Michael J. Keegan

"The City of Boston uses innovation and technology to help deliver better public services, programs and products to every constituent," notes Santiago Garces, chief information officer, City of Boston. Innovation and technology enable equity effectiveness and efficiency. The Department of Innovation and Technology creates accessible, reliable, scalable, secure, and dignified experiences for Boston residents.  "Innovation and technology," explains Garces, allow us to embrace new possibilities to connect public servants to our constituents."

Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus John Kotter has proposed that business organizations develop networks internally to help their traditional hierarchies function in today’s fast-changing environment. Government too finds itself increasingly beset by difficult problems that challenge the ability of departments and agencies to respond promptly and appropriately.

The Leap to Leader: To succeed as a senior executive, you need more than just special skills and competencies. You need a new mindset.  The author has conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of CEOs. In this article, he shares the lessons that emerged about the mental shifts needed to make a successful transition to a senior leadership position. The process involves identifying and communicating your core values and learning how to approach tough decisions.

How can governments better prepare for supply chain disruptions. Supply chain interruptions and slowdowns linger as an effect of the pandemic. They make purchasing and acquisition difficult for both the private sector and government. Recently thinkers put their heads together to come up with ways governments can become more resilient on the supply chain front.

Explore the June 2023 Agency Priority Goal Updates. Agency Priority Goals, or APGs, are an agency’s near-term, implementation-focused priorities that the heads of each major federal agency set every two years. On June 29th, the Office of Management and Budget published the FY 2023 Q2 updates on Performance.gov. These goals serve as steppingstones towards long-term objectives outlined in the agency’s strategic plan.

GAO Claims $600B of Savings, Points to Billions More Possible. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is helping Federal agencies to save taxpayer money on duplicative programs, offices, and initiatives, saving roughly $600 billion since GAO began this work in 2011 – with more cost-saving opportunities available.

 NEW GAO SCIENCE & TECH SPOTLIGHT: GENERATIVE AI. Generative AI systems—like ChatGPT and Bard—create text, images, audio, video, and other content. This Spotlight examines the technology behind these systems that are surging in popularity. These systems are trained to recognize patterns and relationships in massive datasets and can quickly generate content from this data when prompted by a user. These growing capabilities could be used in education, government, medicine, law, and other fields.

 “Inside government…,” notes Jennifer Pahlka, former U.S. deputy chief technology officer, “the digital revolution played out very differently. Even as our expectations about the immediacy and accuracy of services have skyrocketed, the implementation of laws has become anything but easier.

VA’s DelBene: Contractors Playing Integral Innovation Role. VA is driving forward the idea that when it comes to technology and innovation, federal contractors need to become an integral part of the government team. Kurt DelBene, VA’s chief information officer (CIO), said “One of the things that we’ve observed – and I’ve noted as I joined – is that there’s an arm’s length typically too often between the contractor and the full-time teams.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is to promote the progress of science. It promotes the progress of science by investing in research to expand knowledge in science, engineering, and education. NSF also invests in actions that increase the capacity of the U.S. to conduct and exploit such research. NSF research has made possible many of the technological advances that have improved medicine, communications, transportation, manufacturing, and the utilization of natural resources, together with a broad range of other impacts on our lives.