IBM's challenges for the public sector

I recently received an email from the IBM Center for the Business of Government http://www.businessofgovernment.org/ touting its "reputation for a deep understanding of public management issues" and its ten year history of success.

The email also flagged the issues the Center forsees in the upcoming decade:

• Fiscal Sanity: reform out-dated federal retirement and healthcare programs to reflect current economic and budgetary considerations.
• Crisis of Competence: decisions must be made to ensure that public servants in key jobs have needed experience and training as their work becomes more technical and service-oriented.
• Information Overload: develop government-wide as well as mission-specific, information and analytic functions to extract the knowledge needed to created strategy-based solutions.
• Governing Without Boundaries: turn to non-hierarchical ways of doing business, often called “collaborative networks.
• E-Government Is Only the Beginning: restructure services around customers rather than agency programs, creating a new role for public managers in service delivery.
• Government by Contractors take a strategic look at contracting; decide how to manage it, the appropriate roles for all parties and the right contacting methods.
• Results Really Do Matter: transform federal department and agency cultures to create collaborative, results-oriented organizations.
• “Green” Leadership: blend public policies that encourage technology and management innovations to respond to environmental challenges and potential crisis.
• Security and Privacy in a Flat World: factor security and privacy issues into all technology decisions, capturing all possible advantages while also managing the risks.
• Expect Surprises: develop forward-looking information to set the stage for early warning about emerging threats and to make informed choices about effective government responses. (full report available at http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/10_Challenges.pdf)

Now, I don't take issue with these challenges, but I was disappointed (while not necessarily surprised) not to see anything on social justice issues, which leads me to wonder what it will take for these issues to re-take the forefront of the national agenda (I note with some irony that I write this on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.).

I also noticed something else to look into: Oprah Winfrey (just kidding, sort of). In a sidebar article of the March 8 issue of The Economist (p. 95), I saw that the tenth-best selling book on Oprah's nonfiction list is one entitled Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg. I have not read this book (although I'm about to try and locate a copy) but it does bother me that a book with the title Liberal Fascism should be so popular. Has the country really gone that red (ok, more irony here)?

Posted by Lisa Zanetti