Page 37 - FCW, April 2017

President Donald Trump’s
son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the scion of a powerful New York real estate family and the owner of the New York Observer — is poised to lead a govern- ment reinvention effort based in the White House’s new Office of American Innovation, which was created to align government operations with best prac- tices from the private sector.
“Government is not business,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said during a March 27 briefing. “We recog- nize that there are certain things busi- nesses would never do in terms of what government has to do because
recalled a similar effort during his tenure. “My old boss, [former Deputy Director for Management] Clay John- son, was the president’s best friend and had the president’s ear,” Shea said. “That meant more people paid attention than otherwise would have.”
Tim Young, a principal in Deloitte’s public-sector practice and former dep- uty administrator for e-government and IT at OMB, said he hopes the new effort tries to “channel, not duplicate, existing innovation programs in government.”
He added that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
the U.S. Digital Service and the General Services Administration’s innovation portfolio are already focused on “har- vesting and incubating” innovations from the private sector. “I would rec- ommend that the administration use those” rather than reinvent the efforts, Young said.
Influential allies
Terry Gerton, president of the Nation- al Academy of Public Administration, said receiving the necessary funding from Congress and getting buy-in from career agency employees are also criti-
it serves all our people, but there are certain practices we can put in place that can help us deliver a better product, a better service to the American people in some of those key areas.”
According to the administra- tion, those areas include mod- ernizing government technolo- gy, rethinking the Department of Veterans Affairs and improv- ing the country’s infrastructure.
Having such an effort based in the White House and run by an individual who clearly has the ear of the president could go a long way toward ensuring success, many former govern- ment officials told FCW.
“Most public administration experts recommend that man- agement improvement respon- sibility be placed at the highest level possible,” said Robert Shea, a principal at Grant Thornton. He added that the administration has done that by choosing Kushner for the job.
Shea, who served as associ- ate director for administration and government performance at the Office of Management and Budget under the George W. Bush administration,
Building blocks for innovation
At the big-picture level, many of the reforms discussed in this article have history in the federal IT community, and there is work just waiting to be repurposed:
n The Modernizing Government Technology Act offers a funding mechanism for moving agencies away from legacy IT. A high cost estimate by the Congressional Budget Office stalled the bill in 2016, but supporters in the House and Senate are preparing to try again.
n The Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity issued a final report in December 2016 that offers 53 suggested action items, including the creation of a program “to consolidate all civilian agencies’ network connections (as well as those of appropriate government contractors) into a single consolidated network.”
n The Federal Technology Business Management Taxonomy — the result of a collaboration among agency CIOs, their private-sector counterparts and the nonprofit TBM Council — gives the government a common approach to capturing the true costs of agencies’ IT spending.
n The Unified Shared Services Management office at the General Services Administration has established a framework for getting agencies to stop running siloed versions of basic business services.
More on each of those initiatives — as well as related reports and suggestions from a wide range of industry and nonprofit groups — can be found by searching FCW.com.
cal. “If you’re going to make changes, you’re going to need to fund them, and you’re going to need the folks inside those agencies to be on board.” she said. “Otherwise, as we know from experience, government is effective at waiting people out.”
Former U.S. CIO Tony Scott agreed. “You’ve got to have leadership from the top, but you’ve really [got to] get that operational level of manage- ment [that might be] a layer or two down engaged or nothing is going to happen,” he said.
Scott cited the President’s Management Council as a potential resource for the Kushner-led initiative. Com- posed largely of agency chief operating officers and run by OMB’s deputy director for management, the council played a crucial role in the 2015 cybersecurity sprint. “When you [bring] that group together, you have the opera- tional expertise across govern- ment to really get things done,” Scott said.
Some senior Trump appoin- tees will be helping Kushner, including Gary Cohn, direc- tor of the National Economic
April 2017 FCW.COM 21