
The fuss surrounding the release of the first full report on the use of Recovery Act money last week reminded me of an experience I had in 1980 while working for a congressional oversight committee. We had received an annual report with program data for FY 1977 that I thought was quite useful...

I’m back from my first visit to Saudi Arabia. I can’t say I saw any camels, but I did seen plenty of McDonalds and Starbucks! Conference participants were treated royally and we were treated with great hospitality, including an outdoor banquet with traditional Arabic sword dancing. Jo...

The Center for The Business of Government Listen to Jenni Main, CFO, Office of Financial Stability of the Department of the Treasury talk about TARP.
Source: www.businessofgovernment.org
Audio Interview (mp3) Career Overview Organizational Innovation Management Issues Focusing on the Future

David Osborne, of Reinventing Government fame, keynoted today’s session at the Saudi conference on public administration. He said there are two sets of reforms running in parallel across the globe today. ...

I’m in Riyadh this week, blogging from afar at a conference on public administration. The exotic is in the small things – Google comes up in Arabic with the scroll bar on the left and there’s an arrow painted on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing to Mecca. The ...

Yesterday I highlighted Jeff Zients’ testimony before the Senate Budget Committee’s Task Force on Government Performance. But there were two other witnesses who provided some interesting insights, and Senator Mark Warner offered a glimpse of where the Task Force might be heading. Si...

OMB Chief Performance Office Jeff Zients testified today before the Senate Budget Committee’s new Task Force on Government Performance. He laid out a set of five key principles OMB will follow in developing a governmentwide performance management system. ...

OMB yesterday released its latest guidance on federal acquisition. This new guidance, Increasing Competition and Structuring Contracts for the Best Results, provides guidelines for agencies to move to more competitive and lower risk types of contracts, along with semi-annual reports on progress...

Noted business author Tom Davenport has an article, “Make Better Decisions,” in the November issue of Harvard Business Review. He describes the prevalence, in the business world, of what he calls “decision-making disorder,” but this also has real applicability to government. Prof. Tom Da...

This past summer the spectacle of unruly congressional town hall meetings on health care reform played across the media...

The Center for The Business of Government
Jonathan D. Breul was the keynote speaker at the Polish Government's Fifth Evaluation Conference on October 23, 2009 in Warsaw. Breul spoke about "Evaluation as an instrument to improve the quality of public spending - a look at the global financial crisis." The conference was sponsored by the Polish Agency for Enterpr...ise Development and Ministry for Regional Development and attended by nearly 200 senior Polish officials.Read More
Source: www.konferencja-ewaluacja.pl
Conference will be opened by: Hanna Jahns - Secretary of State in the Ministry of Regional Development. Agnieszka Rybińska - Deputy to Chief Executive Officer of Polish Agency for Enterprise Development.

The Senate Budget Committee has created a new Task Force on Government Performance, according to a press release issuedthis morning...

WFED’s Jason Miller reports that the Office of Management and Budget wants to change its stripes and “move away from command and control toward a focus on collaboration.” The old National Performance Review tried do this and failed. At t...

The Obama Administration is stepping up its efforts to solicit ideas from employees. In its first big effort, the SAVE Award (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency), the Office of Management and Budget encouraged employees to submit cost savings ideas...













