The Public Manager: The New Bureaucrat articles from September 1999

The Public Manager: The New Bureaucrat archives from September 1999

Winding down.(celebrities as presidential candidates)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... 1999 IS DEFINITELY WINDING DOWN. It seems there are now more prospective presidential candidates than movie stars, which I find alarming. We are losing career celluloid celebrities by the day to the siren call of national leadership. If one...

But still ticking.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... As I "wrestle" with this phenomenon, I am also acutely aware that the clock continues to tick persistently and a tad ominously in the background. The falling leaves hint of something momentous in the near future. I sincerely hope it is nothing...

Government results--an update.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... Fall also marks the appearance of what has become an annual event for The Public Manager--a forum on government performance. As is his custom and hallmark, Chris Wye has assembled a cast of impressive figures to provide short profiles on the...

And all that.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... We have a Thanksgiving feast of good reading in this issue. For example, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) concludes her memorandum to the president on the subject of control board powers; Carlos Romero presents a thoughtful piece on...

GPRA: On the Edge.(Government Performance and Results Act)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... The following collection of articles provides a series of front line views of what may be expected in the year ahead for the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). Taken together they suggest that the Results Act is at an important...

GPRA's "Year 2000" Problem: Performance Reporting.(Government Performance and Results Act)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... To those who have labored in the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) vineyard, who assumed that times would be better after strategic and annual performance goals were defined, and who cling to the hope that the "beginning of the end"...

Congressional Leadership Letter to OMB.(Office of Management and Budget)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... A September 10 letter from Fred Thompson, chairman, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee; Dick Armey, House majority leader; and John Burton, chairman, House Committee on Government Reform to Jacob Lew, director, OMB, reiterated key weaknesses...

Getting Ready for Performance Reporting.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... Over the last several years, most of the attention on the Results Act has been focused on developing informative and useful strategic and annual performance plans for agency managers, other executive branch decision makers, and Congress....

Performance Budgeting: A Critical Process.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... Performance budgeting--the process of linking budget levels to expected program results--is widely viewed as critical for the successful implementation of the Results Act. After all, the federal landscape is littered with management reforms of...

GPRA 2000: Staying the Course.(Government Performance and Results Act)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... The Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Council was instrumental in getting agencies on track to complete the groundwork required by the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). The challenge in 2000 will be to keep up the momentum, building...

Making the Future Happen: Treasury's CIO and GPRA.(chief information officer and Government Performance and Results Act)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... With the passage of the Information Technology Management Reform Act (now commonly known as the Clinger-Cohen Act) in 1996, Congress gave federal agencies an important new tool: the position of chief information officer (CIO). CIOs now have a...

Building the Right Organizational Culture to Achieve GPRA Outcomes.(Government Performance and Results Act)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) focuses our attention on outcomes--a focus long overdue in government. However, in our concentration on building perfect outcome measures, we seem to have forgotten that the best way to achieve...

Wanted for GPRA Success: Line Managers.(Government Performance and Results Act)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... In my Public Manager article as part of last year's mini-forum on the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) ("Learning to Make GPRA Work," Fall 1998, p. 14), I expressed doubt about achieving GPRA goals "without the involvement and...

The People Factor: The Link Between Strategic Planning and Results.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... The coming year will see a growing number of initiatives among agencies to establish a systematic workforce planning process. Agency leaders and their human resources advisors are realizing that in order for their strategic plans to be...

Beyond the Bottom Line: Leveraging Balanced Measures.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... When most Americans think of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), customer service is not usually the first thing that pops into their minds. But over the past year, the public, members of Congress, and the press have taken note of significant...

Joint Accountability in the Year 2000.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... As the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) focused attention on results, agencies began recognizing the limited amount of control they had over complex outcomes. Programs that produced outputs quite efficiently often found that other...

Strengths and Weaknesses in Agency Performance Plans.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... Working with the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has analyzed the status of agency compliance with the Government Performance and Results Act throughout each stage of the act's implementation. In its...

Government Should Be No Better Off Than the People It Serves.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... In 1997, I joined with Majority Leader Dick Armey in forming the Results Caucus, whose primary goal is to combat waste, fraud, and error in the federal government. The Results Caucus represents a coalition of reform-minded members of Congress...

GPRA: A Work in Progress.(Government Performance and Results Act)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... Since becoming law in 1993, the Government Performance and Results Act has continued to be a work in progress. That progress should begin showing some significant results in the federal government's ability to link spending with performance...

The Year Ahead: We've Only Just Begun.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) is part of a continuum of federal management reform which has existed for more than a decade and a half. From quality management that stressed measuring everything, to the Chief Financial...

Progress, Challenges, and Prospects in Implementation.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... After the first two years of governmentwide implementation of the Results Act, it is clear that policy makers and managers in a variety of settings have used planning performance-based management to good effect. It is equally clear that much...

GPRA: The Year Ahead.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... The year 2000 brings a make-or-break test to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). It is the year when everything comes together--the strategic plans that detail each agency's goals and the measures that assess how well they are...

Mandatory 7106(b)(1) Bargaining: Needed for a More Effective and Efficient Government.
September 22, 1999... A union leader presents the argument for mandatory bargaining over virtually every aspect of the federal workplace. Now is the time for the president to reaffirm every provision of Executive Order (EO) 12871, including making 7106(b)(1)...

Training for Reality: How the Public Sector Is Making Training Programs Come Alive.
September 22, 1999... Initiatives in innovative, action-oriented training in the federal government suggest that such training is evolving in some of the same directions as the private sector. The private sector is pumping more and more training dollars into...

Beyond the Bean Count: Measuring Performance of Regulatory Compliance Programs.
September 22, 1999... The author examines the special challenges in measuring the performance of government programs and agencies responsible for obtaining compliance with environmental, health, safety, and economic regulations. Order and progress would be...

Memo to the President: Part II. Meeting Goals by Sunset.
September 22, 1999... Conclusion of two-part discussion of the District of Columbia Control Board describes actions to ensure the future well being of the district. The control board is due to sunset shortly following FY 2000, when the audit certifies that the...

Information Technology Investment Portfolio System.
September 22, 1999... I-TIPS can help federal managers make better information technology investment decisions. Batteries not included. This is not a toy. Some assembly required. Follow all instructions care fully. Do not use near an open flame or other harsh...

Update: Interview with John A. Koskinen.
September 22, 1999... In the fourth in a series, the chair of the President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion shares his views with the editor of The Public Manager. The Public Manager (Hereafter TPM): Would you provide our readers an overview of the...

Under New Management: The Federal Acquisition Institute.
September 22, 1999... Wallace O. Keene, series editor, recently interviewed Deborah O'Neill, the new director of the Federal Acquisition Institute. The Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI) is one of the three federal government organizations with a primary...

Hassle-Free Government "Going to Kansas City".
September 22, 1999... Bringing together federal, state, local, and not-for-profit agencies to deliver services at the same location and at the same time. You've heard the famous Kansas City song which goes like this: Going to Kansas City, Kansas City...

Public Managers of Tomorrow: Can They Exist in a Privatized World?
September 22, 1999... Our ability to attract and retain capable individuals for key government positions is being eroded by the explosion of the consultation industry. Government agencies have historically competed with private sector firms to hire and retain...

DOD's New Notions on COTS Procurement.
September 22, 1999... To reduce costs for acquiring software, DOD is implementing an "electronic mall" on the Internet for its customers. An interview with John Bolton. Components of the Department of Defense (DOD), and the civilian agencies as well, have been...

Scenario Planning: Strategic Thinking Goes Back to the Future.
September 22, 1999... Scenario planning is hardly rocket science and even rocket science isn't that complicated anymore. In the early 1990s, Peter Schwartz caught the attention of management thinkers when he published his 1991 book The Art of the Long View....

In Search of Strategy.
September 22, 1999... The 40th Anniversary Issue of the Sloan Management Review Everyone should have a 40th anniversary like the Sloan Management Review. Most managers think of the Sloan Management Review or SMR as the MIT "tech management journal." Indeed, back...

THE 1999 NATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE AWARDS.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... The American Society for Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration established this program to pay tribute to public service practitioners whose careers exhibit the highest standard of excellence, dedication, and...

The Washington Monument Syndrome.
September 22, 1999... What the Future Has in Store GRIMALDI (or what Jeanne Dixon would have told Nancy Reagan if she were elected president of the United States) You laugh? If Hillary can run for the Senate in New York having never spent more time...