Weekly Round-up: December 31, 2012

Submitted by on Wed, 01/24/2018 - 12:25
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Gadi Ben-Yehuda
Thanks for reading our Round-ups and other content in 2012. See you in 2013!

On behalf of everyone at the Center for The Business of Government, I want to wish you a happy, healthy, exciting 2013.  We look back at 2012 with a mixture of relief, gratitude, amazement, and some sadness.  We bid a fond and heart-felt farewell to our executive director of many years, Jonathan Breul, and shortly thereafter welcomed his successor, Dan Chenok.  We published numerous reports of which we are very proud and hosted insightful guests on The Business of Government Hour.  And we've had the great pleasure to work in a field filled with inspiring colleagues, and to which we hope we have made meaningful contributions:

 

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

It has proven impossible for me to limit myself to a single article by Alex Howard as his best in the past year.  Though Alex and I have our disagreements, I continue to find him an engaging and indespinsible voice in Gov 2.0.  Here are three of his best from 2012:

Of my own work, I'm proud of the series I did for Gov.AOL, Smart Policies for Smarphones, and the continuing series I'm doing both for Gov.AOL and Gov Exec on Emerging Trends in Innovation and Social Media.  I also published a prediction piece on TechPresident on Identity Management.

And, really, most of the work on GovLoop is stellar, but pay special attention to these Top-12 members.

 

Dan Chenok

 

John Kamensky

  • Why ROWE Failed.  Federal Times reporter Stephan Losey writes that the Office of Personnel Management director John Berry’s pilot workplace flexibility program – dubbed “Results-Only Work Environment” – failed because of managers’ inability to hold employees accountable for their work.  ROWE has been used successfully in the private sector, but has yet to catch on in government.
  • No Passbacks? FY 2014 Budget to be Delayed.  Politico reports that agencies did not receive their traditional “passbacks” from OMB over the Thanksgiving holidays to fine-tune their FY 2014 budget proposals.  The story says this is because OMB is waiting to see what happens via the Fiscal Cliff budget negotiations.  This may result in the budget not being submitted to Congress by the first week of February, as stipulated by law.  Fortunately, there’s no jail sentence involved for violating this, it seems.
  • Smart Meters in the Army.  The Army, reports Bob Brewin at NextGov, is installing “smart meters” to measure and manage energy consumption (electrical, gas, steam, water) at 20,000 locations around the U.S.  The devices track, record, and report energy usage on a real-time basis, allowing immediate adjustments to consumption.  Users in the private sector achieve significant savings when they use the data to modify their energy choices.
  • The Big Fix.  Government Executive’s Tim Clark offers an overview of a series of government reform white papers, “Memos to National Leaders” prepared jointly by the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Society for Public Administration.  These papers address budget, performance, human capital, intergovernmental, and technology challenges, among others.

 

Michael Keegan

 

As  this year comes to a close, we offer a handful of shows you may have missed.  They offer timely insights and illustrate the important work government executives are doing. Here's a sampling, but you can also peruse our entire archive.

 

 

 

** Wreath image courtesy of marin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net