The intelligence community has been leading the government pack in its collaboration efforts. Christopher Dorobek points to 9/11 and other examples to show how government realized it needed a better way to collect, process and share intelligence data in this month’s Incoming column, “The Intelligence Community Writes the Book on Collaboration.”

The intelligence issues, particularly in the case of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, are well documented in the 9/11 Commission’s final report. The commission found that the government largely had the necessary data, but it failed to connect the dots. That data was scattered throughout many different organizations and among many people. Different parts of the intelligence and law enforcement organizations were not speaking to one other. In fact, these issues are not unique to the intelligence agencies. They are all too familiar throughout government.

Yet Dorobek notes that the intelligence community has developed a set of tools to quickly share information, known as Intellipedia. The success of the Intellipedia team has many people talking, and new reports show that Web-based collaboration works.

Everyone seems to be talking about social media and collaborative platforms such as Facebook, wikis and cloud computing. Do you think these tools are effective? If your organization uses them, have you noticed improved communication and collaboration? Is the intelligence community on the right track?

The U.S. Defense Department’s performance management system needs to be completely rebuilt, according to a task group assigned to evaluate the National Security Personnel System. Christopher Dorobek explains the problems with the NSPS in this month’s Incoming column, Building a Better Government Personnel System:

The NSPS has few proponents. In the late summer, the NSPS task group issued its report (www.defenselink.mil/dbb/nsps.html). In the end, the NSPS was handled poorly from the start. The George W. Bush administration forced the program on the department, and the department largely refused to talk to its employees, including the employee unions. Those efforts to firmly establish a system may end up setting it back.

That would be too bad. Dr. John Crum, deputy director of the Merit Systems Protection Board, has noted that few pay reform systems work on their first attempt. They are very complex systems. “It’s a change for the organization’s culture,” Crum says. But it also is critically important that pay be linked to agency missions—and to performance.

The big recommendation coming from the NSPS task group is right on: “The NSPS cannot be fixed; it needs to be reconstructed. A ‘fix’ could not address the depth of the systemic problems discovered,” the group’s final report says. “The Task Group does not recommend an abolishment of the NSPS because the performance management system that has been created is achieving alignment of employee goals with organizational goals.

Dorobek offers thought-provoking insights on the pay-for-performance issue in government. He argues that commitment to transparency, a long-running theme in his Incoming columns, is a key factor to the eventual success of the NSPS or whatever program replaces it: When employees don’t even know the assessment criteria or how the program works, as Dorobek asserts, how can they be expected to measure up?

How do you think the DOD performance management process can be improved? Is Dorobek on the right track? Is there more to it? Please let us know what you think!

Transparency remains an issue for the Obama administration, writes Christopher Dorobek in this month’s Incoming column, Contract Transparency Poised to Open Up, Dorobek observes that one of the biggest challenges the administration has faced in executing programs through the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed earlier this year has been in oversight of the funds:

The [Recovery and Transparency Board] is responsible for oversight and transparency of the stimulus spending. An essential part of the foundation of that oversight and transparency is the recovery.gov Web site. The theory of Web 2.0 is that information is power, and that shared information only becomes more powerful. Therefore, the idea is to almost “crowdsource” the oversight process by making spending data available online. Then, people could see for themselves where money is being spent.

It is important to note that this type of oversight never has been done before. Agencies face a number of challenges for implementing the stimulus spending. One is getting the money out the door. Some government organizations, such as the Energy Department, have to manage stimulus allocations that are bigger than their annual appropriation. Imagine doubling the amount of work but keeping the same amount of people—and doing it all in a transparent way. Scores of challenges are here.

Dorobek invites “debate, discussion, examination and solutions” on these challenges and elaborates on some of the key ones he sees: task order transparency in multi-award contracts, for instance, and the ability to see at least portions of contracts that can be made public, but presently aren’t. You can read his entire column and comment on his general argument here, but here at SIGNAL Scape we’re curious: What do you think the next steps are in improving transparency, especially with regard to acquisitions and procurement?

We try to learn about leadership from great leaders of the past, says Christopher Dorobek in this month’s Incoming column, Trite But True: It All Comes Down to Leadership:

Many remarkable books have been written about leaders. Among the classics are Warren Bennis’ On Becoming a Leader or John Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You. There are books about President Lincoln’s skills; one is Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times by Donald T. Phillips. Another book looks at the leadership skills of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity by Steven F. Hayward. In the end, we understand that leadership is so important that we even try to look back at history to find lessons learned from great leaders in the past.

We all have been to conferences where speakers talk about the problems facing government today. Inevitably, the solution involves leadership. Yet even with all the books and all the talk about the importance of leadership, there seems to be an inverse relationship between how often we talk about leadership and how much we really understand it.

He continues by noting that leadership of today needs to be less reflective to really address today’s pressing leadership issues. Among his assertions: People confuse leadership with management, and leaders must understand emerging principles of leadership. Moving past the obstacles and understanding these key 21st century principles, which include “agility, innovation and the ability to enable people to think independently,” requires a different kind of wisdom: that of today’s leaders. He gives an example from the Environmental Protection Agency:

One of my favorite stories of real leadership comes from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Jeremy Ames, a young man in his 20s, is a front-line federal employee in the EPA’s Indoor Environments Division. Last year he had the task of creating a public service announcement to educate people about the dangers of radon. Rather then just contracting it out, Ames had the wonderful idea of creating a contest that would allow people to submit their videos on YouTube, and then the EPA would award a prize to the winning videos. Ames even researched government regulations to determine that the government could award prize money. The results of this contest were remarkable. Several of the videos are just stunning, and you can view them at http://bit.ly/radon. … [The contest's] success spoke volumes about their ability to infuse the organization with an innovative culture—to empower people to try new things. It was seeping throughout the organization, and people had adopted ideas as their own. Peacock and O’Neill had managed to start a transformation of the EPA—an organization that was already one of the government’s most far-sighted agencies.

This leads us to this month’s question: Where have you seen good leadership recently? We welcome your stories, anecdotes, links and feedback on other examples of where government agencies have addressed these issues of agility, innovation and encouragement of independent or creative efforts.

The role for federal CIOs is changing, says Christopher Dorobek in Be a CIO, Not a CI-No, this month’s Incoming column. He gives props to the current administration for not just supporting information technology and e-government initiatives, but insisting on them, as evidenced by the appointment of key people to important positions and Obama’s own determination to not be PDA-less:

Two early and powerful actions have made clear the Obama link between information technology and governing. Perhaps one of the most powerful actions was when President Obama insisted—demanded—that he have a personal digital assistant. That single action spoke volumes about how core information technology is to the country’s new chief executive. It said that he understood the security concerns inherent with many technologies, but it also said that “no” was not an option.

Another action was the creation of a White House new media office and the appointment of the Obama campaign’s new media guru, Macon Phillips, as its leader. Creating the Obama CIO, the White House Office of New Media and the Obama chief technology officer (CTO) were not just semantic steps. The leaders of those organizations—Kundra, Phillips and CTO Aneesh Chopra, respectively—understand that their job is not about information technology. Their success or failure will depend on the government’s ability to carry out its mission. And, in a significant step, it links responsibility with authority.

These developments are signs that It’s not enough for the IT departments that CIO’s run just to keep the network up, anymore, Dorobek continues. And that is where the huge, uncomfortable shift is taking place:

… increasingly, they are being pressed to focus on tools that further enable agencies to carry out their missions and to become even more core to the mission. But too often, CIOs are not the enablers. Many information technology organizations become “no zones,” and the CIO becomes the CI-No. When personnel go to their information technology organization with an idea, they are told all the reasons they cannot do something. And that is particularly true with Web 2.0 applications because of security concerns.

So there’s been a lot of conversation about culture needing to change to get out of this “two-point-NO” mindset. We’ve heard the call for that change from admirals and generals at our own AFCEA events, to say nothing of the wider Government 2.0 conversation on the web and the digital governance movement afoot in public administration circles. Our question for you is how does that change happen? How can we shape the culture so that government IT leaders can say “yes” to technology more often?

Christopher Dorobek waxes nostalgic about his first e-mail account and how he didn’t get it at first in this month’s Incoming column, “The First Step Toward Collaboration Is to Stop E-Mailing.” And he wasn’t the only one, he writes:

As shocking as it may seem now, all types of questions arose in agencies about whether e-mail was necessary. The General Services Administration (GSA), under then-administrator David J. Barram, was one of the first agencies to ensure that each person in the organization had e-mail—on Flag Day 1996. The GSA press release headline read, “GSA Employees Join Super Information Highway through Intranet.”

Barram’s quote in the release, dated June 14, 1996, states that, “Using this tool called Internet, companies, governments and individuals around the world are inventing exciting new ways to do their work, improve service to their customers, and communicate with each other,” Barram said today. “I believe that use of the Internet will be a key competitiveness factor for GSA in the coming years and that GSA employees must begin to learn how this new resource can change the way we do business.”

Amusing as hindsight can be, Dorobek makes an excellent point when he says that e-mail really did revolutionize the way we communicate, but hasn’t done much toward the effort to collaborate. But since we’ve gotten in the habit of using e-mail to collaborate, for lack of better tools in the ’90s, we’re still using e-mail to collaborate even though better tools are out there. He continues:

My challenge to users is to think before sending an e-mail and ask the simple question: “Is this the best tool for what I am trying to accomplish?” In many cases, much better options are available. Blogs can be used for speaking to large groups of people, but they also create a place where a conversation can happen around topics. Wikis are collaborative workplaces where people can share information and ideas. And other capabilities are popping up every day.

Better tools for collaboration are available. It is time to thank e-mail and move on.

Indeed! Blogs, and wikis, and social bookmarking, and… what else? What we’re curious about here in SIGNAL’s offices are which tools are most effective in facilitating collaboration? It seems like new ones spring up every day, but this could be a valuable conversation in helping managers understand new collaboration tools.

… And Incoming author Christopher Dorobek would like you to know why in his May column. It’s more than a buzzword, he writes:

No person can overestimate the complexities involved in implementing government transparency. It is a dramatic shift in the way we think about information, particularly in government. We always have understood that information is powerful, but the understanding of the power of information led us to keep our information close. In fact, the theory of Web 2.0—and I would argue of transparency as well—is that information, in fact, becomes much more powerful when it is shared.

Dorobek adds a number of examples: the Health and Human Services’ asking for user input on its pandemic flu page (note that his column was written before the Swine Flu outbreak), the Bush administration’s initiative to make the Presidential Management Agenda scorecard ratings public, federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra’s attempts to open up certain D.C. government meetings by posting videos of those meetings to YouTube.

Read his article, “Why Transparency Matters”, and consider the challenges government faces in defining transparency and implementing it effectively. What do you think?

In Christopher Dorobek’s latest Incoming column, he bids readers to have a look at What Would Google Do?, a book by Jeff Jarvis that examines how people can learn from the search engine giant. The lessons, he says, are particularly important for government managers to wrap their brains around:

The book taps into the idea that information is power, but that the real power of information comes in the sharing. Among the principles the book outlines are: give up control; get out of the way; and make mistakes well.

These three principles are useful particularly for government. They are almost directly applicable to government management, and applying them will be particularly challenging.

For giving up control, the book argues that Google does not try to be everything for everyone. To the contrary, it tries to link to everyone. Government agencies tend to want to control information. They become concerned about people misinterpreting the information that is presented. These days, people do not want to be controlled. Agencies still must perform their assessment of data and make it relevant to citizens, but they also must cede control and make data available to people in raw form.

Getting out of the way is related to giving up control, but too often agencies believe that they have to do everything. That is not true. A case in point is the District of Columbia’s remarkable Apps for Democracy program. Under former district Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, who was named the Obama administration’s chief information officer in March, the program gave up control by making government data available—and then held a contest for applications using that data.

…

To make mistakes well is one of the most difficult aspects for agencies—and currently the most disconcerting. Government is terrible at making mistakes. Nobody tolerates them—not Congress, not those involved with oversight, not even the media. This approach has created an ultraconservative culture that is intolerant of any change or innovation. What would Google do? Google would beta-test everything. Gmail is still in beta, for goodness’ sake. That is largely because the company still is making changes.

Read more, including additional examples, in the column What Would Google Government Look Like?, from the April 2009 issue of SIGNAL Magazine. And we’d like to hear from you on any of these topics. Can government learn to “make mistakes well?” Can it get a new perspective on controlling information? Will government get out of the way?

And, perhaps more importantly, if it indeed has to: How will it?

Christopher Dorobek, writing in this month’s Incoming column, addresses a major question for public managers: Just what is the best way to manage in the public sector? During the 1990s, many government agencies were trying valiantly to put performance standards into place, and took many cues from the private sector. But as Dorobek notes in Ending Government’s Private-Sector Envy, government is very different from private industry. He writes:

…There are some inflexible reasons that government performance is so complex. One is the lack of clear ways to measure performance. In the private sector, there is, literally, a bottom line—a profit and loss statement. In the end, that is the grand measure of performance. It is objective, and it can be relentless.

Government agencies and programs do not really have that kind of bottom line. In many ways, that is because the bottom line for most government programs is … undefined. A case in point is port security. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) task seems clear-cut: Prevent terrorists and criminals from sending dangerous and illegal items into the United States through U.S. ports. That task may seem as simple as black and white, yet many people realize that it actually is a daunting challenge given the thousands of shipping containers that enter the United States each and every day. The DHS could “perform,” if security were the only performance criterion, but it would do that by merely shutting down anything from coming into or out of the nation’s ports. Or, the DHS could demand that each and every container be inspected before anything enters the country. Of course, that would bring commerce to a virtual halt and send shudders through an already gloomy economy.

So the measurement criterion is changing, and it no longer is black and white. In fact, the task is to determine the right shade of gray.

As Dorobek adds, every watchdog group and Congressional purse-string-holder will want to weigh in once Obama’s Chief Performance Officer comes on board. If the private sector models aren’t working, where can government managers find a model for performance management that they can depend on? If they have to build it from scratch, what should they incorporate from other models?

With all the headlines about honest mistakes of late, it bears remembering that often such mistakes lead to valuable insights, writes Christopher Dorobek in his newest Incoming column, Government Needs to Find Balance in Oversight. Noting the government trend toward accountability, Dorobek questions whether accountability itself should be the mission of government. Too much oversight, he cautions, may stifle the very thing agencies need most to best accomplish their missions.

But there is a cost to the hyper-oversight: innovation. As people are second-guessed or figuratively flogged by the public, they tend to become demoralized and avoid doing anything that might garner the spotlight—or wrath. Rather than encouraging innovation and finding new ways of doing things, agencies instead turn to the safe, tried-and-true means of conducting business.

Again, nobody is suggesting that oversight should go away. Good managers acknowledge that oversight can be very helpful in identifying issues. And, there are solutions to its drawbacks.

A simple solution is the acknowledgment that these are difficult issues and that mistakes are not necessarily waste, fraud or abuse. People have to make decisions at certain times based on certain data. Most people simply are trying to do the best job they can. The public must recognize that mistakes can and will happen. Yet another truism is that we tend to learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.

In addition to improved oversight, Dorobek cites the need for greater transparency and increased competition–all of which, he says, will help maximize value for agencies and help them improve.

Read his whole column, then come back here and weigh in with your thoughts. Sometimes mistakes prove out to be valuable learning experiences, but that’s always hard to see in the moment. What can the new administration and agency managers learn from missteps of the past? When is a mistake not a mistake? And — most importantly — how do we walk that fine, fine line between oversight and innovation?