Beyond the top five management priorities, several others likely will remain important initiatives at many agencies, beginning with financial management.
Experts say the next president will continue the emphasis on that initiative because both candidates have stressed the need to track federal spending in a transparent way.
The Financial Management Line of Business offers agencies a way to relinquish their internal financial activities to shared-services centers, where they can be expertly managed.
Indeed, of the lines-of-business initiatives, the financial management effort seems to be the most mature, said Deniece Peterson, a senior analyst at market research firm Input.
Efforts to adopt standards in various areas have been progressing, too. Standards allow agencies to consolidate information technology systems, share information and collaborate more easily.
In addition, efforts are under way to consolidate the rules agencies use to trim jobs, standardize the language and vocabularies of many specialized departments to facilitate information sharing, and make communications devices interoperable among emergency departments at the federal, state and local levels.
— Michael Hardy
The Bush administration will be finishing work on a raft of government management issues until the final day of President Bush’s term in January 2009.
Management always is a top concern for the executive branch, from the managers and agency heads all the way up to the president. The Bush administration had a clear list of priorities, and Bush’s successor will set his own roster.
It’s already possible to foresee what at least some of the issues for the next administration will be. According to a variety of observers and prognosticators, here are the top five management priorities for the next president.
1. Think in terms of results Results-oriented government was a priority through the last transition in administrations and will continue to be, said Robert Shea, a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration. But that commitment “has to be made loudly and clearly from the highest levels of the organization,” he said.
Shea, who is due to leave his post as associate director for management at the Office of Management and Budget Sept. 12, said he also believes leaders should publicly and candidly admit when things go wrong. Bush issued an executive order to stress the need for this kind of effective government, Shea said, and the incoming president needs to be at least as visible with his support.
The government has created an appetite for transparency, and people want to see more of these measurable outcomes, said Norm Lorentz, a vice president at the Council on Excellence in Government.
“We now have unlimited [technological] resources at our disposal, so there’s no technology limitation to transparency,” he said.
2. Link individual performance to organizational results The good news is that agencies do not have to be convinced that there are links between performance and results, said Jon Desenberg, policy director at the Performance Institute.
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