Can Government Play Moneyball? - John Bridgeland and Peter Orszag. Oliver Munday Based on our rough calculations, less than $1 out of every $100 of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely. As former officials in the administrations of Barack Obama (Peter Orszag) and George W. Bush (John Bridgeland), we were flabbergasted by how blindly the federal government spends. In other types of American enterprise, spending decisions are usually quite sophisticated, and are rapidly becoming more so: baseball’s transformation into “moneyball” is one example. Allow us to share some behind-the-scenes illustrations of what our crazy system of budgeting looks like—and to propose how the lessons of moneyball could make our government better. The moneyball formula in baseball—replacing scouts’ traditional beliefs and biases about players with data-intensive studies of what skills actually contribute most to winning—is just as applicable to the battle against out-of-control health-care costs.
Building Enterprise 2.0 on Culture 1.0 | e-gineer by @nathanwallace. Introduction JCintra, our Intranet Wiki, has seen incredible levels of adoption and participation, with a positive impact on the way information flows in our organisation. Over 18 months, JCintra amassed 23,335 content contributions from 239 (~70%) people. The number of contributions per month continues to increase steadily. But, JCintra continues to function as an incredibly easy to use Intranet, rather than as a genuine Wiki. In fact, 85% of our 3000 pages only have one contributing author. (Interestingly, this behaviour occurs even at Atlassian, who build Wiki software as their business!)
This article documents our cultural journey so far, and outlines our ideas for driving the next phase of change. Technical and Cultural Maturity What does success look like? Decisions about information sharing in organisations like Janssen-Cilag are complex. Success is defined by what we do, not what we have the opportunity to do. The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model Reducing additional work. Www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-Canada/Local Assets/Documents/ca_en_ps_innov_govern_Jan09.pdf.
Cass Sunstein and the power of ‘nudge’ - World. Peter Yang He is called “the most evil, dangerous man in America” and Barack Obama’s “invisible hand.” Conservatives and progressives alike distrusted his project to use government power to shape human behaviour in ways that people may not even notice. He endured a tumultuous Senate confirmation, battled conspiracy theories and even fended off death threats in his job as the director of OIRA—the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—an obscure-sounding but powerful office that has the final say on government rules about everything from air pollution to product safety.
Cass Sunstein, a well-known Harvard law professor and long-time friend of Obama’s, is also married to Samantha Power, recently confirmed as ambassador to the United Nations. Since leaving government, he’s written a book, Simpler: The Future of Government, that is part memoir and part manifesto for injecting innovative economic theories into the DNA of government. Can Government Play Moneyball? - John Bridgeland and Peter Orszag. Publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection/SC94-72-1996E. Time to tell our stories. I used to be a proud public servant. Now I’m not so sure. There was a time when Canada’s public service was the envy of the world. Bribery and corruption were rare. Employees diligently worked long hours and performed excellent work.
Foreign governments looked to our civil service as the example to follow when creating or revising their own public administration. Wait a second. When I talk to my fellow public servants, they feel under attack from media, from politicians, and even from their fellow citizens. The media showcases all hints of impropriety, rare as they may be. Our political masters incessantly cut operational budgets and staffing levels. Whatever happened to the ethos of pride in public service?
I believe we need to share the stories of success of individuals, and of organizations. I proudly work for the National Managers' Community (NMC), a group with only 22 paid staff in the federal government. To summarize: I’m a proud public servant. It's a long road to wisdom, but a short one to being ignored | HOOT AND HOWL. DHS - Prevention - Homebase. With the creation of Homebase in September 2004, DHS dramatically changed the landscape of homeless services in New York City.
Prior to this time, many low-income New Yorkers found shelter to be the only means for coping with a housing crisis. But now, households on the brink of homelessness are faced with an entirely new reality− complete with an extensive network of neighborhood-based services to help them remain in their communities and avoid entering shelter. With locations in community districts throughout the five boroughs, Homebase remains the cornerstone of the City's homelessness prevention efforts, crafting individualized assistance to meet the needs of each household.
Among the services that may be offered are: Family or tenant/landlord mediation Household budgeting Emergency rental assistance Job training and placement Benefits advocacy (child care, food stamps, tax credits, public health insurance) Case Law on the Duty of Loyalty of Public Servants. By RCMP External Review Committee Staff June 2002 In D-076, the Committee considered several court decisions in Canada and the U.S.A. concerning the duty of loyalty of government employees. The following two decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada were cited by the Committee in its review of the appeal. Also cited was a decision of the Federal Court of Canada summarized below. Fraser (Fraser v. Public Service Staff Relations Board, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 455) This case was decided in 1985 by the Supreme Court of Canada. The case was not decided on the basis of the Charter because the facts of the case predated the coming into force of the Charter.
The Court held that some speech by public servants on public issues is permitted. ... indeed, in some circumstances a public servant may actively and publicly express opposition to the policies of a government. Osborne (Osborne v. In this case, a group of federal public servants wanted to participate in various political activities. Haydon (Haydon v. The real question that the AG report raises but nobody will ask. For opposition politicians, the day an auditor-general’s report is released is pretty much the next best thing to Christmas. I imagine them waking up early, hardly able to contain their excitement.
“I wonder what’s in it! Maybe a billion-dollar boondoggle! Or — ooh! — a $16 orange juice!” You can see the appeal. Not only is it risk-free, politically — who’s in favour of waste and mismanagement? And this is how politics gets reduced to mush. These are not the product of inadvertence, the mistakes and oversights that are the stuff of auditor-general’s reports. To be sure, the bigger and broader any institution gets, the more frayed the lines of oversight become, the less sure anyone is of what they are trying to achieve and the more likely it is to produce the odd boondoggle. But the answer is not simply to tighten the screws harder on the whole operation. Surely it is past time to think about more fundamental reforms. But in fact it ought to provoke a more searching discussion.
Time for revolution rather than evolution? At heart, I’m an evolutionary, softly-softly kind of digital person, so I instinctively disapproved of chunks of Martha’s report. But even I can appreciate that, amid the destruction GOV.UK has wrought amongst the websites of Whitehall, there are some breathtaking vistas to a new way of doing things thanks to the mantra of ‘revolution, not evolution’. DCMS wouldn’t have ripped apart its intranet in the same way without GDS’ inspiration and encouragement, for one. The quick answers that really answer the question. The radical presentation of government – not departmental – policy is another. Despite the awards, I think the jury is still out on whether tidying up the lawn to make policy accessible to new audiences was worth alienating the existing ones, currently screaming at departmental web teams around Whitehall.
Here’s a few ideas, some quite daft: How Van Halen Explains the U.S. Government. Right there on Page 40, in the “Munchies” section, nestled between “pretzels” and “twelve (12) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” is a parenthetical alert so adamant you can’t miss it: “M&M’s,” the text reads, “(WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” This is the famed rider to Van Halen’s 1982 concert contract. In a sentence fragment that would define rock-star excess forevermore, the band demanded a bowl of M&M’s with the brown ones laboriously excluded. It was such a ridiculous, over-the-top demand, such an extreme example of superstar narcissism, that the rider passed almost instantly into rock lore.
It also wasn’t true. I don’t mean that the M&M language didn’t appear in the contract, which really did call for a bowl of M&M’s -- “NO BROWN ONES.” “Van Halen was the first to take 850 par lamp lights -- huge lights -- around the country,” explained singer David Lee Roth. So Van Halen established the M&M test. Real Choices As the kids say, LOL. The truth is much less shocking and far more boring. Fonberg moves to PCO, Fadden to leave CSIS for top job at DND. ITK's 'A Taste of the Arctic' shindig on April 7, Ottawa, photographs by Cynthia Münster April 14, 2014 The Hill Times photograph by Cynthia Münster A happy crowd at ITK's 'Taste of Arctic' at the NAC gathers for a picture.
The annual event, held in Ottawa by the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, is meant showcase Inuit culture. Some 350 attend the party, including a number of MPs, Senators, Cabinet minister, lobbyists and journalists. National Inuit Leader and ITK President Terry Audla shows off his seal vest to Employment Minister Jason Kenney. Environics' Meredith Taylor and Greg MacEachern with ITK's Stephen Hendrie. Justice Minister Peter MacKay, his son Kian, and ITK president Terry Audla. ITK president Terry Audla and Abbas Rana, assistant deputy editor at The Hill Times and Party Central columnist. Labour Minister Kellie Leitch, ITK President Terry Audla, Laureen Harper, and local Ottawa photographer Michelle Valberg. ITK President Terry Audla and Labour Minister Kellie Leitch. The Snarky Optimist. 'The private sector is superior'. Time to move on from this old dogma | Andrew Simms and Stephen Reid. Towards the end of 2012 a telling interview with the head of the London Olympics, Lord Coe, was published in a national newspaper.
"I actually don't believe in big government," said Coe "and half the time I'm never quite sure I believe in government, generally. " Dumbfounded, the interviewer Decca Aitkenhead responded: "But without government we wouldn't have had the Olympics. " Coe conceded, "No, that is true. That is true. " The myth of private sector superiority says that the private sector is efficient and dynamic, the public sector wasteful and slow; that the more we can get the private sector to run things the better.
That the head of a massive public enterprise like the Olympics can so blithely discount what underpins it demonstrates its reach. The myth is effectively government policy. But, what of the evidence of private sector efficiency? Healthcare is typically much more expensive in countries with heavily privatised systems. Gov on the go. Over the past 25 years, productivity in the private sector has risen by more than 50 percent. Globalization, advanced manufacturing processes, and a deeper understanding of individual and organizational psychology have all contributed significantly to this growth. But the single most significant contribution to this growth has been the private sector’s ability to harness the disruptive power of technology and to use it invent better and more efficient processes. The public sector, on the other hand, has been unable to keep pace, despite, in some cases, eventually adopting similar technologies. At the same time that private sector productivity grew 50 percent, productivity in the public sector actually fell.
Mobile technology, a very powerful productivity booster, offers the public sector a chance to hit the reset button. This report examines three key areas where mobile acts as an enabler of productivity for the government and its citizens: VanRoekel is right. This was not always true. The Rat Pack of Public Service Sector Renewal. As many of you know I spend a lot of time thinking about public service sector renewal – that’s a wonkish term for renewing the public service. I do it because I think the public service is one of the most important institutions in the country since it affects everything we do, pretty much every day. Over the past few years I’ve met more and more people who are equally passionate about this issue.
Some I’ve met in person, others I’ve just chatted with by email. But, over the last 4 years I’ve watched a small group of bloggers – a rat pack of public service sector renewal – emerge. We’re scattered across the country and have come to from different angles but we all care about how our government is, how it should be, and how we can get to from the first place to the latter.
This is no easy task. I’m outside of government so it’s easier for me to speak truth to power. The CPSR rat pack: Nick Charney’s blog CPSRenewal is one of the best blogs on public service sector renewal out there. Can we have an evidence-based government? President George W. Bush gave Even Start a failing grade, much like the one it appears he's giving to this student. But Obama finally killed the program. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP) In 1988, Congress funded an effort to help young children from disadvantaged families do better in school. A few years later, the federal government tested the program, called Even Start, to see whether it was working. Researchers found no proof that it was, so President George W. The case of Even Start stands out because it is so rare. There are several reasons for that, most wrapped up in politics. But if Washington ever hopes to provide the services voters say they want, at the tax rates voters say they're willing to pay, economists say the government will need to ramp up its efforts to figure out which programs work and which ones don't, and shift resources accordingly.
Peter Orszag, fan of evidence-based policy and purple backdrops. Bush tried and failed for three years to eliminate it. Celebrating Public Service | Alex's Blog. Celebrating Public Service Posted by himelfarb on April 12, 2013 · 73 Comments Public servants celebrating the enrolment of 5 million citizens in the Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan (1959, Archives of Ontario) Notes for talk at Public Policy Forum Dinner, April 11, 2013 I am delighted to be here with family, friends and colleagues this evening – an evening that can only be understood as a celebration of Canada’s public service.
My hunch is that I can speak for all the former clerks here this evening that for us public service was deeply satisfying, a privilege, a source of pride, an opportunity to make a difference. I wonder what proportion of public servants would say this today. Things were much easier for us. Things do seem different today. I know I have to be careful here. It certainly doesn’t need more critics. The advice is often contradictory; the tone is increasingly derisive. Everyone in this room knows that the public service is vitally important. Let me give you an example. Optimism, Fear, and the Knight News Challenge.
Blog.GC20.ca. Public-service cuts more than advertised: report. Towards a unified theory of ‘shiny new things’ for the public sector. Whitehall shakes up IT governance.