Dan Chenok

This article ran exclusively in Government Executive.

This is the second in a five-part series from the National Academy of Public Administration looking at the challenges and urgency of modernizing the civil service. Find the Academy’s full essay on the merit system here.

Blog Co-Authors: Emma Shirato Almon, Associate Manager, Partnership for Public Service; Trista Colbert, vice president and senior partner of hybrid cloud management, IBM; Will Kimball, former intern on the Partnership for Public Service’s Research, Evaluation and Modernizing Government team.

We are pleased to announce our latest round of new reports on key public sector challenges, which respond to priorities identified in the Center's research agenda. Our content is intended to stimulate and accelerate the production of practical research that benefits public sector leaders and managers.

This vision opens a new report from the IBM Center in collaboration with the Agile Government Center of the National Academy of Public Administration, The Future of Agile Government, by G. Edward (Ed) DeSeve, Coordinator of the AGC and Executive Fellow with the IBM Center.

Government leaders increasingly find that “unexpected events” are now neither rare nor unexpected. Indeed, they are shocks—more frequent and more destabilizing, and involving cybersecurity, climate, supply chain, human capital, and other domains.

Governments around the world are advancing in the transformation of operations and services for the digital age. The goal of “trusted digital services” enables transformation in a way that earns public trust. Developing and implementing trusted digital services matters supports near-term service delivery, and long-term legitimacy and sustainability of government with the public. Advanced digital governments cite trust as a key success factor, and as well as how digital technologies supportive innovative governance that services the public.

Blog Contributor: Emily Cheston, Digital Business Strategy, IBM Consulting

Our collaboration with recognized scholars and thought leaders is intended to spark the imagination—crafting new ways to think about government by identifying trends, new ideas, and best practices in public management and innovation.

Based on our recent research and perspectives shared by current and former government, academic, and nonprofit leaders, this special report identifies eight strategies for transforming government in the years to come. These strategies draw on significant insights from a research roundtable in 2020.

In my previous post, I discussed “agile policymaking” as a vehicle for better government and how agile would be more objective and evidenced-based when it comes to traditional policy analysis (“TPA”).

Just the sound of “making government more agile” summons pleasing images to the civic mind: resilient response to changing conditions; innovation and ingenuity; immediacy in problem-solving; citizen-centered service; bureaucracy getting out of the way; experimentation leading to progress.