. He also worked with foundations and banks to finance affordable housing. At New York University, he wrote about the preservation of federally assisted housing. Contact him at Shaun.L.Donovan@hud.gov.

by Geoffrey Abbott

It was August 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The levees had just given way and the waters were rising. Within hours, Coast Guard helicopters and boat crews scrambled to rescue more than 30,000 citizens from rooftops and balconies across the city.

During one of the many missions, a Coast Guard pilot signaled to his rescue swimmer below that he needed to return for refueling. As the sound of the chopper’s blades subsided, the rescuer could hear the cries of help from a family trapped beneath the roof of their house.

There was little time. The water was already above the second story windows and rising. The rescuer tried to pull up shingles with his bare hands, only to find plywood underneath. He tried kicking through the plywood roofing but could not. He did not have the right tools for the job.

When the pilot returned, the rescuer—angry, frustrated, and sad— recounted the story. In an anguished voice he told the pilot: I joined the Coast Guard to save lives, not lose them! I’m afraid that family drowned because I couldn’t help them.

When that helicopter returned to its home base at Mobile, Alabama, about midnight that night, this rescue swimmer and some of his colleagues went to a local hardware store and bought every fire ax it had. The next morning every Coast Guard rescue swimmer on every helicopter leaving Mobile had a fire ax to rescue people trapped in their roof spaces.

The swimmer did not wait to formally request fire axes through his supervisor and official channels. He did not put in a procurement request to the storekeeper. And, he did not know, nor care, whether he would be reimbursed. Indeed, he likely could have gotten in trouble for bringing unauthorized, potentially dangerous equipment on board weight-limited helicopters. But he took the initiative.

What made him do it? What made him in effect “lead from the middle?”

It was his clear sense of his ultimate mission—saving lives—and his keen situational awareness that every hour and every day counted.

I remember this story from my deployment during Hurricane Katrina because this employee represented the culture of innovation that I had come to know in the Coast Guard. He had passion for his work and compassion for the people he was trained to save. He knew the Coast Guard expected him to use good judgment to take initiative and to innovate when the objective was clear, but normal procedures proved ineffectual. He felt empowered to act to produce good outcomes. His actions and his method of urban search and rescue helped him and his colleagues rescue dozens of citizens that week.

In the years since, my research on the Coast Guard’s innovation program and a survey of 170 “documented” Coast Guard innovators demonstrates that empowered employees who are proactive and take initiative to make improvements in the workplace not only significantly improve organizational performance, but are “jazzed” about their work. They have much higher job satisfaction than their peers. The research findings could provide profound insight for federal executives and managers faced with the challenge of improving, or even just sustaining, workforce productivity and organizational performance levels in the face of agency budget cuts, fixed federal salaries, and reductions in bonuses for superior performance.

What Is Innovation and How Does It Occur?
There must be a thousand definitions for and examples of innovation—from the latest cellular technology to improving educational practices. How do we know which to apply? In his 2008 master’s thesis describing the Coast Guard’s innovation program, Lieutenant Commander Chris Kluckhuhn of the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves uses a definition adopted from the government of New Zealand: Innovation: The creation, development, and implementation of a new product, process or service, aimed at improving efficiency, effectiveness, or competitive advantage.

Innovation may be applied to products, services, manufacturing processes, managerial processes or the design of an organization. Both the organization and employees must be engaged for innovation to occur. First, the organization must establish goals and guidelines. Then it should empower people to take risks to find the best solutions.

The survey of 170 Coast Guard innovators, including innovation award winners, graduates of the National Graduate School (NGS) master’s program in quality systems management, and current and former innovation council members, revealed the following factors as most influential in enabling innovation to take place:

1. leadership support (37 percent)
2. empowerment (10 percent)
3. personal involvement (10 percent)
4. resources (8 percent)
5. a willingness to take risks (8 percent)
6. a change culture (7 percent).

Among these categories, leadership support received as many comments as did empowerment, personal involvement, resources, and culture combined.

What is necessary to create and sustain an innovative culture? The top responses included

1. leadership support (38 percent)
2. resources (13 percent)
3. recognition (13 percent)
4. open, frank feedback (often to leadership) (7 percent)
5. implementation of good ideas (7 percent)
6. motivated employees (7 percent).

Components of Coast Guard Innovation
Established in 2001, the Coast Guard innovation program has a solid track record of producing significant improvements in capabilities. The program has several components, including an innovation

• staff: a small but dedicated team coordinating the innovation efforts
• council: influential members representing various directorates as a collateral responsibility
• process: developed by the innovation council to identify and promote the best initiatives
• venture capital fund: a modest fund to invest in proofs of concept, or further develop promising initiatives, and used to conduct the annual Innovation Expo
• expo: conducted annually to connect Coast Guard innovators, their program managers, leaders, executives, defense and homeland security partners, and stakeholders so they may communicate fresh ideas horizontally and vertically to improve the organization. Participation has grown from 200 at the first expo in 2001 to 2,500 at the 2010 expo. Some 28 countries have been represented.
• awards: presented annually since 2003 by the expo Commandant at the expo in the areas of operations/readiness, science/technology, administration/training/support, and management
• top leadership support: the innovation staff works directly for the chief of staff and co-locates the fall flag/Senior Executive Service leadership conference with the annual Innovation Expo.

The Coast Guard also has partnered with the NGS to deliver a unique master’s program in Quality Systems Management. This program includes experiential learning that is applied to improve processes in such business areas as logistics, operations, finance, law, engineering, acquisition, and planning. In addition to several courses in best business practices, this 12-month program requires students to conduct a team project to address an organizational business challenge, identify improvement opportunities, implement change, and measure the impact of the change.

Students may not complete their degrees unless they can show a positive return on investment to the organization. More than 700 Coast Guard personnel have earned Quality Systems Management master’s degrees in this program and have implemented team projects valued at $500 million.

Who Are Public Sector Innovators?
A lot of innovation comes from stars at the nation’s leading engineering and business schools. But the innovators that improve our public-sector organizations come from a wide variety of experiences, pay grades, ages, and job functions. When it comes down to it, where they came from does not matter. It’s what they did. Coast Guard innovation award winners include:

• Lil, a lieutenant, started the Coast Guard partnership with the NGS, which (through 2010) has yielded 700 CG personnel with master’s degrees producing projects valued at $500 million
• Jay, a warrant officer, found opportunities to improve healthcare to Coast Guard personnel and their families in remote locations through telemedicine
• Zeita and Rahshaan, both lieutenants at the time of the project, worked on an NGS team to improve small arms weapons training using lasers. They significantly improved small arms qualification scores, and reduced training costs and the environmental impact of small arms training
• Richard, a civilian medical professional and Coast Guard auxiliarist, established Coast Guard auxiliary healthcare support with more than 50 physicians, dentists, and licensed allied health credentialed providers who donated 5,600 hours of healthcare augmentation valued at $340,000
• Justin, a 20-something third-class petty officer, developed a process to use cellular phone technology to provide search areas directly to Coast Guard search units saving time and relieving crew members from navigation duties to concentrate on search efforts
• Bob, a civilian working at an information technology center, worked with a team to develop technology that added significant value to the Coast Guard common operational picture (displaying relevant information shared by more than one command) and improved USCG maritime domain awareness
• Jan, a lieutenant commander and persuasive proponent of information sharing, became the architect of the Coast Guard’s internationally recognized information portal
• Montgomery, a warrant officer, saved 18 months in acquisition time and more than $12 million when he helped replace a recently crashed CG helicopter using an available Defense department helicopter hull.

As Tables and Figures show, Coast Guard innovators are a diverse group of people yet they share common characteristics.

According to their self-description, they are

1. highly-motivated employees (25 percent)
2. creative and open to new ideas (12 percent)
3. not afraid of failure or accepting risk (10 percent)
4. optimistic and enthusiastic (7 percent)
5. not driven by promotability (7 percent)
6. empowered (6 percent).

Coast Guard Innovation Strategy
As its innovation program evolved, the Coast Guard developed and refined a strategic approach that included soliciting, rewarding, implementing and funding, and sharing innovation. It was further supported by internal and external critical success factors, and mission and support activities.

Value-Added Innovation Program Results
The results achieved by the Coast Guard’s innovators have improved organizational performance in all mission areas. Some additional examples include

• implementing e-learning technologies for training course delivery
• modifying equipment to allow direct communications between Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection officers during joint counter-narcotic and illegal immigration operations
• reducing the response time for congressional inquiries
• improving flight simulator training for pilots
• developing easy-to-customize generic specifications for boat repairs and overhauls
• creating an Internet portal for authorized public members to access useful Coast Guard information
• developing a budget metrics tracking system
• creating a procurement request tracking database.

The Coast Guard’s innovation program rewards two types of innovation–independent initiatives like the one taken to secure the fire axes, and formal initiatives such as the master’s program. The NGS program formally captures the return-on-investment and value created for each team project. Note that “value” can be composed of three elements—time, money, and capability.

What Motivates Innovators?
What factors are influencing people to find better ways to perform their work? When researchers asked the innovators, their responses varied:

1. personal drive (29 percent)
2. to make improvements and lead productive change (23 percent)
3. to improve efficiency (16 percent)
4. to benefit the Coast Guard overall (9 percent)
5. to benefit my workplace and teammates (8 percent)
6. to fix broken processes (6 percent).

When researchers asked, “What ‘rewards’ are most meaningful to you as an innovator?” the top responses were:

1. recognition (formal and informal) (24 percent)
2. implementation of my idea/concept (21 percent)
3. improving the organization (12 percent)
4. personal satisfaction (10 percent)
5. appreciation/thank you (7 percent)
6. promotion (6 percent).

Monetary performance awards were eighth on this list and thus did not appear to be a major motivating factor for innovators. Most of all innovators wanted recognition from peers or superiors and the satisfaction of seeing their ideas implemented.

Innovators Have Higher Job Satisfaction Than Their Peers
The Coast Guard scored the highest job satisfaction ranking of any agency within the Department of Homeland Security in OPM’s 2008 Federal Human Capital Survey, conducted biannually, and the Coast Guard also finished in the top 20 percent of all governmental agencies for effective leadership and empowerment; DHS overall ranked 27th of 28 for major federal departments.

The recent research included survey responses to eight identical questions on empowerment and job satisfaction from 170 Coast Guard innovators, the general Coast Guard population (based on 2010 CG Organizational Assessment Surveys), and overall federal government, DHS, and Federal Emergency Management Agency employees (based on 2010 OPM Federal Human Capital Surveys).

A 5 percent difference in response rates was determined to be statistically significant for this study. While DHS insiders expected that three to four questions would show significant differences, the CG innovators responded more positively than their Coast Guard peers to all eight questions by an average of 12.2 percent. The overall federal government responses were similar to the general Coast Guard population.

However, the response rates of Coast Guard innovators were 24 percent and 22 percent higher than DHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency responses, respectively. Table 1 shows the results for two of the most meaningful questions asked: Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your job? Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your organization?

More than 90 percent of CG innovators surveyed said the culture of innovation encouraging employees to take initiative and risk improved performance and commitment to the CG as well as job satisfaction within it.

Implications for the Federal Leaders and Agencies
Federal executives and managers should take heed of a few recommendations from the Coast Guard research as they work to energize employees and improve job satisfaction while increasing workforce productivity in tough budgetary times.

• When supporting workforce empowerment, strong visible and personal leadership engagement is critical.
• When making hiring decisions, consider a potential employee’s motivation level; it may prove more important in the long run than experience.
• Investing in employee’s strengths and empowering them in those areas may provide a better return on investment for an agency than attempting to fill gaps in individuals’ overall professional portfolios.
• When rewarding and recognizing people, think carefully. Senor leader recognition of good work in front of peers, combined with their implementation of good ideas, are very meaningful to innovators, often much more so than monetary rewards.

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Geoffrey Abbott is a retired U.S. Coast Guard Captain. He conducted this research as part of a National Graduate School doctoral dissertation entitled “Improving Organizational Performance Through Innovation and Workforce Empowerment.” He served in the Coast Guard for 30 years, spending the last few years developing the innovation program. Contact him at abbottginnovate@aol.com.

by Frances L. Edwards

The year 2010 was challenging for Planet Earth. While the East Coast sweltered in record-setting high heat and humidity, the U.S. Congress abandoned its attempt to pass global warming legislation. Meanwhile, Moscow experienced a heat wave that drove residents to vodka parties and swimming to cool off, with fatal results for some. California experienced a year with no summer, causing late harvests and damage to crops that the rest of the nation depends on for food. Finally, during the holidays, the U.S. East Coast experienced a blizzard from Maine to the Carolinas that haulted transportation systems, even the venerable New York City subway.

Observed Impact

A political debate rages over the science of climate change, but local governments have to cope with the realities of heat waves and blizzards, and changes in sea levels and fresh water supply. Observed impact of these events rather than scientific theory may offer a less controversial basis for climate change public policy development.

Impact from changes in sea levels on islands has already been observed, especially along shorelines and barrier reef islands. The impact of climate change is expected to exacerbate the threat from many natural hazards, such as hurricane wind speeds, wildfire frequency, storm surge levels, and the occurrence of flooding. Changes in land use, such as a growing coastal population, have raised the stakes for environmental-related events, while climate change—or climate variability—has altered the frequency and severity of such hazardous events.

When confronting climate change, decisions on public investments must be made using rational criteria. The Transportation Research Board’s “Decision Framework to Address Impacts of Climate Change” offers guidance to local governments on infrastructure investment decisions. Similarly, the California Institute for Local Government provides the “Best Practices Framework,” which lists 10 areas for potential climate change adaptation and mitigation actions (see Figure 1).

The International City Managers Association (ICMA) has crafted the publication Balancing Ethics and Climate Change to guide decisions on local investments. The guidelines emphasize the importance of determining who benefits and who pays—discussing ways to lessen the burden on those least able to pay and avoid mortgaging the next generation’s future.

The guiding principles are distributive justice, intergenerational considerations, precautionary principle, human rights, and “do no harm.” ICMA recommends taking prudent action today that will have no net harm if climate change does not progress, and will have a beneficial effect if climate change does progress.

San Jose’s Green Vision

San Jose, California, the 10th largest U.S. city and the capital of Silicon Valley, began its response to climate change with the 2008 adoption of Mayor Chuck Reed’s Green Vision. This multipronged approach to climate change includes both mitigation and adaptation. A former agricultural center, San Jose has seen its economy switch to the high tech industry, changing orchards to industrial and commercial centers. The result has been an increase in impervious surfaces and a loss of carbon-capture capacity.

LED Street Lights

One Green Vision program is the installation of LED (light-emitting diode) street lights. Conversion of traffic signals to LEDs occurred several years ago, demonstrating energy savings and lessening labor costs for replacements. The LED streetlight conversion now underway will not only cut electricity costs, but also decrease the light signature that affects the observatory at Mount Hamilton, provide white light that enhances the ability to identify colors of cars and perpetrators’ clothing at crime scenes, and save on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With cities confronting shrinking resources, LED streetlight conversion is a community benefit on many levels.

Tree Planting

Another Green Vision program is tree planting on available lots. San Jose has a long-standing partnership with Our City Forest to maintain and improve existing trees. Budget cutbacks several years ago eliminated tree planting and maintenance by the city, however. Through Green Vision, San Jose’s goal is to plant 100,000 trees on median and parking strips, other publicly owned areas, and spots where the city has easements. Tree planting will restore carbon-sequestration capacity that the city lost when orchards were converted to a built environment, and the shade is expected to lessen the need for air conditioning during the warmer months.

ICMA and the California Institute for Local Government note the importance of stakeholder involvement in climate change mitigation programs. AmeriCorps volunteers made a tree inventory to create the basis for the new tree-planting program. San Jose has extended tree-planting program implementation to private property locations and other community members. Individuals can participate in the tree-planting program by registering their privately planted trees online with My City Forest to help track achievement of the 100,000 tree goal.

LEED Certification

Another focus of San Jose’s efforts is Green Building certification for its facilities. Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) is an internationally recognized green building certification and rating system. The new city hall was awarded the LEED-platinum rating. Building retrofits for fire stations and the construction of the new police substation included green building strategies, including energy efficiency and building materials selection.

California’s Initiatives

Electrical generating and transmission are among the sectors most vulnerable to natural hazard events associated with climate change. On the one hand, aging infrastructure elements, such as transformers, are damaged by high heat. Additionally, demand for electricity rises during high heat events, resulting in managed “brown outs,” or unmanaged blackouts, as air conditioning demands stress the aging electrical grid.

In the western United States, hydropower has been a staple electrical generation system, but the early snow melt and lower levels of precipitation in some areas have lessened the number of megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity generation in dry years. One of California’s many climate change-related initiatives is investment in the development of solar power generation at the point of consumption.

In 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued Executive Order S-13-2008, which mandated state agency action on climate change to both mitigate climate change (limit the GHG emissions believed to be the cause) and adapt to the climate changes already observed, such as a seven-inch rise in sea level and rising average temperatures.

California Solar Initiative (CSI)

Electricity generation has been identified by the California Air Resources Board as the second largest source of GHG emissions in the state, following transportation. The California Solar Initiative (CSI) was intended to mitigate climate change by lessening the GHG emissions associated with energy production.

One aspect of CSI was the Million Solar Roofs program, begun in 2006 and sponsored by the governor. CSI created an incentive program for individuals and businesses to adopt solar technology, especially installing solar panels on their roofs for point-of-consumption power generation. Creating power at the point of consumption not only eliminates GHG emissions from the power production cycle, but also prevents the needs for new transmission infrastructure investment. Following the ICMA ethics concepts, the solar program was extended through special incentives to low-income single family and multi-family homes.

Solar Power Generation

The goal of CSI is 1940 MWhs of solar power generation at the point of consumption. About two-thirds of this capacity has already been created by residential and commercial generation projects in areas of the state served by investor-owned utilities. Each MWh of electricity generation avoided saves about 0.32 metric tons (MT) of CO2 emissions. In 2008 that represented 1.8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.

Participants have included colleges that placed solar roofs on parking spaces and on the roofs of parking garages and state buildings that installed photovoltaic systems. The UPS building in San Francisco operates solely on its solar roof system during daylight hours, its highest period of consumption.

Fuel Cell Technology

Fuel cell technology is one green technology that the state is also encouraging for point-of-consumption energy generation. One firm in Sunnyvale, California, produces Bloom Boxes, which use a solid oxide fuel cell to create power. The fuel can be bio gas or even solar power. Google, eBay, and Yahoo have adopted Bloom box technologies to power their facilities around the clock.

Alternative Transportation Strategies

The California Department of Transportation has been tasked with managing transportation’s impact on climate change. Planners have long said that new roads create their own customers, opening up formerly rural areas to longer commutes that will require more fossil fuels to power vehicles or electric trains for commuters.

Caltrans has been working with the transportation planning organizations in the state to develop strategic growth and congestion management plans to lessen GHG emissions. In partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Community Development and the Air Resource Board, housing needs assessments will be  developed that include strategies for infill development and transit-oriented development that will lessen the demand for single user car commutes. The state also is greening its own fleet by purchasing replacement vehicles that run on alternative fuel or hybrid technology.

Water Conservation

Water policy is also affected by climate change. Western states rely on snow pack and snow melt to create surface water flow in rivers and streams, as well as to recharge aquifers. Drawn down ground water causes the ground level to subside and may lead to sink holes. For example, the San Jose neighborhood of Alviso has sunk to six feet below sea level as a result of pumping underground water for agricultural irrigation in other parts of the Silicon Valley.

Loss of surface water can impact the electrical power supply in areas with hydroelectric power. Early snow melt can lead to spring flooding and summer drought, which requires the construction of reservoirs to ensure water provision.

In California water conservation has been practiced for many years. Now with the realization that water processing and use incurs GHG emissions, projects that reward water use reduction and water recycling are widespread. The state is focusing on agricultural water conservation and smart irrigation systems for public lands.

Denver’s Climate Action Plan

As has been noted, regions and sectors of the United States are developing plans for coping with climate change that may offer guidance for communities that are just beginning to develop mitigation, resilience, and adaptation plans. Denver, Colorado, developed its Climate Action Plan in 2007, which addresses 10 areas for participation by the city government and individual residents, with goals set for 2012. While focused on greenhouse gas reductions, other strategies include

• reuse of fly ash in paving energy conservation and the use of renewable energy sources
• support for multimodal transportation
• waste reduction by commercial and residential generators, including recycling green waste.

Energy efficiency standards are included for commercial buildings, new homes, and remodeled homes, including a preference for renewable energy sources. Existing homeowners are encouraged to plant trees and monitor their energy use. City development plans include enhanced densities, pedestrian and bicycle-friendly areas, and mass transit development. Alternative fueled vehicles and car-share programs also are incorporated, along with encouragement for telecommuting and car pools.

Pew Center Urges Further Adaptation

In 2009 the Pew Center for Global Climate Change issued a working paper that outlines actions that states and local governments are taking to adapt to climate change while they work on mitigation measures. Pew defined mitigation as reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and adaptation as coping with the results of climate change.

Although 32 states were identified as working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, only 10 were developing adaptation plans. The Transportation Research Board report on transportation’s impact on climate change also encouraged adaptation to reduce vulnerability.

New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., have published plans and programs on climate change initiatives. San Diego and Dallas have plans focused on energy strategies. San Jose has a Green Vision website that addresses its comprehensive climate change plan, from emission reductions to planting trees and from green composting to LED street lights. Alaska, California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington all have state-level comprehensive climate adaptation approaches.

Pre-Disaster Mitigation

China’s growing population of successful consumers is pushing levels of air pollution—and the generation of greenhouse gasses—above previous levels throughout the most populous areas. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, author Thomas Friedman notes that as new nations develop “American” economies, the rate of demand for fossil fuels will rise and greenhouse gas emissions will increase, but at a rate slower than the American experience because of more fuel-efficient systems.

Australia’s 2010 drought was blamed on global warming. In an effort at adaptation, desalinization plants were constructed to enhance the supply of fresh water for irrigation for domestic use. Unfortunately, the power for the desalinization plants is coal-fired electricity, further contributing to green house gas emissions.

Political support is needed at the state and local government levels for pre-disaster adaptation efforts to cope with the observed changes in natural resources and systems. Some of these mitigation efforts already are underway as part of the federally mandated community mitigation plans developed under Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000.

Existing strategies may include alternative flood protection approaches, such as avoidance, elevation, and flood-proofing, as well as structural protection against flood events and flood protection of low lying areas. Protection of fresh water sources from salt water incursion and development of new materials for roadways that are less prone to heat damage may prevent some future climate change impacts.

Construction methods that recognize the benefits of insulation, building orientation, and location for mitigating the demands for heating and cooling are also useful, including strategies used before air conditioning like attic fans and location-specific building orientation. For example, in the hot climate of California, the original settlers used a northeast-southwest building orientation for whole communities—notably Los Angeles—to mitigate interior heat build-up. In New York, which experiences colder temperatures, architects advocate locating the most-used living areas on the south side of a home to benefit from solar warming.

Natural Cycle or Carbon: The Challenge Is the Same

Communities must evaluate the threat posed by climate change and determine the level of adaptation that is possible and cost-effective. Community stakeholders developing a climate adaptation plan need to include residents, emergency responders, local infrastructure agencies, scientists, and other levels of government. Adaptation to climate change affects public health, local government, transportation, and many other aspects of the public infrastructure.

While debating the cause of climate change can be divisive and politically volatile, a review of observed climate-related events within the community and a strategy for lessening future loss of life and infrastructure provide a firm basis for adaptation planning, funding, and implementation. The observed effects of climate change must be dealt with, regardless of their cause, whether part of a natural cycle or due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Frances L. Edwards, PhD, is the deputy director for National Transportation Security Center of Excellence at the Mineta Transportation Institute, San Jose State University in California, and director of the master of public administration program. Contact her at kcthm@yahoo.com.

by Brad Douglas

State government officials have not faced a budget crisis this severe since the end of World War II. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), the 50 U.S. states had to face a collective budget gap of $83.9 billion for FY 2011. For many, this marks the fourth year in a row that they have had to slash programs or raise taxes to balance their budgets.

Unfortunately, the problem is not improving. New gaps have opened in at least 15 states for 2012, and 2013 is expected to bring more of the same, according to the NCSL.

Georgia has not been spared. The 2012 state budget is projected to be 20 percent smaller than it was when the recession began, down from $20.5 billion to $16.5 billion. But the situation could have been much worse. Thanks to an effort to transform procurement, Georgia has brought $1.6 billion of an estimated $5 to $6 billion of total spending under central management, and the state expects to double the amount under management in 2011.

Without this procurement transformation, Georgia would be in much worse shape.

A Bold Experiment

In 2005, one of Governor Sonny Perdue’s highest priorities was to apply best practices from the private sector to state operations to increase efficiency. Perdue and his staff sought experienced executive talent from the business sector to oversee this transformation.

That year, Perdue hired me as assistant commissioner of purchasing for Georgia’s Department of Administrative Services (DOAS).It was my first position in the public sector. I had previously spent nearly two decades in the private sector, including eight years running the procurement operations at large companies in the staffing services and hospitality industries.

I took the job because, after 18 years in the private sector, I wondered whether the business principles that I had used in the private sector could be successfully applied to government operations.

Notably, Georgia changed the purchasing code, which provided DOAS with the authority to make the significant changes that Perdue’s vision required. Just five months into my post as assistant commissioner, I was promoted to commissioner and brought in Tim Gibney to fill my assistant commissioner post. Gibney had previously headed procurement at the University of Notre Dame, where he had implemented a procurement transformation initiative that included successfully rolling out eProcurement technology from software firm SciQuest. Additional hires from the private sector followed. These included the director of strategic sourcing, who was lured away from Microsoft; an experienced procurement hand recruited from Bell South and put in charge of technology purchasing; and another procurement veteran – and Georgia Tech grad – from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

From Tactics to Strategy

When I arrived, Georgia quite literally had no idea of the exact size of its spending or where that spending was going―a situation that the vast majority of states still find themselves in today. It was also cumbersome for state employees to find vendors who had contracts and then buy from them. Additionally, the contracts themselves differed greatly according to price and coverage of the right goods and services. Most important, these contracts did not work together toward achieving a larger strategic goal.

Without a strategic sourcing process, the procurement operation ends up being a group of people sitting in an ivory tower saying, “Well what can we go source today?” It’s this mentality that produces a statewide contract for trash bags, instead of a contract for maintenance, repair, and operating supplies covering 20,000 line items. With a strategic sourcing process, government professionals ask , “What are all the items that go into running a building?” The procurement team then leveraged the marketplace to put together a broader set of goods that can be combined on a contract, with a rationalized supplier base.

My team and I envisioned a procurement process that made it as simple to buy items on statewide contracts as it is for consumers to purchase books, clothing, and music from commercial websites. We believed that through the judicious use of technology, we  could capture spending in exquisite detail, which would empower us with the information needed to negotiate smarter deals. And by streamlining the process, we could eliminate waste and cut the cost of processing purchases. The opportunity, we felt, was enormous.

Procurement Taskforce

The first order of business was to set up an organizational structure that could execute on this new vision. We had a set of general guidelines because Gov. Purdue had already set up the Procurement Taskforce of the Commission for New Georgia to establish a vision for the transformation of state government, but creating and implementing a structure according to those guidelines―a collection of principles that if achieved would result in the nation’s first statewide reform of government procurement―would require some extra help. We hired consulting firm A.T. Kearney to be our “transformation assistant.” It provided  more than 20 people to assist us through the initiative.

A.T. Kearney helped us define an optimal organizational structure under the committee’s guidelines, while we outlined new workflows and defined the capacity that the state’s procurement office could sustain to ensure it maintained adequate staffing levels. Kearney also helped us rewrite job descriptions, perform a fit-gap analysis of technologies to support the transformation, and revise and re-engineer the entire purchasing process and related policies to streamline administrative actions that didn’t add value to procurement.

Strategic Roadmap

The roadmap required procurement staff to move away from a transactional focus to a more strategic role. Technology would automate routine transactions and take the paper-pushing out of procurement. This would free up procurement staff to focus on higher-level, strategic tasks such as negotiation, project management, collaboration, and strategic sourcing. Early in the transformation initiative, employees in our procurement office were evaluated to determine whether their skill sets―and mindset―matched our more strategic direction. Of the 40 staffers who entered the process, more than 50 percent were rated as not being capable of taking on a new strategic role, which meant that substantial education and training efforts were needed.

As a part of the transformation, Georgia created a new team structure with a different approach to doing business. Today, the state procurement office includes a strategic sourcing group built around four commodity groups: technology (headed by the Bell South veteran), goods (a recruit from AMD), services (led by a longtime staffer who stayed on with the procurement team) and infrastructure (headed by a retired U.S. Air Force officer who previously helped lead the introduction of strategic sourcing to that branch of the military). A group dubbed “the Knowledge Center” supports the sourcing teams by conducting spending analyses that identify gaps in spending under management and opportunities for a leveraged, statewide contract. The Knowledge Center staff also evaluates, selects, and implements technologies that support the state procurement function, process improvement, and Georgia’s new training and certification program for procurement.

Emphasis on Training and Certification

The renewed emphasis on training was a big change. Previously, Georgia had just two purchasing courses for staff―“Welcome to State Purchasing” and “Purchasing Fundamentals.”  Today, the state procurement office offers more than 30 courses that are both instructor-led and computer-based. To date, Georgia has had more than 5,000 “course sittings” by buyers and staff both within the state procurement office and also among hundreds of buyers across the different agencies and universities. The office also instituted its own three-tiered certification program, offering the Georgia Certified Purchasing Associate (GCPA), which covers fundamental workflows; Georgia Certified Purchasing Manager (GCPM), which includes higher-level negotiating and RFP skills; and Georgia Certified Purchasing Card Administrator (GCPCA), which is for staff who manage P-card programs. Plus, these courses are by no means limited to staff within the state purchasing office. Other state agencies and state universities have access to the courses and certification programs.

Procurement as E-Commerce

Once we had new staff in place and new processes outlined, we turned to the technology side of the equation. We intentionally waited until we had the people and new processes in place before we began working with the enabling technology, because we didn’t want to automate a bad process with people who would not be able to execute it. We did not want to harden procedures that would hurt our ability to provide good service and cost avoidance.

With technology, the goal was to create an “Amazon.com-like” experience―to make it so simple for state employees to find the right product on the right contract, including specs or an image of the item, that it was easier for them to buy on contract than it was to buy items on their own without going through procurement.

Team Georgia Marketplace

After evaluating our options, we deployed an eProcurement system that was based on a solution from SciQuest and integrated with the state’s existing backend PeopleSoft financials system. We dubbed it Team Georgia Marketplace. The SciQuest solution helped us populate Team Georgia Marketplace with products from negotiated statewide contracts. The SciQuest solution provides a familiar and user-friendly shopping experience on the front end that drives both a more efficient procurement process on the back-end and ensures contract compliance and better spending practices by end users.

The software automatically tracks and reports on spending, giving the strategic sourcing teams a wealth of information on spending according to supplier, product, or category. In addition, the marketplace allows buyers from Georgia’s local public entities to see the terms and discounts of the state’s supplier contract. As a result, local government employees within the state can now “window shop” to get the best pricing by leveraging the state’s buying power.

Results

Georgia is rolling out its procurement transformation in waves, with the first wave now completed. The results have been impressive. The organization ran $1.6 billion through the system in fiscal year 2010, but leadership believes that the real spending could be between $5 and $6 billion. Georgia is finally learning what the state’s true spend really is. Twelve months ago, procurement had no details on that $1.6 billion in spending,  but the day the fiscal year closed on July 1,2010, we had detailed information on every purchase right at our fingertips.

Today, approximately 3,800 agency users from 17 agencies and 21,000 registered bidders and suppliers are live in the system. In December, the Department of Revenue, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the State Personnel Administration, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and the Department of Early Care and Learning/Bright from the Start all went live.

Reduced Cycle Times, Automation, and Going Paperless

Seven additional departments in the state―the Department of Community Affairs, the Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Disabilities, the Department of Defense, the Department of Driver’s Services, the Office of the Secretary of State, the Department of Education and the Department of Public Safety―are expected to go live later this year.  The entire Technical College System of Georgia, which encompasses 26 technicalcolleges, will be the next entity to go live.

The initiative currently encompasses 17 state agencies. Yet, even at this early stage, the project has yielded impressive results. Prior to undertaking the initiative, the state effectively had just 6 percent of its spending under management, while today that figure has increased to nearly 60 percent, with a goal of reaching 80 percent by the end of fiscal year 2012. For the agencies using the system, requisition-to-purchase order cycle times have dropped dramatically, from as much as 20 days to just two days.

Strategic sourcing efforts have yielded additional discounts from 5 to 20 percent on the goods covered under new contracts, and easy access to these contracts through a simple online interface have ensured that the state actually realizes thesebenefits. In addition, improved workflows and efficiencies, along with purchasing automation, allow thousands of users to take advantage of next-day deliveries for a wide range of goods. Automation has helped the Georgia Department of Audits to completely eliminate paper from its procurement processes.

Expansion to County and Municipal Organizations

The prospects for savings and better service do not stop with state government. Our vision is for Team Georgia Marketplace to be accessible to all public entities in Georgia that use the required technologies. This will allow county and municipal organizations to access the state’s contracts, even while they increase the buying volume that strategic sourcing managers use in their negotiations with suppliers. In effect, Georgia will create the nation’s largest group purchasing organization in the public sector.

Cost-Saving Model for Public Sector

With this program, Georgia is giving the nation a concrete example of the future of public procurement, in which purchasing on contract is as easy as filling an electronic shopping cart, and where the procurement office can focus not on pushing paper, but on analyzing data on spending and negotiating contracts that public employees will use to save taxpayer dollars.

I am the first to admit that Georgia’s procurement transformation is an ongoing process. While the state believes it has addressable spend in the range of more than $5 billion, the success of the procurement initiative to date has opened up the possibility that the state procurement office could eventually capture significantly greater amounts of spend―and drive much greater efficiencies―as the initiative progresses.

Georgia offers a powerful example of the significant opportunity states have to drive bottom-line results with an entirely new approach to procurement.

It is not always what you buy that makes the difference, but how you buy it. The steps that Georgia has taken and the completely new way that it uses taxpayer funds has enabled the state to achieve far more with each and every dollar. Citizens deserve that diligence, not just in Georgia, but throughout the nation. 

Brad Douglas is the former commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services for the State of Georgia. Contact him at buzztech@yahoo.com.

by Richard Wenning and Damian Betebenner

The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) supports and serves 178 school districts that educate more than 800,000 preK-12 students statewide. The CDE also serves adult education and the state’s libraries. Three years ago, CDE approached the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (NCIEA)—whose mission is to help improve student achievement through enhanced practices in educational assessment and accountability—to jointly create a new way for parents, educators, administrators, and policymakers to analyze, view, and understand school performance data.

Colorado Growth Model
The CDE and NCIEA wanted to develop a model that moved conversations away from disconnected, annual discussions of student status toward continuous, year-over-year discussions of student growth. The two organizations started by creating the Colorado Growth Model, an analytical tool that tracks each student’s academic growth and achievement history. The model focuses on whether each student’s growth is adequate to reach and maintain desired levels of achievement, particularly proficiency on state assessments and
postsecondary workforce readiness.

With the model in place, the CDE knew it had the correct metrics to transform educational data use statewide, but it needed a way to turn this data into the information and knowledge necessary to enable transformation. To do so, the CDE embarked on a path that moves away from the traditional model of enterprise data use.

Using the model, the CDE worked to develop a system to get data to improve statewide educational programs to the correct personnel in a timely fashion. The state of Colorado collects millions of data elements on schools— from performance to location to student and school demographics. But historically, few people have had access to this data, and those who did still lacked the ability to view it and ascertain why certain students and schools were improving while others were not.

Rather than focusing primarily on the goal of assembling the data (and expecting the data to speak for itself ), the CDE focused on getting the correct data to the correct people. This allows stakeholders to use the data more efficiently. The CDE also wanted to go beyond traditional data spreadsheets and HTML charts with dynamic data visualizations to make the data come alive and inspire the user to explore and collaborate over the information—ultimately changing the understanding people have about education.

Enter SchoolView
Inspired by the Web 2.0 revolution of user-centered design and social networking, the CDE decided to apply these philosophies, designs, and associated technologies to data visualization and communication, helping to turn data into useful information for a wide variety of education stakeholders.

The result is SchoolView, the umbrella project under which Colorado is pursuing its wide-ranging agenda for its longitudinal data and instructional improvement systems. SchoolView is a unique Web 2.0 platform that enables all key stakeholders—from parents to school leaders to policymakers—to view, sort, and compare statewide educational performance data using highly visual, clickable dashboards, graphs, and maps. The platform’s website offers several easy-to-use data visualization tools to make it simple for users to understand how a child, classroom, school, or district is performing relative to others in the state.

In tandem, the Colorado Growth Model and SchoolView connect different stakeholders around a common indicator of individual student growth, illustrating how actions and performance at the individual, school, district, and statewide level are connected. By connecting the micro-level data with a macro view, stakeholders can convene around a single platform and set of indicators to discuss educational performance.

SchoolView aims to provide students, parents, teachers, principals, and administrators with meaningful support and actionable information to systemically manage continuous instructional improvement, including

• instructional planning
• information gathering, such as formative, interim, and summative assessments, and student work in graphical, audio, or video formats
• information analysis, with the support of real-time analysis and reporting
• evaluation of the effectiveness and return-oninvestment of specific actions.

SchoolView also promotes collaborative problem solving and action planning, and it integrates instructional data with student-specific data, such as attendance, discipline, grades, and credit accumulation, to provide early warning indicators of a student’s risk of educational failure.

The platform was created to serve distinct user groups with different information needs and uses. Parents and teachers tend to want to see data at the individual student level, whereas administrators and policymakers want a 40,000-foot view.

Educators, for example, will be able to examine interim and benchmark assessment results using engaging interfaces to support instructional planning. They also can access and contribute to effective practices identified for specific categories of students or instructional situations. Meanwhile, policymakers can examine summary information at the state level and easily investigate student achievement and growth through various lenses, including school type such as charter schools or online schools, location, poverty, and other school demographic characteristics.

Building SchoolView
The CDE and the NCIEA realized they needed a private-sector technology partner to develop the comprehensive data visualization tools that form the SchoolView portal. They hired digital solutions agency Universal Mind to build a series of sophisticated web-based tools that would interface with Colorado’s massive databases of educational performance information.

Because Universal Mind’s capabilities span both systems integration and digital design, it was able to handle the technical complexities of the data environment and develop the visualizations, as well as design an intuitive user experience that served the needs of a wide range of different stakeholders. Universal Mind’s user-experience designers first created a series of sketches and diagrams that initially helped stakeholders gain a common understanding of the project. To manage costs, the team brought the application to life gradually, adding levels of fidelity without building out a lot of technical code. This enabled it to refine concepts affordably as they went. Working with a single technology vendor reduced costs and enabled the CDE and the NCIEA to work more efficiently and quickly.

Early Results
SchoolView was rolled out in August 2009 and is already hugely popular among parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers. The application currently distributes summary measures and individualized student reports for more than 450,000 students statewide. As individual password-protected access to sensitive data is fully implemented, these reports—together with summary measures across all relevant subgroups—will be available to authorized personnel statewide.

SchoolView’s goal to provide a balanced, public scorecard that is accessible to anyone and easy-tounderstand through clear visual representation can be a very powerful motivator for change. For example, one principal, who was convinced his students were making strong progress toward state goals, learned by using SchoolView that, in fact, his students were not progressing as well as other students across the state. Never having been able to compare progress on a state level, the principal had been relying on his own measures of student growth. Gaining a clear understanding of one’s relative performance against standards is essential information for school improvement.

Educational Accountability System
The SchoolView project has already had a major impact on legislation and policy. By making complex data available to the public in an easy-to-visualize way, SchoolView has become the underpinning of a new Educational Accountability System in Colorado that oversees how Colorado evaluates schools, develops improvement strategies, and allocates resources. SchoolView was also recently recognized by the National Council for Measurement in Education (NCME) for its outstanding dissemination of educational measurement concepts to the public.

Recovery Act Support
Widespread support for SchoolView has also translated into a commitment from Colorado Governor Bill Ritter to invest $2.5 million of discretionary Recovery Act funds to ensure  that all of Colorado’s 178 school districts, nearly 1,800 schools, and more than 25,000 teachers use the portal.

The initiative has also spread to other states. By creating an open source model in the Colorado Growth Model, the CDE envisioned other states as co-developers of the materials required for successful use of the data. From its initial stages of development, the Colorado Growth Model was intended to be used regardless of any future scaling (vertical or nonvertical scale) or technical alterations associated with the state assessment. As such, it is suitable for use with any annual state assessment system. This broad applicability has led a dozen other states to investigate and implement the model, including Massachusetts, Indiana, New York, and Virginia.

What’s Next for SchoolView?
The next version of SchoolView offers even more sophisticated data visualization tools, such as applications that enable educators and administrators to access and analyze classroom-level and individual student growth metrics, as well as print reports showing how student groups and individual students are performing relative to their academic peers. Users also will be able to share visualizations on Facebook or Twitter to drive deeper discussion around the topic of school performance.

The CDE also is planning to integrate online learning applications to better enable school districts to provide blended learning and instructional opportunities. Significantly expanding the availability and depth of online course offerings will increase student achievement and improve teacher effectiveness, and impact students’ post-secondary workforce readiness and college readiness.

Just as other states have learned from Colorado by embracing its growth model, Colorado hopes to tap into the wisdom and creative insights of other states in the development of all the associated content on which the utility of the model rests. To this end, the CDE has encouraged the formation of a consortium of states to share and co-develop the data visualization technologies associated with the Colorado Growth Model and to move toward deployment of this visualization technology into a cloud-based site that will promote the rapid sharing of insights and developments that each state brings to the table.

Indeed, the Internet has transformed how people exchange information, collaborate on ideas, and gain knowledge, with dynamic, real-time communities forming around specific areas of interest that leverage blogs, wikis, forums, user groups, and social networks. The CDE proposes to use this same web-based model to link parents, educators, students, researchers, and other education stakeholders into powerful, collaborative learning communities. These tools will break down the barriers of location, time, and access to resources to deliver the information needed for professional development, instructional materials, and other educational content and collaboration crucial to improving student achievement.

Richard Wenning is the associate commissioner for the Colorado Department of Education, where his responsibilities include public policy development and the design and implementation of Colorado’s educational accountability system, including SchoolView and the Colorado Growth Model. Contact him at Wenning_R@cde.state.co.us.

Damian Betebenner is a senior associate with the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, where his current responsibilities focus on assisting states in the implementation of student growth models. Contact him at dbetebenner@nciea.org.

Introduction to the Forum: Overview of Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reforms

by Beverly A. Cigler

Residents of New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast have been trying to adjust to their “new normal” in the five years since Hurricane Katrina and the “Great Flood” in New Orleans, along with subsequent Hurricanes Rita, Wilma, Ike, and Gustav. The new normal changed abruptly when an industrial accident, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, occurred off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010. The burning rig took 11 lives and was followed by the worst environmental disaster the United States has ever faced, along with economic, social, and cultural impacts associated with gushing oil just as another hurricane season approached.

Oil Spill Impacts on New Orleans

The months before the fifth anniversary of the Katrina disaster saw the creation of yet another recovery plan: the Long-Term Gulf Coast Restoration Support Plan. The impact of the oil spill on tourism, fish stocks, trade, the oil and gas industry, and the environment across the region are extensive and likely long-term, although varying widely by state and community. The impact on New Orleans itself is yet unknown.

The city is not as affected by a loss of tourism as are the white sand beach communities of the other Gulf States, such as Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The arts, culture, food, music, and festivals of New Orleans draw tourists year round from across the United States and the world, making the tourism industry the metropolitan area’s largest economic driver. It is uncertain whether closed beaches and cancelled hotels and vacations along the Gulf Coast will be offset by purchases from those associated with cleaning up the oil.

The well-being of New Orleans is tied to the Gulf waters and coastal region, however. In addition to the number one economic engine—tourism—the oil and gas and port and transportation industries are key economic drivers, giving economic value to the nation while generating jobs and wealth in metropolitan New Orleans. Oil-related impacts on the economy of Plaquemines Parish may negatively affect the entire region, according to data provided by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. The Gulf Coast region produces 30 percent of crude oil and 12 percent of natural gas for the United States. A lengthy ban on offshore oil drilling would likely have a major negative economic impact.

Louisiana’s marshes and wetlands are the breeding ground for hundreds of aquatic species critical to the environmental and economic value of the region and nation. The wetlands have been eroding at an alarming rate for decades. Marshes have traditionally been called swamps in Louisiana and are filled in to allow new development, which is vulnerable to natural hazards. Oil exposure to these delicate areas may have long-term negative effects on fish; sea birds, such as pelicans and migratory birds; whales; and dolphins.

Commercial and recreational fisheries depend on a healthy coastal ecosystem, navigable waters, and wetlands and barrier islands to protect them. Since Katrina’s devastation, there has been renewed interest and effort to restore the coastal wetlands in the realization of their central importance to the recovery of the Gulf Coast. The magnitude of the setback caused by the oil disaster is not yet known, but the oil tragedy may lead to reenergized interest in coastal restoration and increased funding.

Remembering Katrina

At least 1,464 Louisianans died—by drowning, injury and trauma, and heart conditions—in the Katrina disaster. The victims were not disproportionately taken by race, but half were over the age of 74. Those most vulnerable, physically and economically, were the least able to evacuate and cope. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC), in operation since 1997, provides data on the Katrina losses in New Orleans and, generally, on the Gulf Coast, which are used for the short summary here.

More than one million Gulf Coast residents were displaced from their homes by the winds and water. Those with resources returned home relatively quickly, but more than 600,000 households were still displaced a month after the storm. Evacuee shelters housed as many as 273,000 people at their peak and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers housed at least 114,000 households.

One million housing units were damaged by Katrina’s wind and water in the coastal region and the subsequent flooding when the levees failed in New Orleans. Half were located in Louisiana. Eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, leaving some areas under 10 feet of water, and others with less than one foot.

By July 2006, the city had lost more than half of its population. Monetary damages from Hurricane Katrina—and Hurricane Rita that followed three weeks later—totaled $150 billion or more than twice the damage from Hurricane Andrew, 9/11, and the Northridge Earthquake combined. The national spending was $125.5 billion but $75 billion of that was for emergency relief, not rebuilding. Philanthropic contributions were more than double for both the 2004 South Asian Tsunami and 9/11 in the United States but amounted to just $6.5 billion. Private insurance claims covered less than $30 billion of the losses.

As the five-year anniversary of Katrina approached, major efforts to reform the public school system, improve the delivery of healthcare to the neediest, and reform a dysfunctional criminal justice system were touted. The Saints’ 2010 Super Bowl victory had captured the spirit of a city that was determined to be resilient—to bounce back better than it was five years before. Then, the region was faced with another disaster, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

Katrina and Deepwater Horizon highlight the region’s vulnerability to natural and man-made hazards— hurricanes or flawed structures such as levees and oil rigs—that are ever threatening to the people in the Gulf region and their more than $240 billion dollar economy.

Loss of trust in institutions—government and private—resulted from the two catastrophes because of the slow and confused responses, real or perceived, to the events and the circumstances surrounding their occurrence. A structurally unsound levee system surrounding New Orleans was a result of cronyism and corruption. “Cozy” public-private sector relationships in the Gulf states encouraged lax regulations and regulatory enforcement, making it possible for an oil company to tolerate questionable construction practices for the oil rig that exploded. There is not a “stress meter” large enough to measure the ruined lives and pain in the U.S. Gulf Coast region.

New Orleans Five Years Post-Katrina

Despite persistent predictions that New Orleans’ post-Katrina population would plateau, the number of households in the city continued to increase steadily in the city’s fifth year of recovery, although that rate of growth has begun to slow, according to a study by the GNOCDC, released in July 2010. In the past year, neighborhoods that have been slowest to recover from Katrina have grown the fastest. The current population mix might not consist of all the same people as in the past, but the growth is robust, even five years post-disaster.

Among the city’s 73 neighborhoods, 66 have recovered more than half the number of households they had before the levees failed. In general, as residents moved back into their rehabilitated homes or into new or rehabbed apartment buildings in flooded parts of New Orleans’ east bank over the past two years, the consolidation of the city’s population in areas that did not flood has started to reverse itself. For example, 21 neighborhoods lost households from June 2008 to June 2010 and many of these are in parts of the city that did not flood, such as the West Bank and the “sliver by the river.”

Some parts of the city don’t show the ravages of the disaster, while others look like it happened yesterday. Because neighborhood recovery varies greatly in relation to resources and capacity for organizing, the neighborhoods need help making participatory land-use decisions. A recent GNOCDC study recommends that the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and the state’s Office of Community Development avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to remaining blight.

The center warns that the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf could have a dampening impact on the New Orleans housing market and suggests guarding against the potential for absentee owners to acquire and “sit on” historic housing stock. The center also recommends that Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) still held by the state, as well as unspent federal dollars, be used to reduce blight and expand public transportation options to connect neighborhoods to work centers.

Five years post-Katrina, it is difficult to imagine that the flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans would have recovered much at all. Beyond the financial aid used for the recovery is a story of resilience—of individual, family, and neighborhood residents; a network of nonprofits; and thousands of volunteers who organized and developed plan after plan to rebuild the city.

Ensuring Resilience

In its first ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) report to Congress on February 1, 2010, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) outlined its strategic framework to guide its activities for the next four years. The section of the report dealing with disasters and FEMA states the mission as “ensuring resilience to disasters.” In July 2010, the QHSR presented its Bottom-Up Review Report (BUR), a department-wide assessment of DHS aimed at aligning programmatic activities and organizational structure with the missions and goals identified in the QHSR.

This followed major changes in the emergency management system with the passage of the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act of 2006, which called for some 300 changes in federal emergency management. The changes, some completed and many ongoing, span five major management issues associated with mission and culture, leadership and structure, capabilities, resources, and accountability.

New Emergency Management Continuum

The two most recent reports reconceive how to deal with disasters. Traditionally, emergency management professionals and academics refer to the stages of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The QHSR and BUR, however, use “resilience” as the umbrella term for depicting how to deal with disasters. Resilience applies to both physical and social systems, and has several key attributes:

• Robustness refers to inherent strength or resistance to withstand external demands.
• Redundancy allows for alternatives—options and choices—during stress.
• Resourcefulness is the capacity to mobilize needed resources and services before, during, and after an emergency.
• Rapidity refers to the speed with which disruption is overcome and services restored.

The State of Louisiana has recently defined “community resiliency” as the capability to anticipate and respond to natural or human-made hazards in an effort to limit negative impacts on people and property. Believing that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for promoting resiliency, Louisiana officials are working with at-risk communities to develop appropriate solutions. The competitive Comprehensive Resiliency Pilot Program is a $10 million pool of federal CDBG money that will enable communities to be proactive in addressing risk and tying those factors into population growth, flood zones, and economic development.

Drawn from Louisiana’s $1 billion allocation of CDBG funds for recovery from the 2008 hurricanes Gustav and Ike, in June 2010, the state awarded nearly $9 million to 29 projects in communities affected by those hurricanes so they could become more resilient in the event of future disasters by incorporating mitigation and sustainability strategies such as updated comprehensive plans, zoning ordinances, and building code enforcement.

All of the eligible projects are focused on communities in the 53 parishes that were affected by Gustav and Ike. The program makes Louisiana eligible to compete in a special $312 million Disaster Recovery Enhancement Fund that was made available in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Dissemination of Best Practices

Lessons learned from the planning processes in the Louisiana communities will be compiled into a best practices resource available to all. The 29 projects were selected from a field of 87 submissions for resiliency planning, with a second round of awards for buildingcode enforcement following soon. One project is the development of a comprehensive, integrated water management strategy and plan for Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard Parishes.

The plan builds upon an international partnership between the region, the American Planning Association, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands known as the Dutch Dialogues. The strategy will be one of the first developed for a city located within in a subtropical climate zone and can serve as a model for other regions at risk.

Another of the funded projects is the Southwest Louisiana Economic Development Alliance, intended to develop a comprehensive regional housing study and strategic plan for five parishes. The nonprofit Global Green identified a project to develop an economic development strategy in coastal parishes, that is based on wetland protection and carbon sequestration. Preliminary wetlands data suggest that coastal wetlands may absorb as much as six times more carbon than forests, placing these wetlands at the forefront of areas where emerging carbon investors might invest.

Other Changes Related to FEMA Post-Katrina

The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (the Stafford Act) authorizes the president to issue “major disaster” or “emergency” declarations before or after catastrophes occur. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is currently being addressed by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, P.L. 101-380.

If the scope of the impact on the coastal states or the need for supplemental federal funding or other factors change, FEMA’s role could expand, and the Stafford Act would offer several options to programs to address the oil spill, although the U.S. government has secured an agreement for the private oil company responsible for the disaster to pay all costs.

Discussion of the Stafford Act reminds us that the difficult and still unresolved issues related to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall have led to numerous congressional hearings and studies intended to decide whether the Stafford Act needs major changes. It also reminds us of the turmoil after Katrina in dealing with public expectations for government performance and funding and the mistrust that resulted.

FEMA published a draft National Disaster Recovery Framework early in 2010 that attempts to reconcile many of the complex, confusing, and overlapping authorities and funds currently available to recover from a disaster. The plans may not be needed or implemented for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill if the “responsible parties” are continually involved in the clean up and the involved coastal communities are resilient.

Beverly A. Cigler, PhD, is professor of public policy and administration at Penn State University Harrisburg. Her key areas of interest and research are intergovernmental relations, especially state, local, and intermunicipal. This includes a focus on intergovernmental and organizational issues related to emergency management, especially mitigation. Contact her at cigler@psu.edu.

by Irene Connelly

Training managers at the National Park Service designed a program that not only met the agency’s succession requirements, but also implemented a major change in park management culture.

You are part of an organization that is almost a century old, with a decentralized workforce that spans the entire United States (and employs staff in both its most remote regions and its busiest cities) and a mission that includes responsibility for the country’s most important built and natural treasures. Your challenges and flaws include an impending loss of significant institutional knowledge and a reactive work culture that cannot serve your organization’s long-term interests. You are committed to an extended workforce training program that addresses your succession planning needs, and you have attempted a massive workplace culture shift. You have succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Now, you plan to expand the reach of your program.

If you have done all that, you are probably part of the National Park Service’s (NPS) Park Facility Management Division. In 2006, the division jump-started an aggressive, competency-based training program—the Facility Manager Leaders Program (FMLP)—designed to develop the next generation of leaders in the maintenance field. By applying industry standards and using expertise from within and outside NPS, training managers designed a program that met the agency’s succession requirements while implementing a major change in park management culture.

The program’s exceptional record of success earned it the 2010 winner of the W. Edwards Deming Outstanding Training Award.

The Graduate School’s Deming Award
Presented annually since 1998 by the Graduate School, the Deming Award is given to a federal government organization or civilian branch of the military to honor a training program that has made a significant impact within an agency or a particular effort that has benefited an organization.

Deming Award nominees are judged on the basis of innovative employee development and training initiatives that achieve not only measurable results, but positive outcomes. The most successful training initiatives documented in the award archives share certain characteristics: Each was developed with a thoughtful, clear vision for an organization’s future and potential, as well as an equally clear understanding of the potential pitfalls and negative realities it faced.

Those who develop successful initiatives tend to be those who are willing to dig in for the long haul, demonstrating a commitment to new learning. Award-winning programs also generate a high level of employee buy-in. In both areas, NPS’s FMLP excels.

The Challenge
FMLP came about as the result of an increasing federal-sector focus on facility management. By the beginning of this decade, NPS faced a significant skills gap in institutional knowledge, thanks to the anticipated retirement bubble. Increased reporting, accountability, and transparency requirements on the part of the U.S. Department of the Interior and Congress also posed challenges.

With facility management in the federal sector a focus issue for major federal organizations, NPS subjected itself to intense scrutiny. According to the nomination form submitted to the Deming panel, “Executive orders, human capital strategic plans, congressional watchers, and in-depth studies by the National Academy of Science’s Federal Facilities Council [all showed] a need to improve the effectiveness of park facility management.”

The FMLP course of study describes an aging infrastructure of facilities, lack of specific competencies in facility management, and a need for greater public accountability, which led to significant oversight review by federal agencies. During the 1980s, a successful series of courses were developed and delivered to the facility maintenance workforce, only to be discontinued as other issues took budget priority.

Maintenance of national parks was a patchwork process: “When something broke, it was fixed.” This approach was increasingly less practical as park infrastructures and portfolios grew more complex. NPS was locked into a reactive cycle. Issues that were— from a scientific management or data-driven management perspective—more important in the long run were largely ignored because the division was able to effectively handle typical maintenance and operations. Restrooms, roads, trails, and the like were impeccably cared for by committed staff as need arose, but without preventive maintenance to extend the life of major critical systems, such as HVAC systems or bridges, the parks were headed for disaster.

Any program that addressed these issues was going to have to initiate and support a massive organization culture shift, taking it from reactive to proactive. While it is often easy for an organization to think about structure and facility maintenance in the short term, NPS is charged, essentially, with maintaining its sites in perpetuity.

Stephen Wolter, director of the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands at Indiana University (which teamed with NPS to develop FMLP), thinks this is a vital part of the whole picture. “When you’re maintaining these same assets in perpetuity, then you end up saying, ‘Well, we can’t really defer that maintenance and have it break in 50 years—we have to find a way to fix it now,’” he says.

It was critical that facility management staff understood the extent to which their jobs were driven by data and systems and critical maintenance so that they could be proactive about extending the life of park assets.

The Solution
The NPS Servicewide Maintenance Advisory Committee (SMAC), consisting of representatives of its maintenance and facility discipline from around the United States, was asked to craft a vision for the future of facility management in the national parks.

Adopted in 2002, Facility Management for the 21st Century was a foundational document that expressed the need for creation of “a new cohort of facility managers” and for continual development of the facility manage- ment workforce “in order to improve the stewardship of built resources and, through those built resources, the natural and cultural resources of the nation.” NPS began to study federal directives related to facility management, as well as the training needs of its facility managers and the industry standards related to that training.

Gap Analysis
The Performance, Training, and Competency Gap Analysis (2005), completed in partnership with the Eppley Institute, supported the need for further performance and training improvements. Significant gaps in the fundamental software system used to manage facilities were identified.

Additionally, analysis uncovered a gap between the training programs being offered and the skills actually needed for a facility manager to function at full capacity. To confront these challenges, as well the results of further gap studies, NPS partnered with Eppley to create a course of study: FMLP.

Proven Results
FMLP, now in its fifth iteration, has proven to be a positive step for NPS. Since its inception, nearly 60percent of graduates have gone on to take positions as facility managers or chiefs of maintenance. In addition, there has been a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of preventive maintenance work orders, and indicators show an ever-increasing emphasis on managing park units for total cost of facility ownership. Additionally, graduates overwhelmingly indicate that they have experienced improvements in defined job competencies both during and after the training, and their supervisors confirm this.

Finally, parks or units where FMLP graduates work have seen estimated benefits in the millions of dollars. The effects on our national parks have gone beyond the monetary, as facility management principles taught in the program have been brought home to the students’ parks—to the parks they visit for field experience and to the parks of program mentors.

Program Expansion
The success of FMLP has led to a new strategic phase. A current NPS goal is to make this robust program available to a larger group of employees and not just those selected for the one-year curriculum. With the course of study spread out over a longer period, perhaps several years, employees can participate as their schedules allow. In addition, FMLP is said to have tremendous implications for the entire park and recreation and public land management sector.

How NPS Did It
Because NPS is required to use the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) competency approach, the curriculum development team relied on subject matter experts to validate the OPM competencies, which in turn served as a baseline for the creation of FMLP.

Intense study identified the parent competencies for facility managers in the public and private sectors, and the team reviewed requirements, goals, and recommendations from government and industry. Developed jointly by its training team and outside subject matter experts, the FMLP curriculum design uses the full range of delivery techniques in use by government, universities, and the private sector.

A year-long, assessment-based certificate program, FMLP comprises five courses ranging from traditional classroom studies to e-courses, webinars, and directed field experiences. Fifteen to 18 students representing different types of parks and various geographic areas are chosen each year from a pool of applicants. Applicants are regionally and nationally scored, with final decisions made by seven regional chiefs of maintenance.

As described in the course of study, FMLP embraces deep learning that promotes critical analysis of ideas so that students can combine them with their existing skills, knowledge, and information for greater understanding. This endorses concept retention, leading to a greater capacity to analyze new and changing situations or scenarios and to improved problem-solving skills. Program designers define deep learning as “the [fundamental] difference between education (which is focused on uncertainty and application of knowledge, analysis, and logic) and training (which is more focused on certainty and routine).”

When they enter FMLP, students are paired with mentors from the management field who have extensive management experience with NPS. Not only do these mentors provide guidance and informal training, including hosting mentees at their home parks, they also attend the classroom courses. Wolter describes the mentors as adjunct professors, a critical part of the success of the experiential learning model.

The FMLP’s 2006 pilot program was evaluated while in progress and upon conclusion. The consensus was that it should be continued in order to reach the goal of developing succession facility managers for the NPS. In May 2010, the fifth class began its course of studies.

Positive Outcomes
According to the FMLP’s course of study, “At the core of FMLP is the creation of proficient facility managers for the NPS and meeting succession management goals for the U.S. Department of the Interior. However, it also strategically improves the NPS’s ability to achieve its central mission of preservation and enjoyment through enhancing organization capacity.”

To date, the goals of succession management, the creation of proficient managers, and the preservation and enjoyment have all been furthered. The exceptionally positive results of the program are being documented by an ongoing evaluation process.

With an overarching goal of succession management for facility managers, one of the most positive outcomes the program would be for FMLP students to take positions as chiefs of maintenance, facility managers, or the equivalent. Evaluations indicate definite success in this regard.

Facility Manager Mobility
While numbers have peaked overall since the program was implemented, Figure 1 (covering the class years 2006–2008) suggests that recently, fewer FMLP students are becoming facility managers. This trend is believed to result from the fact that some facility manager positions are not yet open.

The class of 2006 had three years in which to find new positions, whereas at the time this chart was created, recent graduates had less than a year. More important, 89 percent of FMLP graduates have received promotions in facility management or have sought and been offered promotion after completing the course.

Preventive Maintenance
An expected outcome was for graduating students to demonstrate a grasp of the core concepts of proper facility management, not the least of which was that important shift from reactive maintenance to proactive and preventive maintenance. The 2005 gap analysis indicated that facility managers were not using the facility management software system (FMSS) to plan work. An indicator of success would be the existence of more preventive maintenance work orders in the system.

Between FY05 and FY09, the annual number of preventive maintenance work orders in FMSS increased by many thousands. The relative stability of FY06 to FY08 reflects the FMLP curriculum’s heavy focus on taking inventory of park assets and creating park asset management plans. The FMLP class of 2009, on the other hand, shifted its focus from creating plans to executing plans, creating a “rewarding” jump in the number of preventive work orders created.

Because preventive maintenance extends the life cycle of an asset and reduces costly, inconvenient emergency maintenance, this indicator illustrates a very positive impact for NPS. With the number of parks touched by FMLP students, mentors, and visits continuing to grow, this upward trend is expected to continue.

Job Competencies
As part of the evaluation process, a competency-based survey is administered to students and their supervisors 180 days after graduation. Training impact is assessed at five levels, with each level depending on and linked to measurements of the previous levels. Only two years of data are currently available, but NPS has found the impact striking. Data was collected from all graduates and at least one supervisor per graduate.

Also, graduates overwhelmingly indicated that they experienced improvements in defined job competencies both during and after the training. Thirty-six tasks were listed, ranging from developing a park asset management plan to evaluating equipment and corrective maintenance to creativity, innovation, strategic thinking, and technical credibility.

The students’ self-ratings on a list of competency tasks showed that more than 70 percent indicated they had improved to some degree in all the competencies, and more than 90 percent indicated that they had improved to some degree in an overwhelming majority of those competency tasks.

At least 50 percent of those students attributed these improvements to FMLP. Their supervisors observed similar improvements, but rated them even more highly than did the students, with a greater frequency of “significant or above average improvement.”

Financial Benefits
Responding to open-ended survey questions, both graduates and their supervisors identified the benefits to their respective park sites as increased efficiencies and additional money generated for park, savings, and special program development. Financial benefits are a standout here, with parks or units where graduates work seeing estimated benefits in the millions of dollars.

Other Benefits
But, it is not just the students and their parks that benefit from this process. The mentor-student experience has proved valuable for FMLP in ways it had not fully anticipated. Putting mentors through the courses—keeping them informed on the same topics and approach to doing business—made them more committed to meeting the gap that existed between proactive and reactive.

The principles and lessons of the program spread to the parks of the mentors and to the parks visited by students for field experience. Inclusion of the mentors extended the impact of the program and added formal supervision, management, and leadership competencies to their personal capabilities. The results of this relationship have been so profound that NPS realized in 2009 that FMLP’s ROI analysis would also need to include the program’s effect on mentors.

This workforce training initiative stands out because of the impressive nature of both management commitment and workforce cooperation. The attitude of leaders in the NPS Park Facility Management Division in approaching program design has been described as rare. Leaders studied benchmark surveys to uncover the hallmark characteristics of successful leadership programs and made a deep commitment to implementing and following through on changes. They committed to giving new efforts a chance to take root and show results.

The involvement and commitment of the NPS facility maintenance workforce is also exceptional. The division bears responsibility for upwards of 50 percent of the operational funds and services provided by NPS—running the larger parks has been likened to taking responsibility for a small city. As a result, employees have a strong belief that they have to develop their discipline and do their best
to protect the assets under their care.

NPS is tasked with the care of built and natural resources that include wilderness areas, habitat for endangered and threatened species, and cultural heritage sites that date from prehistoric times through the 20th century. This is not an insignificant responsibility, and it is an area in which failures in upkeep will be quickly seen and deeply felt at many levels. The motivation to maintain and steward these treasures is tremendously powerful for employees at all levels of this organization, as is the desire to develop succeeding generations of employees to continue their work and to do it even better.

As of 2009, more than half of the national parks in the United States (more than 200) have been directly— and positively—affected by FMLP, its students, and its mentors. The result is better management of built resources, which in turn means that the cultural, historic, and natural resources protected by these built resources are better preserved “for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.”

Irene Connelly is a senior editor in the department of communications and marketing at the Graduate School. Contact her at irene.connelly@graduateschool.edu.

by Russ Linden

Are your agency leaders talking about collaboration now more than five or six years ago? Are you seeing considerably more collaboration in your agency today?

When I pose these questions to managers, 80 to 90 percent answer “yes” to the first question, but less than 30 percent answer “yes” to the second question. Why is there this yawning gap between the rhetoric and the reality about collaboration?

Increasing the level of collaboration in an organization requires a major culture change.  John Hancock, a colleague at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) observes, “Changing organizational culture isn’t rocket science—it’s harder!” Hancock’s point is spot on; greater collaboration is a cultural change that involves values, attitudes, history, and professional identity—much of an agency’s DNA.

Culture can change and adapt over time, but it is difficult. Mid-level and senior managers are concerned about what they have to lose. Front-line employees clearly see the need for change, but also encounter a variety of interpersonal barriers. Indeed, culture change is difficult for anyone who works at an agency where people “talk collaboration,” but hire, train, evaluate, and promote workers based on their individual skills.

Six Key Collaboration Factors

The good news is that there is a discipline to this challenging but critical work. I’ve learned from two decades of researching several successful—and not-so-successful—collaborative efforts that six factors form the foundation of collaboration:

1. Partners have a shared, specific purpose that they are committed to and cannot achieve (as well) on their own.
2. Partners want to pursue a collaborative solution now, and are willing to contribute something to the effort.
3. Appropriate people are at the table.
4. Partners have an open, credible process.
5. The effort has a passionate champion (or champions) with credibility and clout.
6. Partners have trusting relationships.

Having a Shared Purpose

Having a shared, specific purpose that partners are committed to and need help to achieve may seem obvious, but it isn’t. Have you ever participated on a team in which the goal seemed clear to you, only to learn that other members had differing notions of the purpose?

People join collaborative groups for a variety of reasons; some even join because their organization is threatened by the initiative and send someone to slow it down. Identifying the shared purpose and gaining commitment is critical. In fact, this was the top-rated factor by one of the work groups at the 2009 Strengthening Trust in Government Conference, which was sponsored by The Public Manager and the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). 

When it’s unclear whether each partner is committed to the same purpose, some collaboration leaders approach the partners one-on-one—outside of team meetings—to learn what each sees as the goal and hopes to get out of it.

Collaborating and Contributing Now

Wanting to pursue a collaborative solution now and being willing to contribute something to the effort is another success factor. The two key words are “now” and “contribute.”

Collaboration works far better when the timing is right—and when there’s a sense of high stakes. Stakeholders need to be more than interested; they need to contribute time, effort, ideas, problem-solving skills, and other resources. One strategy for raising the stakes is to include customers on the team. Allow customers to describe why the project is so important and the difference it will make in their lives.

Gathering the Appropriate People at the Table

The appropriate people must be at the table. Many rate this factor as the most challenging element to achieve. We can invite others to collaborate with us, but when they work in other units or agencies, which is what collaboration is all about, we can’t direct or demand their involvement.

Ideally, the appropriate people have subject matter expertise, interest in the project, access to resources (including people in other organizations), and the ability to speak for their part of their organization. It often helps to identify the specific people you want from each partner organization and ask for their involvement, rather than wait for each agency to send its representative.

Creating an Open, Credible Process

Process, is a long “four-letter word” for many people, especially when it’s “process for process’ sake.” In collaborative teams, a credible process is critical to producing positive results.

The process for successful collaboration needs to include an able convener, agreed team norms, joint ownership of the initiative, transparency (no side deals made without the team’s knowledge), metrics to gauge progress, and knowledge of what each member brings to the table. A trained facilitator can be extremely effective in helping the team work through these issues and create an open, candid climate.

At the 2009 Strengthening Trust in Government Conference, one break-out group offered another important aspect of a credible process: use of a common language. When those from different cultures work on a team, they often speak past each other because the same words have multiple meanings. For example, ask colleagues in five different agencies for their definition of “program,” and you’ll likely receive five different meanings.

Gaining a Passionate Champion with Credibility and Clout

The effort must have a passionate champion (or champions) with credibility and clout. You might assume this refers to senior leaders, and there’s no question that strong senior support is essential for many—but not all—collaborative efforts.

I’ve seen some collaborative initiatives do very well when they fly beneath the radar and stay out of the leadership’s focus. However, I’ve never seen an important collaboration succeed without a passionate champion at the table. A working-level champion is one who has credibility, clout, and is passionate about the initiative.

Trusting Relationships

Effective partnerships require trust. Some collaborative groups spend months working on the formal aspects of their partnership: the governance structure, the parties’ roles and responsibilities, funding, the project plan, and so on. Yet, ultimately, they produce very little because they fail to realize the power of a trusting relationship.

All of those formal tasks are important, but the group must build trust before such tasks have any meaning. No piece of paper, structure, or plan has the power of respectful relationships built on trust. With trust, a great deal is possible; without it, little is. 

Best Practice: IADS 

The six key collaboration factors were at work when a group of analysts from various agencies within the intelligence community began looking for a better way to produce data and analysis.

The result: Integrated Air Defense System (IADS), a virtual team comprised of professionals from the intelligence and defense communities. IADS includes analysts and managers who work together to analyze the air defense systems of countries that pose threats to the United States. There are three customers for this sort of analysis: war fighters, policy makers (in Congress, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Air Force), and the acquisition community.

Their solution has been an enormous success and has improved security in the United States. 

 
From Jigsaw Puzzle to an Integrated Whole

Prior to IADS, the different intelligence agencies produced their own reports on particular aspects of other countries’ air defense systems. For example, agencies couldn’t give a complete response about how an entire defensive “kill chain” worked in a specific country. One agency could report on early warning radar and another could analyze surface to air missiles, but there were no integrated reports. A single agency could not answer critical macro questions such as, “Can U.S. aircraft be detected and tracked by Country X?” As one analyst expressed, “The customer got parts of a jigsaw puzzle and had to put the parts together.”

In the years following the 1991 Gulf War, analysts at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) and other intelligence agencies began discussing an integrated approach for analyzing air defense systems, and brought the issue to their supervisors. A new approach was required. In 1994, John Berbrich, chief of scientific and technical intelligence production at the Defense Intelligence Agency, became a strong advocate for the concept, making it a priority. He urged a group of managers to flesh out the concept and identify significant hurdles.

Change occurred in both a top-down and bottom-up fashion. Supervisors and their managers suggested formation of an integrated team of analysts from across the intelligence community to work on air defense. Phil Davis  was enlisted to develop the program and negotiate with the agencies involved. Davis and Phil Lathrop  spent several months meeting with managers within key agencies, listening to questions, and seeking concurrence. Some of those agencies’ leaders saw this new program as a threat; it didn’t belong to any one agency, and it would require new resources. They feared it meant that they might lose some of their current mission elements.

Davis came up with a detailed proposal for IADS and gained general support from the agencies. He briefed Joan Dempsey, who then was in charge of intelligence production as deputy director for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). She agreed with the need for an integrated team and suggested a two-part structure, with DIA leading a coordinating group of managers from the agencies involved and the U.S. Air Force leading a second group made up of working level analysts. The directors of the agencies approved the structure, and detailed work on developing IADS began in earnest. Dempsey became IADS’ senior champion.

Questions and Concerns

Despite their support for the IADS structure, senior managers of IADS’ partner agencies had a host of concerns. To address their questions, Lieutenant Colonel Ty Johnson, the first chief of the coordinating group, met with each of the managers before IADS went into operation. He explained the overall concept of IADS, then invited their input and listened patiently to their questions and concerns.

One of their leading concerns was that IADS might take something away from their individual agencies: control, key staff, mission elements, or other resources. Johnson’s explanation of the important roles the managers on the Coordinating Group would play helped address their need to maintain some control and influence over the direction of IADS. Also, the fact that IADS was a virtual team, rather than a new organization requiring a realignment of the intelligence community structure, reduced their concerns. Dempsey and Johnson demonstrated a great sensitivity to the politics and personalities involved, working with each partner agency to gain commitment. IADS was formally launched in 1995.

Two-Part Structure

IADS is led by a coordinating group made up of mid-level managers from various IADS agencies. Twice a year they identify the highest priority countries for analysis—those that require new or updated studies based on several factors, including the threat each country poses, and customers’ requirements. They then commit their agencies to work on those priorities.

The actual IADS work is performed by air defense analysts who are part of the analyst group. They create a schedule for producing reports on each country and then arrange for the studies. When a new study begins, the authors attend a kickoff meeting; after that, 90 percent of the communications is done via email, phone, or video teleconferencing. VTC.

The major authors of IADS studies are analysts at NASIC, the Missile and Space Intelligence Center, the National Ground Intelligence Center, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Other authors and contributors include the National Security Agency, DIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial Agency, and the Transportation Security Administration.  

When the analyst group sets the production schedule, the coordinating group members obligate their agencies to meet that schedule. Inside the analyst group, NASIC takes responsibility for pulling together the various pieces of analysis prepared on each country study. It seeks consensus when there are differing opinions, acts as referee when consensus is needed, and makes any necessary changes to the final products.   As Figure 1 illustrates, this structure is easy to understand on paper, but requires a lot of give and take and can be arduous to implement. One example is in establishing priorities for the country studies. Requirements come to IADS at two levels: 1) member agencies receive them from their individual customers and 2) the IADS program receives requirements directly. For instance, the U.S. Air Force might be tasked by a customer to focus in one region, while DIA is given requirements to work somewhere else. Each customer, of course, sees its need as the highest priority. Resolving these conflicts and scheduling resources to each priority requires a huge amount of patience and understanding.

Making an Impact

IADS has been successful, providing its customers with the kind of integrated, timely reports they require. One of its successes occurred in the fall of 2001, when much of the country was still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Immediately following 9/11, IADS analysts began a study of Afghanistan’s air defenses, assuming U.S. military would soon strike.

Within three days, the group produced a product ready for war fighters in what came to be called “Operation Enduring Freedom.” The analyst group had to produce a tremendous amount of work in very little time, and they had to get it right.

According to one of the IADS analysts, “There’s no way we could have produced a quality product so quickly before we had IADS. It was only possible because of the years of experience working together on the IADS analyst group and the existing structure to pull in whatever resources we needed. Sure, Afghanistan didn’t posses an integrated air defense system. But it had a lot of ways to shoot aircraft down! And its assets weren’t organized in any obvious way, which actually made it harder to analyze. Our intelligence agencies had virtually no information on the country’s air defense capabilities in September, 2001. They needed a huge amount of data and analysis, immediately.” IADS filled the need and demonstrated its value.

Lessons Learned

What can other agencies learn from the development and work of IADS? One lesson has to do with tempo. There’s a saying among entrepreneurs: “You go slow to go fast.” When a new venture starts, it takes time to figure out the product; find customers; design the first solution; and get it out the door, receive feedback, and modify it. As the kinks are worked out, customer satisfaction rises and word starts to spread. Then the product really hits its take-off point.

Successful public-sector innovators often use a similar process. They buy the time and good will to develop their concept, get the right people to the table, develop trust and confidence, find a senior champion, gain needed resources, demonstrate the ability to meet or exceed customer needs, and market initial results. IADS’ leaders demonstrated the wisdom of the “go slow to go fast” model. As one of its analysts explains, “It was good to start with a success.”

IADS also reflects the power of having the six key collaborative elements in place. Managers in the agencies had a shared goal, one they couldn’t meet on their own. They wanted to work together toward that goal because the problems with the former process had been amply revealed in the 1991 Gulf War, and powerful customers were angry with that process. Also, the managers got the right people to the table to develop a new way for producing analytical studies, led by senior advocates (Berbrich, then Dempsey) and working-level champions (Lathrop, Davis, and Johnson), who developed the detailed plan and worked through agency managers’ concerns. 

And the IADS model helps create open communications and trust. Middle managers don’t feel threatened by IADS because they help to make key decisions and they feel informed about what their analysts are working on. Analysts (who do most of their joint work via collaborative software) begin each new study by meeting face-to-face, allotting time to work out goals, roles, timelines, and develop trust with members of the team.

Once IADS was up and running, it benefited from other smart moves:

Ample recognition. IADS analysts give each other credit for good work. They let each others’ managers know, too. The products are Department of Defense (DOD) studies authored by all agencies, not by any one agency.

The two-part structure. The coordinating group provides a forum for discussing issues. It deals with hurdles facing analysts, provides leadership, and helps anticipate and prevent problems. The analyst group coordinates the subject-matter experts and provides a means for resolving differences.

Good answers to the “What’s in it for me?” question. IADS is briefed and marketed well within the agencies involved, which makes everyone look good.  IADS reports are shared across many agencies and with senior government policy makers, which is an incentive to be involved. Further, IADS is generating real results; thus, the managers of these agencies put pressure on their employees to participate. They want to benefit from the program’s successes.

A reward system focused on both “me” and “we.” In Competence, Courage, and Change: An Approach to Family Therapy, psychologists Edith C. Lawrence and David B. Waters describe two fundamental human needs that they have discerned from their many decades of clinical practice: 1) the need to be, and be seen as, competent and 2) the need to belong to something larger than oneself. Consider these the “me” and “we” needs. Most of us need to be acknowledged for individual contributions, but we also need to belong to a larger entity that gives life meaning and purpose.

Effective collaborations need to meet both needs, as IADS does. IADS analysts are eligible for individual awards given within each partner agency, based on their own award framework. The analysts are also eligible for team awards given by the intelligence community. Beyond such formal systems, IADS relies on the individual expertise of the analysts, but that expertise only satisfies customer needs when it is integrated with expertise from different agencies, producing a comprehensive product that no individual could develop. IADS participants can meet their “me” needs only through a commitment to their team’s overall mission.

Ongoing, fluid communications between the coordinating group and the analyst group. In most cases, the managers on the coordinating group supervise the analysts who produce the studies on each country. Thus communication happens quite naturally. If you’re an analyst on the “Country A” team, your manager goes to coordinating group meetings at which your team’s reports are discussed and decisions are made about your team’s future assignments. This helps keep managers and their IADS analysts on the same page. Communications has been a major strength of IADS.

Future Collaboration

In his book The Next Government of the United States, Don Kettl argues that government managers have to learn the skills and tasks of collaboration because of the great amount of government work that is now conducted through networks. 

To illustrate his point, Kettl describes a long and difficult illness experienced by his mother-in-law. She saw dozens of people from various organizations during the ordeal and received expensive 24-hour service, all of which was covered by the government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. Yet, when Kettl looked back on the situation, he realized that she never spoke with or was served by a single government employee.

His mother-in-law was helped by a network of nurses, physicians, administrators, pharmacists, dentists, social workers, and physical therapists who worked for private or nonprofit agencies. The care was fine, Kettl reports, but it had to be organized and coordinated to have the intended results. And it’s not only the 45 million Medicare recipients and 60 million people on Medicaid who receive their services and benefits through complex networks. Customers of many human services, natural resource, emergency management, scientific, and other programs are also served through networks. These services do not perform well unless government employees are collaborating with each other and with non-government providers to share information and coordinate activities.

Consider John Gardner’s quote, “Behind all the current buzz about collaboration is a discipline…. If it contained a silicon chip, we’d all be excited.” There is no silicon chip, but the discipline is becoming known. Our challenge is to learn and use the discipline of intelligent collaboration.

References

1. Competence, Courage, and Change: An Approach to Family Therapy (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993).
2. The Next Government of the United States (W.W. Norton and Company, 2009).

Russ Linden has been teaching and consulting with public-sector managers since 1980. He’s an adjunct faculty member at the Federal Executive Institute, the University of Virginia, and the University of Connecticut. His clients include several intelligence, military, and homeland security agencies; the Departments of State, HHS, Treasury, and Education; and several nonprofits in the United States and Israel. His work focuses on change management, collaborating across organizational boundaries, strategic thinking and planning, and creating customer-focused agencies.

Parts of this article are excerpted from Linden’s new book, Leading Across Boundaries: Creating Collaborative Agencies in a Networked World (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

Introduction: What Is Happening, Why, and So What?

Alan P. Balutis

In mid-2007, the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) began an effort to contribute to the new administration’s management initiatives, which are designed to better implement the president’s policy agenda and improve the operations, effectiveness, and efficiency of the government. IBSG developed a four-part program, consisting of small group seminars, publications, coalition and collaboration activities, and a website devoted to new ideas in government.

Individuals who participated in the series of monthly seminars were invited to prepare articles for the Winter 2007 and Spring 2008 issues of The Public Manager, which were reprinted in a special Spring 2008 issue of TPM. In addition, insights were posted on several blog sites, as well as Cisco’s New Ideas Website (www.newideasforgovernment.com).

Since that time, Barack Obama was elected president, a smooth transition occurred, a new cabinet came into office, and sub-cabinet positions and senior management jobs around government were filled—with more developments still to come. During this time, the financial markets seized up, credit froze, the economy went into a nosedive, and several massive financial, economic, and auto industry rescues were enacted. As the first year of the Obama presidency draws to a close, some assessment is in order.

Updates and Status Reports

In this Forum, the same team of analysts, experts, and government executives who outlined a management agenda for the new president report on the administration’s actual agenda. Without suggesting a causal link, much of what was advocated in the Spring 2008 issue of TPM has come to fruition. In the president’s FY 2010 budget, the administration’s new management and performance agenda is based around these themes:

• putting performance first by replacing the existing Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) with a new performance improvement and analysis framework
• ensuring responsible spending of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 funds
• transforming the federal workforce
• managing across sectors
• reforming federal contracting and acquisition
• enhancing transparency, technology,
• and participatory democracy.

Readers are invited to examine this Forum to get an update and status report on

• human resources from W. Frederick Thompson, Stephen Benowitz, Steve W. T. O’Keeffe, Robert D. Childs, and Childs’ colleagues at the Information Management College at Ft. McNair
• acquisition from Allan Burman
• technology from John Sindelar, Tom Hughes, and Daniel Mintz
• performance from Robert M. Tobias
• citizen-centric government from Martha Dorris and David McClure
• collaboration and managing across boundaries from Robert J. O’Neill and Elizabeth K. Kellar
• overall management reform from Alan P. Balutis and Donald F. Kettl.

Alan P. Balutis is director and distinguished fellow in Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. He is also chairman of The Public Manager Board of Directors. He can be reached at abalutis@cisco.com.

Change Is in the Wind for HR Management

by Stephen Benowitz

While long-term change does occur, it’s often at glacial speed because of the political issues associated with implementing it. As a result, transformational change in policies that govern the federal civil service rarely occurs. Has this happened with the Obama Administration—the party of “change”? It certainly has reversed a number of personnel policies that were adopted by the previous administration, many at the urging of employee unions.

Stephen Benowitz is a retired federal executive with more than 30 years experience in human resource management. He now serves as a consultant to government agencies and private sector clients on HR issues. He can be reached at stevebenowitz@comcast.net.

HR Strategies for Driving Change: Finding the Right Road

by W. Frederick Thompson

Economics has long held that when there is a common shared resource that none of the parties own, competing parties will pursue their own short-term interests at the expense of long-term outcomes and will thereby over time destroy the systems on which they rely.

Politicians, federal employees, and their managers are bound together in a common civil service system that they all want to change and improve. But they each have very different visions of how to do this. Past history need not lead to a future stalemate. We do not have to have winners and losers to make progress.

W. Frederick Thompson is an advisory fellow with Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group and a senior advisor to the Pew Charitable Trusts' Center on the States. He can be reached at frethomp@cisco.com.

Telework Tango: Take Two, From the Top

by Steve W. T. O’Keeffe

Government managers who oppose telework are like the ballroom dancing aficionados in college; we know there are a lot of you, but nobody’s out on the floor. Telework is certainly not a new craze in government. In fact, Uncle Sam has spent decades trying to move his distributed workforce to the beat. Despite legislation, the $4 gallon of gas, bird flu, H1N1, hurricane planning, green initiatives, cloud enablement, traffic gridlock, and so on, many agencies still have two left feet in telework.

Against this awkward backdrop, is there any hope that regular Feds will get to dance cheek-to-cheek with telework? Even with the false starts, a series of agencies are getting hip to workforce empowerment.

Steve W. T. O’Keeffe is executive director of Telework Exchange and founder of MeriTalk. He can be reached at sokeeffe@okco.com.

The Future Workforce: Gen Y Has Arrived

by Robert D. Childs, Gerry Gingrich, and Michael Piller

Going viral can be a great thing for an organization’s products and services. In the current Web 2.0 environment, favorable electronic communications that go viral give a big boost to the featured organization. Does your agency recognize the potential power of viral postings? Does it encourage its employees to create communications that might go viral?

Generation Y, also called the Millennial Generation, understands the importance of going viral. Bound by a hunger for IT, especially social media and other Web 2.0 technologies, Gen Yers spend enormous amounts of time, both professional and personal, communicating electronically. Learning how to go viral and how to jump on the beta wagon will be much easier for your organization if you reach out and connect with Gen Yers through the world of social media.

Robert D. Childs, EdD, is the senior director of the Information Resources Management (IRM) College and an expert on the competitive use of information, information technology, organizational models, and building educational programs. He can be reached at childsrd@ndu.edu. Gerry Gingrich, PhD, is a professor of systems management at the IRM College, and has more than 25 years experience leading, managing, and teaching organizational and technological strategy, innovation, and leadership. She can be reached at gingrich@ndu.edu. Michael Piller, PhD, directs the IRM College Laboratory Center,a hands-on environment for experiential learning. His expertise includes instructional technology, human-computer interaction, and simulation and game-based learning. He can be reached at pillerm@ndu.edu.

The Past Is Prologue: The Obama Technology Agenda

by John Sindelar, Daniel Mintz, and Tom Hughes

In spring 2008, our TPM article reflected on the progress of e-government under the Bush Administration and what it portended for the future of the new administration beginning January 20, 2009. While many of the themes and challenges cited then were relatively accurate, our self-congratulations is tempered by the realization that—in the words of that great philosopher Yogi Berra—“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

As we approach the end of the first year of the new administration, it is fitting to compare our past observations with the changes now upon us in the world of information technology (IT) and related governance. We begin by revisiting the macro trends of e-government (recognizing that this terminology is no longer in vogue); then moving to the critical drivers of Web 2.0 technologies; and examining the changing role of the federal chief information officer (CIO).

John Sindelar, client industry executive at HP, is a recognized leader in the field of electronic government, having worked closely with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies, and the private sector. In February 2007, he retired from federal service after a 33-year career with the U.S. General Services Administration and Treasury Department. He can be reached at john.sindelar@HP.com. Dan Mintz is chief technology officer of the Civil and Health Services Group at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and a former CIO at the U.S. Department of Transportation. He can be reached at dmintz@csc.com or on Twitter under the handle technogeezer. Tom Hughes is currently a director at CSC, working in the civilian and public health organization. Until recently, he served as CIO of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA), overseeing e-goverment initiatives, computer security efforts, IT portfolio financial management, a second national data center, and a national Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solution for the agency. He also served on the federal CIO Council. He can be reached at thughes26@csc.com.

Inherently Governmental Functions: Has the Debate Changed?

by Allan Burman

There has been a long-standing policy, codified in the United States Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), that functions intimately related to the public interest should only be performed by federal civil servants. Typically, these types of “inherently governmental” functions require either the use of discretion or the making of value judgments to apply government authority.

Some observers have expressed frustration that laws and policies offer agencies no bright-line test. As a result, contractors often perform work that should be carried out by civil servants. The Spring 2008 issue of The Public Manager asked the question: Should the government rethink its long-standing policy on contracting out work? The answer: Yes.

Allan V. Burman, PhD, is a former administrator for federal procurement policy of the U.S. government and president of Jefferson Solutions in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at aburman@jeffersonconsulting.com.

Performance Management Progress

by Robert M. Tobias

In addition to being the most powerful person in the world, the person elected president of the United States also is the chief executive officer (CEO) of the executive branch of government. Ordinarily, the organizational results “buck” stops at a CEO’s desk, but recent presidents have seemed more interested in running against the machinery of government.

Unlike his predecessors, however, President Obama has chosen to reverse this trend. He has announced that he plans to adopt a “lead-from-the-top” strategy to improve executive branch performance. Rather than pretend that the executive branch is inhabited by aliens who operate on a separate planet, President Obama seems to be taking responsibility for the results of executive branch performance.

Robert M. Tobias is the director of the Key Executive Leadership Programs and the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University. He can be reached at RTobias@American.edu.

Developments with Intergovernmental Cooperation

by Elizabeth K. Kellar and Robert J. O’Neill

In our article, “Now Is the Time for Collaboration,” we urged the new administration to seek honest dialogue and pragmatic solutions to the most important nondefense issues facing our nation: jobs, healthcare, security and safety, education, environment, and long-term economic security (retirement, Social Security, and Medicare).

What progress has the Obama Administration made on the intergovernmental cooperation agenda since taking office? We had an open-ended conversation with Donald Borut, executive director of the National League of Cities and Raymond Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors’ Association, to discuss what is working—and what has not yet been addressed.

Robert J. O’Neill is executive director of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). He can be reached at roneill@ICMA.org. Elizabeth K. Kellar is president and CEO of the Center for State and Local Government Excellence. She can be reached at ekellar@slge.org.

The Obama Technology Agenda: Open, Transparent, and Collaborative

by David McClure and Martha Dorris

The Obama Administration’s technology agenda is game-changing, bringing collaboration, participation, and transparency to government in a big way. As more information makes its way onto the Internet, an increased level of focus and flexibility is required to balance privacy and security concerns with the desire to make information more readily accessible. To maintain perspective, focused leadership from government executives and managers is paramount.

The collaboration and transparency push has already made an impact on government in some very interesting ways. Collaboration within government has improved through the use of lightweight, and often free, tools and technologies that provide fast, cheap and effective support and enable us to expand government’s reach and engage with citizens more broadly. 

David McClure is associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). Martha Dorris is deputy associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications of GSA. She can be reached at Martha.dorris@gsa.gov.

Obama’s Stealth Revolution: Quietly Reshaping the Way Government Works

by Donald F. Kettl

Government reform has been a staple of presidential management for the last 50 years. President Kennedy brought in his whiz kids, led by Robert McNamara. President Nixon upped the ante with a management-by-objectives budget system, and President Carter trumped him with zero-based budgeting, which promised to force budgeters to explain the extra value that marginal dollars would bring.

During the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore identified hundreds of recommendations for reinventing government, and by day 200 of his administration, President George W. Bush had launched a top-down performance system tied to the budget. Does Team Obama have something on the way?

Donald F. Kettl is dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and author of The Next Government of the United States (Norton, 2009). He can be reached at kettl@umd.edu.

The Obama Management Agenda: Five Steps Toward Transformation

by Alan P. Balutis

In the Spring 2008 Special Issue of The Public Manager, nearly 20 current and former government executives, academicians, and private and nonprofit sector leaders outlined a management agenda for the incoming 44th President of the United States. It’s been one year since a healthy majority of American voters elected Barack Obama to change America. So we reassembled almost all the original contributors—and added just a few new ones—and asked them to assess the Obama Management Agenda.

Alan P. Balutis is director and distinguished fellow in Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. He is also chairman of The Public Manager Board of Directors. He can be reached at abalutis@cisco.com.

To download the complete PDF version of this Forum, click here.

by Bill Damaré

The Department of Defense and private sector have reaped the benefits of standardizing project management tools and techniques for many years. Improvements in the way projects are estimated, scheduled, monitored, and completed have dramatically improved organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Large sums of taxpayer money are invested in complex projects, so federal, state, and local government agencies have begun to take a keen interest in institutionalizing standard project management practices. When these practices are not institutionalized, inconsistencies and variations in project manager and staff knowledge, skill, and experience can lead to mismanaged, overbudget, and, ultimately, failed projects.

Instituting new rigor and formality in project management is rarely associated with improved morale and job satisfaction. In reality, implementing a comprehensive project improvement initiative results in multiple benefits—from improved communications and less risk to better value for the dollar spent—especially when an organization can strategically integrate project management principles and practices across the entire enterprise.

The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH), which serves about 10 million residents in California, is the largest mental health system in the United States. It has faced a tremendous increase in demand and workload over the last few years due to program growth following the passage of the Mental Health Services Act. This growth prompted the department to embark on an integrated, strategic approach to maturing its information technology (IT) project management capabilities, which now serves as a model for other LosAngeles County departments and agencies.

Speaking the Same Language

When managers look to improve their project management team, too often, they simply look at the skills and experience of individual project managers without much consideration for the extended team members’ involvement in developing a project’s charter, work plan, or acquisition strategy. They attempt to close skill and knowledge gaps by sending individual project managers to training delivered by various sources that advocate a variety of methods, tools, and techniques. Inconsistent or isolated training events usually fail in the end because a project management team is only as strong as its weakest link.

A new trend in projectmanagement training takes into account the entire project responsibility life cycle (Figure 1), including team members from the business analysis and acquisition communities. This approach recognizes that business analysts, project managers, and contract managers (procurement) work on a project continuously, yet they are engaged in various capacities and at various intensities during the course of a project. Along with the customer (the end user, who has a stake in the ultimate success of the project), the project team needs to have an understanding of how their roles and responsibilities overlap and fit into the larger picture.

New integrated training techniques and programs focus on blending skills across the project team. Integrated approaches ensure adequate multidisciplinary training to perform consistent and effective project execution. IT project managers, for example, understand their part of the project management life cycle and the details of IT. However, the transition from gathering requirements to setting up the actual project team and developing the project plan often doesn’t happen smoothly. Business owners often communicate their wants and needs from their perspective without a full understanding of the impact the project may have on other projects or the enterprise. The IT project manager usually has a broader perspective of the organization’s infrastructure and the potential impact for change. In the requirements analysis phase, the project manager must learn how to ask questions that elicit the business owner’s desired project outcomes.

Defining requirements to build a project plan is the cornerstone of any successful project. Unfortunately, many project managers don’t have the business analysis training or background to understand how to gather, document, and validate user requirements. Most important, many do not know how to define a project around what is achievable to meet those requirements. Therefore, a comprehensive project management training initiative should include a heavy emphasis on the front end—business analysis and defining requirements.

Integrated training should focus on aligning the project team’s work by adopting the following principles.

• Create a Synchronized Project Management Team
  Project managers, business analysts, and contract managers often work in silos—each handling one piece of the project management pie. This disjointed approach flies in the face of how a well-run project should be executed, adding a new definition to the triple constraint. Each element of project scope, time, and cost builds upon the other, and any missteps lead to problems later on. The analyst must verify the user requirements. The project manager must build a work plan, set up the project organization, and define the tasks in as much detail as possible. From an accurate plan, contract management can create a solicitation that includes specific milestones taken from the project’s work plan to measure vendor performance and outcomes. Today, a comprehensive training program must ensure that the team works in alignment and, most important, can even perform aspects of each other’s job function.
• Train Simultaneously
  Project management training works best when classes comprise staff members from all three areas—business analysis, project management, and contract management. Simultaneous training helps teams develop a common understanding of methods and each other’s responsibilities to ensure cohesiveness and collaboration. Communication within physical and virtual project teams improves significantly. DMH applied this new trend in project management training when, in November 2004, California voters passed Proposition 63, now known as the Mental Health Services Act.

New Legislation Prompts Training, Restructuring

The historic Mental Health Services Act levied a 1 percent tax on individuals with personal incomes exceeding $1 million to be directed to new mental health programs in the state of California. This “millionaire tax, ” which was projected to generate nearly $600 million in fiscal years 2004–06, affected a number of organizations throughout the Golden State. But few were as affected as the Los Angeles County DMH.

In the wake of theMental Health ServicesAct, DMH found itself suddenly inundated with requests for new IT projects and services. Dealing with unprecedented demand, and about a 30 percent increase in workload, DMH’s chief information officer, Dr. Robert Greenless, realized that his staff needed more formal training and consistent methods for project success. He was also faced with transforming his IT enterprise from one with roots in a mainframe world to one organized around the PC and Internet.

After an extensive search, DMH engaged ESI International to develop a training roadmap for its IT organization that would allow the teams to more effectively execute a series of IT projects, including a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

“We had an increased workload, but had a staffing shortage of 54 people. So, we had a clear vision of how effective project management training could be valuable to help us face each new challenge in a consistent way without having to reinvent the wheel each time, ” says Greenless. He points out that his team didn’t share the same experience, training, and vocabulary in project management and business analysis. Even specification documents, for example, would vary on the basis of who wrote them. “We needed a common system, a common set of methods and a common language. ”

In concert with Greenless and Sharon Carlson, associate chief information officer, ESI developed a training road map for DMH to ensure an integrated training curriculum—not just disparate courses. DMH required training content that combined aspects of business analysis with globally recognized, standard project management knowledge consistent with the Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. An important factor in the selection of ESI was the final exam administered at the conclusion of each class. “It served as an important measure of learning and challenged participants to be fully engaged in the learning process” remarks Ms. Carlson.

An added bonus of the program was that staff members received recognition and documented credentials when completing the entire curriculum, including a formal certificate from ESI and ESI’s academic partner, The GeorgeWashington University.

Building a Training Roadmap

Since 2005, three cohorts of DMH employees and managers from the Chief Information Office Bureau have followed a consistent, methodical business analysis and project management training program. According to Carlson, this was a wise decision. “Managers who went through training were able to more effectively pair employees to projects that aligned with their new skill sets. ”

In addition, a number of DMH executives and managers from non-IT business units completed theManaging IT Projects course. This helped facilitate and promote a better understanding of the processes involved in many of the department’s projects.

ESI’s courses had to be taken in a specific order and were designed to build upon each other for maximum effectiveness. The first set of four courses (Introduction to BusinessAnalysis, How to Gather and Document User Requirements, Managing IT Projects, and Process Modeling Management) purposely focuses on business analysis and the role of the project manager during the requirements gathering phase.

For example, the Process Modeling Management course aims to teach team members how to perform the business analyst’s role and responsibilities in defining requirements during the planning phase of a project. By having both project managers and business analysts attend the same course, the business analyst can work in concert with the project manager to ensure that newly implemented processes enhance the success of a project and increase the project’s ability to meet the organization’s business goals. The project team further focuses on competencies necessary to perform workflow modeling to ensure processes can be documented, benchmarked, and measured.

One course, How to Gather and Document User Requirements, is particularly helpful in providing tools and techniques to better elicit and manage requirements. Communication breakdown often happens at the onset of a project because business analysts and project managers often lack the training and communications skills to collect the right information from end users to define requirements.

“Before training, our analysts didn’t have a common approach to eliciting useful information from those they interviewed and often lacked the confidence to take control and really engage the end users, ” says Mark Cheng, Manager/Enterprise Project Management and Planning Division, noting that frequently, “Meetings with end users would often go around in circles producing very little in terms of useful requirements and workflow definition. ”

By learning successful facilitation techniques, business analysts and project managers can effectively help stakeholders define their needs, form these needs into documented requirements, motivate group participation, build consensus, manage conflict, and maintain session focus. After completing the final three courses, Facilitation Techniques for Requirements Development, IT Risk Management, and Scheduling and Cost Control, team members were awarded a Master’s Certificate in Project Management fromThe GeorgeWashington University’s School of Business.

Training Put into Action

Los Angeles County’s DMH quickly put its training to the test when it embarked on a series of projects, including a medical professional credentialing system, meant to lead to the ultimate goal—an EHR system. “We took ESI’s methodology of examining our ‘as is’ situation relative to our ‘to be’ situation when assessing our EHR system. We quickly recognized that there was an enormous gap between what we had in place and what we needed to do in order to support data integration between counties and across agencies, ” says Greenless.

DMH not only provides mental health services to its clients, but also acts as a mental health plan administrator, contracting with Medicaid providers to deliver services. The State of California Department ofMental Health has a vision to allow the safe and secure sharing of client medical information across multiple counties in California— no matter where a client is seen, the clinician could access their record and see the entire medical history.

Seen as one of the first steps in this ambitious EHR agenda, according to Greenless, “the credentialing project has become a textbook case of good project management. ” The project became a priority when DMH decided it needed to improve, simplify, and better coordinate its process for validating the licensure and training for physicians and other licensed professionals, including psychologists, registered nurses, and other health care providers in preparation for the EHR system.

“We certainly couldn’t do the credentialing manually anymore, ” said Greenless. “We decided to automate the credentialing and purchase a system that could be integrated with and feed into the eventual EHR system. ”

Following an IT projectmanagement method reinforced through ESI training, the assigned team embarked on documenting requirements and procuring a new credentialing system. The first step was the project initiation phase, where the project was officially requested and a business case was built around the credentialing system (Figure 2).

In the second phase, project planning, DMH analysts met with five separate business areas that already performed credentialing and assembled requirements, and then worked successfully with the project manager to define one overarching process that could meet everyone’s needs, along with developing the work breakdown structure, budget estimate, and resource plan.

As the project developed, the DMH team moved into the project control phase, managing processes to make sure the actual project performance aligned with planned performance. The project is now moving into project execution, where the system is implemented and tested. This will be followed by the project closeout phase.

“Our training provided a clear starting point on how to elicit requirements, then how to staff and build a project plan and clearly define who does what. Considering we were severely understaffed at the start of the project, so far, we have kept it on schedule and within budget, ” notes Greenless.

This is all the more notable since DMH’s IT department is the first one to concede that its project management success rate had previously been “uneven, ” noting some false starts and projects that went unfinished.

Training Roadmap Becomes Model for County

In 2006, DMH prepared a 2007–08 business automation plan for the Los Angeles County Chief Information Office. Greenless points out that the Chief Information Office noticed how productive it had been, despite severe staffing shortages, in addressing the challenges of the Mental Health Services Act. This prompted the office to look more closely at DMH’s training program, along with other public-sector models across federal, state, and local government, to create a county-wide, consistent training “road map. ”

Sanmay Mukhopadhyay, associate chief information officer, created a Project Management Office advisory committee with representation from several large LosAngeles County departments, including DMH. Taking the best ideas from several programs, the Chief Information Office selected a series of seven IT project management courses, concluding with a county-specific IT orientation class, and established the LosAngeles County IT project management certificate track (see Figure 3).

Training Fosters Teamwork

The ESI training, by its very nature, is designed around class exercises and requires collaboration during the course. By training together, the project teams rely on each other to get the job done. “After training, I can certainly say that confidence andmorale shot up. When I walk around the work areas, I frequently see ESI manuals on desks used as reference. If people are stuck with their project management or business analysis tasks, they quickly refer to their manuals or engage their colleagues for help, ” says Cheng.

DMH currently has no plans to slow its training initiative, and many of the bureau’s planned new hires over the next year will be taking courses. “We now have a formal process to follow, logical steps to take, and training that allows our staff to practice what they learn through exercises that mirror real-world situations. Now, when a project comes along, no one is scratching their heads and stymied about how to take the project to the next stage. Training has obviously eliminated many fears, ” says Cheng.

When people hear the term “public servant,” they think of presidents, governors, legislators, cabinet secretaries, agency directors—the political officials featured on news broadcasts, on political talk shows, and in newspapers. These officials are an important component of our system of governance, deserving of our scrutiny, praise, or, sometimes, disdain, but they are only a very small portion of the legion of people responsible for governing the nation.

The nation’s career civil servants implement the laws, carry out the programs, deliver the services, and manage the resources that keep the nation functioning. Many of them are public managers responsible for directing the programs and organizations of federal, state, and local government. They are selected through merit systems designed to ensure competence and continuity in the operation of government. They often operate in a hostile environment, in which criticism, cynicism, and resistance greet the actions of government.

Public managers also operate in an environment that affords many opportunities to improve the lives of others and contribute to the proper functioning of a democracy. The ability of the nation to address its most pressing and complex problems largely depends on the effectiveness of career public managers. The nation’s most daunting challenges—those often beyond the capacity of the market and other institutions—are assigned to government, and the hard work of finding solutions falls uniquely on public managers.

The literature of public administration is replete with ideas about the roles and responsibilities of managers and administrators. These roles, such as resource management, strategic planning, and internal and external communication, remain fundamental activities for public managers. Each requires its share of knowledge and skill, both elements of any manager’s effort to improve the effectiveness of a program or organization.

Too many public managers emphasize operating and perfecting processes, procedures, functions, and hierarchical structures. The rules and accountability structures of large organizations impose this orientation on them, but public programs are expected to solve complex public problems. The traditional orientation of public managers does not position them to confront public problems, which appear in myriad forms and do not fit neatly within the authority of one law or jurisdiction. Taken together, the problems confronting public managers present a dizzying array of harms.

A successful public service that helps lead the country by addressing its problems requires managers and leaders who understand and embrace the new imperatives of public management. These new imperatives mean that public managers need to serve as strategists and entrepreneurs, masters of improvisation, champions of effectiveness, reflective practitioners, and stewards of the public interest.

Strategists and Entrepreneurs

Public managers can no longer succeed if they remain in their traditional roles as technicians and administrators concerned only with controlling and refining organizational functions and processes. They now need to be strategists and entrepreneurs who identify emerging needs and demands, frame new opportunities for their programs and organizations, and reposition those programs to respond more effectively.

Public managers operate in an onrushing stream of public problems that emerge in many forms: risks, threats, inequities, conflicts, breakdowns, failures, and inefficiencies. These problems compete for a place on the public agenda. Simply put, the formal mandates to which public managers hold title are often inadequate to address these problems, which do not fit neatly into existing laws, programs, and hierarchical organizations.

Effective public managers now need to develop the diagnostic skill and discipline to anticipate and identify problems, analyze them to understand their causes and interrelated parts, characterize their severity and urgency, and triage them to set priorities for action.

Public managers also need the skills and discipline to devise and implement appropriate responses. To do so, they must develop a set of tools (policies, programs, and capabilities) that can be applied to problems; select the appropriate combination of these tools to apply to each problem; look beyond their organizational boundaries for partnership opportunities with parties that offer resources, expertise, and authority for solving the problem; exercise both agility and persistence in implementing solutions; and measure the progress made.

Masters of Improvisation

Public managers need a broad perspective not fixed on the status quo. They must be comfortable with constant surprise, able to function in the midst of significant change, and anticipate a wide range of future scenarios.

Public managers often find themselves surrounded by ambiguity—about the problem they are asked to address, authority they can bring to bear on that problem, resources available over the long term, challenges they will encounter, and difficulties of measuring success. They need to develop a large appetite for dealing with ambiguity, turning it from a liability into an asset. In ambiguity lies opportunity, the chance to fill the gap left by statutory language, better define a public problem, and design tailor-made solutions.

The worsening fiscal crisis in government can be a constraint or barrier to innovation and improvement, but it also provides an incentive or mandate for public managers to be more creative, innovative, and improvisational. Although resources (funds and personnel) are likely to continue to decline, demands for government intervention are likely to continue and expand, and the problems assigned to government may well become more complex and threatening. The government takeover of stricken financial institutions is the most recent, but surely not the last, of these emerging challenges.

Public managers need to be masters at developing adaptive business models that allow programs and organizations to adjust to new circumstances and still produce valuable results. They need to adapt to being conveners, leaders, or members of networks and other collaborative structures that combine the resources, expertise, and authority of multiple organizational entities. Such networks offer opportunities for new creative partnerships that can address problems and deliver services more effectively and comprehensively. In doing so, public managers need to be mindful of the tradeoff between the improved capabilities the networks provide and the difficulty of ensuring accountability of the multiple public and private partners in these networks.

Champions of Effectiveness

Public managers need to be relentless advocates for creating and measuring results and outcomes. They need to use performance-based management to ensure that their programs or organizations use resources wisely, produce useful activities and quality services, and achieve outcomes that support the mission or purpose for which they were created.

The principal tool available to public managers who wish to focus on results and outcomes is a set or system of meaningful performance indicators. A critical skill for effective public managers is a keen ability to identify, design, and use performance indicators or measures. Such indicators need to be relevant (to goals, objectives, and priorities), transparent (promoting clarity and understanding), credible (based on complete and accurate data), functional (encouraging effective and constructive behavior), feasible (cost-effective), and comprehensive (addressing important operational aspects).

Most programs have some capacity to count or measure activities or outputs (such as the number of enforcement actions taken by a regulatory agency). Some measure final outcomes (such as an improvement in ambient air quality or industrial workplace safety) though the program may only be one influence on these results. Intermediate outcomes—the territory between outputs and final outcomes—hold the greatest promise for achieving performance-based management.

These intermediate outcomes (such as reduction or elimination of noncompliant behavior) have several advantages:

• They provide a more meaningful account of program performance than outputs, offering a more compelling story about program accomplishments for the public and political overseers.
• In contrast to final outcomes, they directly relate to outputs.
• Measuring them presents fewer technical challenges than measuring final outcomes (if any).
• They manifest more quickly than final outcomes.
• They provide insight for managers and others about whether activities contribute significantly to final outcomes.

Identifying, developing, and using performance indicators is an iterative, incremental exercise: a journey rather than a destination. The benefits for public programs— better control of operations, stronger justification for scarce budget resources, enhanced understanding of patterns and relationships between activities and outcomes, and clearer demonstration of program effectiveness— are well worth the considerable effort.

Reflective Practitioners

Effective public managers continuously examine current practices, reviewing whether procedures and policies still make sense and evaluating the impact of their programs and organizations. They also continuously scan for ideas and approaches, assessing their applicability and potential for improving effectiveness. They do not allow the press of day-to-day business to hamper their ability to raise issues about current reality or search for new ideas. Moreover, they create a marketplace of ideas in their organization and convey constant openness and receptivity to better ways of doing business.

Practitioners should cultivate an active dialogue with academic experts and thought leaders in public management and public policy as sources of fresh thinking. Any gulf between public management practitioners and academicians is unfortunate as they have much to learn from each other, and both would be strengthened by a closer relationship. Practitioners can help improve academicians’ relevance, and academicians can help improve practitioners’ effectiveness.

Given the magnitude and complexity of the public problems government must address, the public manager’s success can no longer be left to ad hoc approaches to learning about supervision, management, and leadership. Instead, public managers need the formal, continuous education other professions—such as doctors and lawyers—use to stay current with developments in their professional field.

Stewards of the Public Interest

The “public interest” is a lofty concept, but individual public servants and managers can contribute to this public interest through their day-to-day activities in their particular sphere of public policy and administration. They can objectively view the nature and causes of public problems and the options for addressing and resolving them. They can ensure balance and fairness in decisions affecting competing or conflicting interests. They can open public policy processes for participation in collaborative efforts to make decisions on public issues. They can use public funds and resources prudently and effectively. Finally, they can embody a passionate commitment to the mission of the organization and serve as a model for its members.

Our public discourse is often driven by chronic partisanship and short-term political gain. The tactics include fear, distortion, intellectual dishonesty, and a cynical brand of simplification that obscures the complex nature of public problems and solutions. Our political culture sometimes glorifies and celebrates individual freedom without regard for the common good, social equity, and need for shared sacrifice.

This situation suggests a broader, emerging stewardship role for public managers. In these times, the nation desperately needs citizens who have not lost sight of the public welfare and demand that the public interest receive the deference it deserves. Joining such citizens are public servants who, as they tend to the public interest in performing their job, provide a balancing force or countervailing influence to the excesses of our public discourse and political culture. They can help form the core of public-spirited citizens who still believe we have obligations to each other, responsibilities to preserve democratic ideals for future generations, and a need to be constructive citizens of the world.

Answering the Call

The public sector usually has responsibility for addressing the nation’s most serious, sweeping, and intricate problems, and career public managers must devise and take practical steps to identify and implement solutions. The conventional wisdom sometimes is that government is broken, incapable of addressing even simple tasks, and not up to the challenges of the future. Much evidence in the past ten years supports that view.

Contrary to that conventional wisdom, government also has an impressive record of achievement. In Government’s Greatest Achievements, Paul Light examines the most noteworthy accomplishments of the federal government in 1950–2000. Included among his top ten achievements are rebuilding Europe after World War II, expanding the right to vote, promoting equal access to public accommodations, reducing disease, ensuring safe food and drinking water, strengthening the nation’s highway system, increasing older American’s access to health care, and promoting financial security in retirement.

Many of these accomplishments may seem distant or quaint, but a world in which these endeavors were not undertaken is hard to imagine. From that perspective, many of these accomplishments have made America the most successful democracy in history.

Light points out that progress was made on the pre-2000 accomplishments due to several common factors: passage of multiple laws over a relatively long period, which required persistence; involvement of both political parties and productive relationships between the executive and legislative branches; collaboration and a mix of policy strategies tailored to the problem; and continued creativity. To these factors, we can add effective public management, which calls for career managers who have the characteristics described above.

The challenges on the horizon are just as daunting, if not more so. Consider the magnitude and complexity of solutions needed to reduce and reverse global climate change, develop alternative energy from renewable sources, respond to terrorism, address the upcoming fiscal crisis in entitlement programs, manage the federal government’s growing stake in the recovery of our financial system, and somehow tame the monstrous deficits that stretch into the foreseeable future.

These challenges will test America’s system of politics and governance, but they can be conquered if our system is propelled by a cadre of dedicated public managers who understand the new imperatives of their profession.

References

Light, Paul. Government’s Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Security (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002).
Moore, Mark H. Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995). This reference effectively describes a more entrepreneurial style of management.
Sparrow, Malcolm. The Regulatory Craft: Controlling Risks, Solving Problems, and Managing Compliance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000). This reference is a detailed and very useful exposition of the “problem-oriented approach” in public management. See also Sparrow, Malcolm. The Character of Harms: Operational Challenges in Control (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

One of the most difficult problems for local governance is to determine institutional arrangements and boundaries for local goods and services that are preferred by citizens in different geographical areas or that possess different production characteristics.The local governance system in British Columbia, Canada, has a practical set of institutional arrangements, the British Columbia regional district system, which deals with the variety of boundary and institutional issues associated with local public services. Like most institutional innovations, it was created by politicians and administrators to solve pressing practical problems, and it is doubtful that they were aware of scholarly debates associated with the issues they were trying to resolve. Forty years after its origin, the system is still solving many of the problems posed, but not resolved, in academic and political debates over how to govern metropolitan areas in the United States. The system is equally useful for non-metropolitan areas.

Regional District System

Like states in the United States, provinces in Canada are responsible for local governments. British Columbia, along with Alberta and in contrast to the rest of Canada, has a long history of policies allowing local citizens to take the initiative regarding local government structure. Municipalities have responsibilities similar to those of municipalities in the United States, except that welfare is a provincial government responsibility. In the areas outside municipal boundaries, the provincial government provides roads and policing.The province contains no county governments, but it does have school districts and improvement districts (called special districts in the United States) for specific functions. Although British Columbia is geographically larger than Washington, Oregon, and California together, 87 percent of its population resides in the 156 municipalities that encompass 1.4 percent of its area, and 60 percent of its population resides in 19 municipalities of over 50,000. It has two major metropolitan areas: a population of more than two million in greater Vancouver and 350,000 around the capital of Victoria.

In 1965, provincial legislation set out procedural rules for the creation of regional districts.Twenty-nine areas were designated to cover the province, but it was up to the local governments in these areas to decide if they wanted to incorporate a regional district. If incorporated, they were essentially a shell, with procedures for representation, financing, adoption of activities, and definition of boundaries for different activities. However, except for authorization for land-use planning and zoning outside of municipal boundaries, it was up to the citizens in the municipalities and in unincorporated areas to determine how they were to be used.

Twenty-eight of the original twenty-nine areas incorporated themselves over the next four years, and today there are twenty-seven (one split into two and three have merged), covering all parts of the province except the northwest corner where very few citizens reside. Over time, the provincial government and municipal representatives have decided that municipal borrowing through the Municipal Finance Authority (MFA) should be processed by regional districts. The only local government functions that regional districts subsequently have been mandated to perform are planning for solid and liquid waste disposal, which they can do as an entire district or divide up among municipalities and unincorporated areas, as appropriate for their region. Otherwise, regional districts can perform as rural governments for unincorporated areas, serve as a forum for and administer local government services for any combination of municipalities or unincorporated areas, and serve as a regional government for the entire region, all as decided upon within the region.

Regional districts have an unusual combination of attributes. On one hand, they are forums for municipal representatives and representatives elected from unincorporated areas to get together and agree to engage in joint activities. On the other, they are a “government” with the powers of regulation and taxation when agreement has been reached locally on assigning jurisdiction over an activity to the regional district.To understand how regional districts work, it is necessary to examine their governance and financing structure and the services they provide.

Governance and Finance

Following incorporation, all regional districts have the same basic governing structure. The governing board is composed of directly elected members from electoral areas outside municipal boundaries and of municipal counselors appointed by their elected municipal councils. Individual members of the board are called “directors.”

The total number of directors and the nature of their weighted votes are determined by population, and voting rules vary for different kinds of issues.To adopt new services, including borrowing money to finance them, generally requires a referendum by citizens in the participating areas, but there are significant exceptions. One is that a municipal council may approve new services on behalf of its electors. Another includes provisions for regional district directors to override the objection of an electoral area director on area-wide services where no borrowing is undertaken.There are also limited provisions where a service can be adopted unless there is a citizen-sponsored counterpetition (a process similar to a citizen initiative).The net effect of the rules is that, for almost all new activities, the consent of the municipal council of each separate member municipality (or the voters in electoral areas) participating in the service is required.

What is also important to recognize is that activities do not need to be undertaken just for the entire region.Any combination of municipalities and electoral areas, or only part of an electoral area, can join together to provide an activity through the regional district structure.This offers infinite flexibility in the design of service areas, although municipalities do not divide themselves up internally as often as electoral areas. In practice, the boundaries for most activities appear to be set to include entire municipalities and developed parts of electoral areas but not to cover the entire regional district.

Once activities are adopted, different rules apply for governing individual services. In general, region-wide business is decided by one vote for each director, budgetary matters for region-wide services by the weighted votes of all directors, and services provided to subparts of the regional district by weighted votes from the directors in the participating areas. For most services, the costs are divided among the municipalities and electoral areas in relation to the property tax base.However, simply financing through shares of the property tax base also has led to conflicts.A 1999 review of regional district operation identified mismatches between control, financing, and benefits as the major source of disputes. This was because the relative property tax bases of different areas differed from the population and benefits received from the service.Thus, the area with relatively high property tax bases but smaller population was often dissatisfied with the arrangement—although because its population was relatively small, it did not have the votes to constrain expenditures or make changes to the agreement.

Custom Agreements

The solution to these problems turned out to be greater use of “custom agreements” for new activities and a provincial mediation process to revisit previous agreements where custom agreements had not been used and problems had arisen. Custom agreements are used to relate voting strength more closely to use of a service and to financial contributions rather than financing from different areas in relation only to the property tax base. Custom agreements can also create a committee or commission to govern the activity, and the agreement may provide for committee or commission members who are not directors. Examples of custom agreements within one regional district include financing based on the following:

• 50 percent assessed value and 50 percent population— for a theater and an arena
• The number of cases during the previous year— for permitting and regulation of soil deposit and removal
• One-third converted assessed value, one-sixth land area, one-sixth population, and one-third highand medium-priority discharges in the previous year—for storm water quality management
• Population—for 911 emergency service.

In another regional district, the number of members of the committee to oversee water supply is based on water consumption in the different areas the previous year. Many more examples could be cited, but all custom agreements appear to bring governance and financial contributions closer to benefits for either individual users or member municipalities.

Tax Assessment and Collection

The financial obligations of each member municipality are set out as each new activity is undertaken by the regional district.The regional district administration calculates the amounts during its annual budgeting process and sends a requisition to each municipality. Each municipality can raise the amount owed to the regional district any way it prefers, although many actually list regional district services on the property tax bills sent to their ratepayers.The regional district also informs the provincial property tax collector, who collects all property taxes in rural areas, how much is owed by each electoral area, and the collector calculates the rates needed and adds them to the property tax bill it sends out to collect school taxes, taxes levied by the provincial government itself, and for any improvement districts. Municipal and provincial tax collectors then pass the requisitioned revenues on to the regional district.

The process for allocating costs among municipalities and custom areas in electoral areas works because the British Columbia Assessment Authority has a complete database on all properties in the province with an annual updated estimate of the market value.This database makes it possible to record all service area memberships for each property, obtain total assessed values for all properties in a service area for budgeting and rate-setting processes, and calculate the taxes due for each service for each property.

There is no question that regional districts can become complex organizations. However, their organizing philosophy is rather simple: they provide a forum and institutional framework for local governments to make binding decisions jointly with their neighbors and with boundaries for a service different from their own, where governance and financing matches the benefiting area. Their voluntary adoption of functions and flexibility is reminiscent of the flexibility that special districts introduce into the local governance system in the United States.However, unlike the United States, where each service may generate its own special district with no necessary relationship to municipalities, other special districts, or a regional organization if there is one, the British Columbia approach embeds the numerous combinations of activities into a common regional district governing and financing framework.

Regional District Services

Given the existence of institutional structures to facilitate cooperation in the provision of local services, just what services have regional districts evolved to provide? Two examples follow.

Regional District of Comox-Strathcona

The Regional District of Comox-Strathcona on central Vancouver Island encompasses 7,900 square miles and has a population of approximately 36,000 in eight electoral areas and 70,000 in eight municipalities. The 1999 survey identified forty services it provided to various geographic areas (Table 1).

Only four services cover the entire region, and a significant number (twenty-four) involve unincorporated areas only. However, twelve services involve multiple municipalities, and eleven of those include service areas where parts of electoral areas surrounding the municipalities are included. The services include water supply, community planning, community parks, 911 emergency services, regional parks, exhibition grounds, fireworks regulations, aquatic center and ice arena, solid waste planning, street lighting, house numbering, fire protection, economic development, regional sewer, cemetery, animal control, sports track, grants for search and rescue, victims’ assistance, building inspection, regional library, transit, several community halls, several sewer systems, several water service areas, several refuse collection areas, and several local transfer stations and recycling centers.

Although the regional district board governs regional district services, committees oversee general activities, specific geographic areas, and activities such as fire departments in electoral areas where the local people elect a board to oversee the service, which is then ratified by the regional district directors.Very little of the actual business of running the services comes before the regional district board in other than a committee report.The actual production of most activities is contracted out, some to private firms, others to community organizations, and some to municipalities to provide a service beyond their boundaries on behalf of the regional district.

Capital Regional District

The Capital Region District (CRD) of British Columbia, on southernVancouver Island, has a population of nearly 350,000 within 925 square miles. In 1999, it included twelve municipalities ranging in population from 1,563 to 107,026 and four electoral areas. Seven of the municipalities were between 10,000 and 20,000 in population and three were smaller. One objective of the 1999 survey was to identify how activities where there may be economies of scale beyond the size of most of the municipalities (population of 10,000 to 20,000) were provided in the metropolitan area. Of the 283 activities making up twelve major functions, eighty (28 percent) were identified as having economies of scale due to the need for specialized equipment or personnel. Fourteen (3.5 percent) were identified as having economies of scale due to the need for a large capital facility, and some of these could be provided on a smaller scale as well.Table 2 summarizes the results for capital facilities.

The CRD is involved in nine of the fourteen major capital activities,but only five of the nine cover the entire regional district (each of the other four has a different boundary).There is also some kind of arrangement to provide for the other capital services on a larger scale than that of a single municipality.The summary of information here does not include all of the areas of regional district involvement, but it shows that, given a forum for systematic cooperation, municipalities have used the regional district to undertake activities jointly for mutual benefit to a reasonably high degree. The study also shows that the regional district has flexibility in setting the boundaries for services and uses that flexibility.

Observations on Regional Districts

Regional districts are a useful institutional innovation in British Columbia.Their most important attribute is that they provide a systematic authoritative framework that lowers decision-making costs to facilitate cooperation among local governments to provide activities on a variety of scales. Their staff also often takes the initiative in identifying where costs can be saved or services improved through cooperation.They can adjust boundaries to match either demands to provide a service for a group whose boundaries differ from those of existing local governments or they can adjust boundaries to achieve scale economies in production, depending on which is more beneficial for that particular service. The choice is a local one, and local people are most likely to make the right tradeoffs when there is an incompatibility.They are also designed to achieve fiscal equivalence for services whose boundaries do not fit existing governments, and this can take into account the huge number of specific activities that make up the local services in an area.

A second important characteristic is that they do not engender competition and rivalry between elected politicians at the local and regional levels.Virtually all major local government functions have activities that are both local and regional. Thus, if responsibility for the function is assigned to either level, there will always be activities more appropriately provided or produced at the other level.With regional districts, the same elected officials are responsible for the functions regardless of the level at which the activities are provided or produced. The British Columbia experience shows that local officials in different local governments can cooperate in the provision and production of local services for the benefit of their citizens.

Relevance of Regional Districts

A very important characteristic of the regional district system it that it assumes local representatives know their own situation best, and that by providing a forum for cooperation, they will undertake activities for mutual benefit. It places a great deal of faith in citizens and locally elected officials, but given the diversity in local service conditions, there does not seem to be any reasonable alternative. Regional districts offer the opportunity to achieve fiscal equivalence in local government services for a large number of services where boundaries differ—without creating a different special government for each service.The result is an organization that does not fit neatly onto an organization chart, but a framework for a process that lowers decision-making costs of cooperation among local governments and encourages fiscal equivalence, two criteria that scholars have identified as important to a well-functioning system of local governance.The net effect of regional districts should be an improvement in the performance of local government. Understanding how regional districts operate can make an important contribution to the debate over how we govern in metropolitan areas.

References

Bish, Robert L. Local Government Service Production in the Capital Region (University of Victoria Local Government Institute: 1999). www.rbish.ca and http://web.uvic.ca/padm/ cpss/lgi/publish.htm (reports section).

———. Regional District Review—1999: Issues and Inter- Jurisdictional Comparisons. Prepared for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs (University of Victoria Local Government Institute: September 1999). www.rbish.ca and http://web.uvic.ca/padm/cpss/lgi/publish.htm (reports section).

——— and Eric G. Clemens. Local Government in British Columbia (Richmond: Union of British Columbia Municipalities, 3rd edition, 1999). Other references are cited in this reference, and other studies are available at www.rbish.ca and http://web.uvic.ca/padm/cpss/lgi/ publish.htm (reports section). This reference also describes the MFA, another British Columbia innovation. Because small municipalities had difficulty undertaking debt to finance infrastructure, the provincial government passed legislation creating the MFA, which is a cooperative of local governments, to undertake joint borrowing. Since its creation, it has achieved an AAA bond rating and its rating is often higher than that of the provincial government itself, ranking only lower than the Government of Canada, and the Province of Alberta in Canada.

Ostrom, Vincent, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren. “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry.” American Political Science Review, Vol. 55, December (1961), pp. 831–842. This articles poses the most important theoretical issue for the organization of government in metropolitan regions. It discusses designing institutions to accommodate the diversity in preferences for public services in different geographic areas and how to accommodate production arrangements to the diversity in efficient scales for different activities within different functions. Bish, Robert L., “Local Government Amalgamations” (Toronto: C.D. Howe Institute Commentary 150, March 2001), summarizes evidence on these issues.

In an increasingly multisector workforce environment, public managers can infuse results expectations into performance documents to achieve desired outcomes and ensure accountability.

by Joe Alexander and Phil Kangas

Citizen demands on federal, state, and local governments require the delivery of premium services at the best cost. These demands cannot be met by government workers alone. The complex challenges facing government today require a much larger workforce—including nonprofit groups, volunteers, and private-sector contractors—with a dynamic mix of skills and capabilities. Together, these groups form the network to deliver public-sector services.

Increasing mission obligations coupled with decreasing budgets require public-sector leaders to optimize resources and improve operations. The next administration’s challenge will be to institute broad-based policy and management guidelines that allow federal agencies to achieve these goals by leveraging all components of the service delivery network. The challenge will be to find the right balance in workforce composition and to institute cost and performance accountability controls across integrated service delivery teams. Civil servants and political leaders at all levels of government should focus on how to maximize the delivery of these services through single-agency, intergovernmental networking, and intersectoral (public-private–not for profit) coordination.

To this end, government executives and managers must

• link agency mission goals to measurable performance metrics,
• apply a reasoned business case analysis or feasibility review to optimize resources through service delivery team composition, and
• institute accountability controls across the delivery teams to optimize mission delivery.

Figure 1 illustrates this approach for optimizing mission delivery through infusing performance planning and accountability controls across the service delivery network.

These steps will improve delivery of services, establish performance goals across integrated teams, make resource decisions to reduce cost and risk, and implement tactical accountability processes. Informed decisions by executives and managers are the key to driving performance accountability and efficient delivery of limited government resources.

Rise in Size and Mission of Government

Recent analysis shows that the actual workforce delivering government services is larger than ever. Government service providers span not only federal workers, but their support contractors, not-for-profit grantees, and volunteers. This dynamic, multisector workforce combines to deliver the mission of government organizations. This trend of a diversified network of service offerors is a movement of increased importance in the delivery of the government’s services. The work of government is critical in preserving the American way of life. Public servants, both civilian and military, protect our homeland, design plans for energy independence, deliver stability internationally through the execution of our foreign policy, provide services for our nation’s poor and elderly, coordinate disaster relief, and support countless other critical services.

Delivering such services requires cross-government coordination, intragovernmental shared services arrangements, thoughtful leveraging of industry’s innovations and staffing depth, and aligned performance accountability. With the ever-rising public debt and drain on tax revenues from a slowing economy, government executives and managers will continue to face pressure to deliver services at the lowest possible cost. Challenges abound with competing mission priorities, duplication of efforts, and conflicts of interest. Government leaders need the tools and processes to maximize delivery of their mission effectively and efficiently.

Balance in Workforce Composition

Establishing service delivery teams to perform government missions is a complex endeavor. The interpretation of where to draw the line between functions performed by government staff members and those of contractors or volunteers historically has been a political one. Labor unions and pro-industry groups have faced off on either side to push this line to their advantage. Striking the right sourcing balance in workforce composition directly impacts organizational effectiveness. Government decision makers should determine how best to use their network of service offerors by conducting a careful business case review of the agency’s functional characteristics.

This business case analysis should include a review of the following factors:

• The market capacity for and interest in performing such services and the economic impacts of changing the current service provider
• The relative critical-to-mission nature of the work and associated risk implications of external service provider performance
• The organization’s stability and workforce dynamics
• Workload and technology issues
• The legal and regulatory compliance environment specific to the work.

The combination of these risk factors should determine the mix of sourcing solutions for team composition to deliver optimal performance. Applying these factors to a scenario-based feasibility assessment will help government decision makers determine the most appropriate mix of options. The options will impact efficiency drivers to control costs and improve performance. Table 1 describes these considerations.

Function-Based Business Case Review

The result of this analysis will show which sourcing options are most feasible for optimal performance. Among the sourcing solutions from which public managers can choose are in-house performance, public-public partnerships, public-private partnerships, outsourcing, or divestiture. Figure 2 illustrates the options and performance accountability drivers associated with potential sourcing alternatives.

Table 2 shows further information on each of these alternatives and the associated mechanisms for performance accountability.

Tailoring Accountability Controls

Cost and performance controls are crucial for federal government mission delivery. How the government manager designs the service delivery team composition drives accountability controls. The goal is delivering highquality services at low cost to the taxpayer regardless of service provider. Managers must first align performance metrics to mission priorities and vision accomplishment. These metrics should then form the basis for government employees’ individual performance plans, service expectations for memoranda of understanding across government teams, and performance evaluation factors for contractors. Beyond setting the performance metrics to organization mission, effective delivery requires tactical accountability checks, which include periodic management reviews, evaluations, and audits. Equally important is structured and timely performance feedback to the service providers from executives and managers.

Government Management Improvement Trends

The U.S. federal government is both the largest organizational entity and largest buyer of goods and services in the world. With this size comes a constant need for innovations for better management. Such management goals are not new: each administration in modern times—from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda—has espoused responsible stewardship of public resources. The next administration should build on these efforts to imbed accountability controls in government, improve performance, and maximize limited resources.

Regardless of the residual effect of current initiatives, the larger trends in government management will dictate the management imperatives of tomorrow. In the environment of blended service delivery teams, government managers must apply accountability controls internally and externally. In the case of outside service provider delivery, contract administration activities and cost controls drive performance accountability. In-house performance and public-private partnerships require similar accountability mechanisms. Continuous improvement initiatives, business process improvement efforts, public reporting of activity results, and activity-based costing and management all support service team integration. Transparency of operations— including the reporting of both cost and performance results—is a tested accountability control to increase public trust and focus corrective actions.

Conclusion

The next administration must build a management agenda that infuses performance accountability throughout its service delivery network. Doing so will increase public trust in government stewards and instill confidence in public-sector operations. Evaluation of service offerors through a structured business case analysis will allow government leaders to make the most of their available service delivery network. Maximizing the effectiveness of this network hinges on clearly linking performance expectations to mission requirements, evaluating sourcing options using risk and reward scenarios, and establishing robust accountability controls.

Reference

Light, Paul C. Fact Sheet on the New True Size of Government. Center for Public Service, The Brookings Institution, Wagner School of Public Service, New York University, 2006.

Joe Alexander is a director in Grant Thornton’s Global Public Sector, with over thirty years’ professional experience in government and consulting, most recently supporting federal civilian and defense organizations. He is a retired Army officer, who has also worked as a civil servant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense before his career in consulting. He can be reached at Joseph.Alexander@gt.com. Phil Kangas is a senior manager in Global Public Sector with over twelve years’ professional experience in government and consulting, most recently helping the Department of Homeland Security improve performance and manage cost. He has worked as a federal, state, and local employee before his consulting work, most recently as director of constituent services for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He can be reached at Phil.Kangas@gt.com.

Federal executive boards now play a pivotal role in emergency planning, response, and recovery.

By Kimberly E. Ainsworth

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established federal executive boards (FEBs) by presidential directive to achieve better interagency coordination and communication among federal departments and activities outside of Washington, DC. In 1982, the Executive Office of the President transferred authority for the FEB functions to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which today oversees the FEB program.

The need for effective coordination among federal organizations’ field activities was clear then and is even more important in today’s environment. About 88 percent of the 1.5 million federal employees work outside of the national capital area, and regional and local offices of federal departments and agencies administer many federal programs. Regional and local federal officials are the federal government’s principal representatives to the vast majority of our nation’s citizens.

The boards function as

• forums for the exchange of information between Washington and the field about programs,management methods, and administrative issues;
• coordinators of local approaches to national programs as approved by the OPM director;
• communicators from Washington to the field of management initiatives and other concerns for the improvement of coordination; and
• conveyors to the national level of problems that cannot be resolved locally.

Today, FEBs are located in twenty-eight areas with significant federal populations. Each FEB comprises the highest ranking local officials from federal agencies in the FEB area. Board leadership and structure consists of elected officers (chair and vice chair), councils, and committees specific to FEB programs.An FEB staff, usually of one or two people,manages the daily operations of the board.

A host department or agency provides administrative funding for each FEB, and the local member agencies normally furnish project funding.The FEBs draw their general operating instructions from the responsibilities outlined in Title 5 U.S.Code Section 960.

In 2007, the FEB network was restructured to meet the changing needs of the federal workforce, and two new lines of business were unveiled:human capital readiness and emergency preparedness, employee safety and security. This article focuses on the FEBs’ role in emergency planning, response, and recovery.

Emergency Preparedness, Employee Safety and Security

In May 2007, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report, The Federal Workforce: Additional Steps Needed to Take Advantage of Federal Executive Boards’ Ability to Contribute to Emergency Operations. Among other things, it highlighted the network’s efforts in emergency planning, response, and recovery over the years and recommended ways to expand its role, particularly relative to a pandemic influenza outbreak. In September 2007, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Government Management, the District of Columbia and the Federal Workforce, chaired by Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), hosted a hearing to further explore these recommendations and learn more about the network’s efforts. I testified at this hearing, alongside my counterparts from Minnesota and Cleveland, as well as representatives from GAO, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and OPM.

Also in 2007,with help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), FEBs nationwide were granted access to the Law Enforcement On-Line (www.leo.gov) and United States Public and Private Partnership (usp3.org) communications systems. The Dallas-Fort Worth FEB and the Dallas FBI office spearheaded this effort, seeing the mutual benefit of expanding what was an interagency communication pilot program nationwide. FEBs now have the ability to communicate individually or collectively using a consistent tool.

Demographics

The U.S. government is the nation’s largest employer and among the top five employers in many metropolitan areas across the country. During emergencies, the federal workforce has the responsibility to collaborate and act uniformly as one government to ensure the safety of its employees and customers.To that end, FEBs play a vital role in workforce planning.

Although FEBs are not first responders, emergency managers, or law enforcement professionals, they play an important role in public safety.They are positioned to provide crucial communication links among federal agencies and state and local officials.They also ensure that agency leaders receive accurate,up-to-date, and consistent information from local subject matter experts to Kimberly E. Ainsworth is the executive director of the Greater Boston Fed- make informed decisions affecting the federal workforce.

Continuity of Operations

Although each federal agency is responsible for the safety of its employees and continuity of operations (COOP), FEBs complement these efforts by facilitating collaboration on many levels.This collaboration is extremely important because, as noted, 88 percent of the federal workforce resides outside the Washington, DC, area. Collectively, the goal is to keep federal employees and customers safe and secure and ensure that the essential business of government continues.

FEB regions vary in size (geography) and scope (number of employees), but the overall lines of business ensure that their goals are consistent. FEBs have the unique ability to facilitate collaboration nationwide while analyzing and understanding the often localized needs of their federal communities.

Greater Boston

Before 2001, the Greater Boston FEB primarily focused on extreme weather events, but in the post-9/11 environment, federal agencies, particularly in field locations, have more needs and greater expectations of this FEB. Its emergency preparedness role has expanded and procedures have evolved.

More than 180 federal agencies have a presence in the Greater Boston area, and according to the most recent Census data, more than ninety thousand people work in civilian,military, and postal positions in Massachusetts. Boston is, in many cases, the hub for the New England region, which includes Massachusetts, New Hampshire,Connecticut,Rhode Island,Maine, and Vermont. The federal workforce has a significant presence, and its impact is widespread.

Emergency Decision and Notification Plan

In 2002, the Greater Boston FEB unveiled a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive Emergency Decision and Notification Plan. Developed by an interdisciplinary work group, this plan outlines an all-hazards approach to emergency preparedness, response, and recovery from a workforce planning perspective for the local federal community. Potential hazards range from human-made and natural disasters to widespread civil unrest or a pandemic influenza outbreak.

As part of this plan, the FEB collected 24/7/365 contact information for local federal agency decision makers and at least one backup. It developed a variety of communication strategies designed to widely disseminate accurate, up-to-date, and consistent information around the clock.

Boston’s plan has been enacted and tested on several occasions since its launch, and the FEB has learned that it provides significant service to its members during “perceived” emergencies.The U.S. Senate subcommittee was particularly interested in learning more about this viewpoint and gaining an understanding of the FEB’s continual contributions to public safety.

2004 Democratic National Convention

For example, the FEB learned much during the Democratic national convention, which took place in Boston in July 2004, the first since the 2001 terrorist attacks. In May 2003, the convention was designated a national special security event, or one that could be a terrorist target that requires federal counter terrorism capabilities. An event of this national stature had the potential to draw both organized and ad hoc protests.The FEB represented the interests of the federal workforce during the year-long security planning and the event itself. It gave federal leaders accurate, timely information to make informed decisions every step of the way. The Boston FEB built on the experiences of the FEB in Los Angeles, site of the 2000 Democratic national convention.

The Boston FEB played a key role in the planning efforts to ensure that the interests of the many federal employees in Massachusetts were considered and that they would be kept informed. It has since chronicled its experiences in an after-action report that has been shared with key OPM officials and the Denver and Minnesota FEBs in preparation for the national political conventions in 2008.

2005 Threats

Boston learned more lessons on January 25, 2005, when the local media reported that a group of Chinese terrorists had issued a specific and imminent threat to the Greater Boston area. Several were reporting from outside local federal sites, and the public became increasingly nervous.The FEB stepped in quickly to collect and share real-time information from subject matter experts about this alleged threat. It invited local federal heads to participate in an online chat with federal law enforcement leaders,who helped dispel rumors and outlined heightened alert measures.As a result, federal managers were able to alleviate the fears of their employees and get back to work.

On July 7, 2005, the FEB employed similar procedures when Americans awoke to reports of a series of coordinated terrorist bomb blasts that hit London’s transportation system during the morning rush hour.At 9:30 a.m. on that same day, in Boston’s downtown, two underground subway trains were involved in a minor collision. Already on high alert and not yet knowing the nature of the accident, dozens of police and fire personnel and the Massachusetts State Police Casualty Unit responded.

Although local public safety officials were quick to determine that there was no link to the London events, an intense flow of misinformation circulated quickly. Federal managers grappled with determining the course of action that was in the best interests of their workforce.The FEB again quickly coordinated widespread information-sharing among the agencies.

2007 Lite-Brite Scare

Most recently, on January 31, 2007, Boston made headlines nationwide when a marketing scheme went wrong. During the morning rush hour, a total of thirty eight electronic devices, resembling Lite-Brite toys,were placed in public locations around Greater Boston, including on bridges and in subway stations, to promote a movie.The suspicious devices sent public safety officials scrambling for hours, and the situation was uncertain throughout the day. Member agencies relied on the FEB to collect and disseminate needed information as the situation unfolded.

Other Federal Executive Boards

Although these examples are specific to Boston, FEBs nationwide have similar stories. From information sharing during large civic rallies to extreme weather events, FEBs play a vital role in ensuring the safety of the federal workforce and its customers.They have a unique ability to not only gain an immediate understanding of the needs and expectations of their local federal workforce, but to balance them with local and national interests.

Oklahoma City

On April 19, 1995, with the tragic bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, the newly created Oklahoma FEB demonstrated its essential role in assisting the federal workforce in its time of need.The FEB not only coordinated relief efforts for federal workers and their families, but served as the liaison with OP Mand other administration officials on a myriad of issues, including pay and leave. These efforts continued for years as trials were held and the community grieved. Oklahoma has also had its fair share of weather-related events in recent years, including devastating tornadoes. The FEB continues to be a unifying source of information-sharing and communication for federal agencies statewide and maintains a close working relationship with state and local emergency management officials to ensure that the needs of the federal workforce are met.

New York City and New Orleans

The same holds true for New York City.The FEB was instrumental in communicating with the federal workforce in the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks. Further, the New Orleans FEB was, and continues to be, actively engaged in workforce issues related to Hurricane Katrina. Its impact is still felt more than two years later, and the FEB continues to serve as a forum for agencies to address common concerns on many issues and, in turn, ensure that the essential business of government continues.

Los Angeles and Atlanta

FEBs have demonstrated strong leadership in disasters, dating to their creation in the 1960s. In 1994, the Los Angeles FEB was engaged in communicating with federal agencies following the Northridge earthquake that crippled the area.The Atlanta FEB spent the better part of a year representing the federal workforce during the planning for the 1996 Summer Olympics and served as a focal point during the event itself.

Tabletop Exercises, Training, and Other Needs

In addition to communication and information sharing roles during an emergency, FEBs nationwide have been major contributors to the preparedness of the local federal community at large.They have been hosting interagency tabletop exercises featuring a variety of scenarios for many years.

Minnesota

Minnesota is a leader in this regard. Since 2001, its FEB has sponsored more than twenty half- or full-day seminars open to all agencies,with expert speakers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FBI, Secret Service, FEMA,Transportation Security Administration, Department of Defense, and Minnesota state and local government agencies.The FEB hosted five major tabletop exercises, including the first large-scale pandemic influenza exercise in the country.The pandemic segment of this exercise was created by FEB Minnesota in conjunction with the Minnesota Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the Minnesota Department of Health. Many localities nationwide have since emulated these efforts.

Boston

In Boston,more than one hundred federal agencies participated in a pandemic exercise in November 2006. The lessons learned spurred two additional educational forums, focusing on telework and workplace violence.

Almost all FEBs host COOP working groups or emergency planning councils to provide technical assistance, training, and education on a variety of COOP, health and safety, and emergency preparedness topics. These activities include state and local representatives.

Detroit

FEBs frequently work in cooperation with FEMA, the General Services Administration, and other key emergency planning components, to meet the ever changing needs of our local federal communities. For example, the Detroit FEB hosted FEMA’s COOP training for the first time three years ago. It followed up with two pandemic tabletop exercises and a COOP train-the-trainer program.Each had a significant interagency presence and assisted the federal community at large with its individual planning efforts.

Honolulu

The Honolulu-Pacific FEB has made strides in relationship building and is actively engaged with the state’s civil defense component, representing its large federal workforce. It also sponsored a variety of planning forums on emergency, health, and safety issues.

Strengthening Their Role

FEBs continue to be effective while overcoming recurring challenges, including diminished resources. In its May 2007 report, the GAO made several recommendations designed to strengthen the FEB network and its ability to deliver services in the emergency preparedness realm.OPM, FEMA, and key administration officials are currently addressing these recommendations.The first step was the development of the business plan,which includes the two lines of business. These have, in a short time, helped FEBs gain the attention of policymakers and increased credibility in their communities.

Getting Involved

FEB programs are not just for executives. Although the Code of Federal Regulations prescribes FEB membership to be the senior agency representative, agencies are encouraged to allow employees at all levels within their organizations to serve as FEB contacts, participate in FEB activities, and incorporate FEB shared services into their agency missions. FEBs host a series of interdisciplinary committees and councils to tackle a number of issues, including emergency planning, and expanded participation is always welcome.

Although we hope the FEBs are never again needed to assist in the aftermath of tragic events such as 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, or Hurricane Katrina, the fact that they are available, have extensive intergovernmental networks in place, and provide the means to disseminate essential information quickly makes them a tremendous asset to the federal workforce. Please visit www.feb.gov for more information.

Reference

GAO. The Federal Workforce: Additional Steps Needed to Take Advantage of Federal Executive Boards’ Ability to Contribute to Emergency Operations, GAO-07-515. May 2007. www.gao.gov/new.items/d07515.pdf