Resources in Government

Local, state, and federal agencies are all subjected to varying degrees of pressure to improve upon the delivery of government services. The need to handle bigger workloads with fewer people, coupled with rapidly rising expectations for electronic access to government services, are having the combined effect of pressing government agencies to the forefront of technological innovation in the 21st century. Better services are constantly being demanded everywhere, and those services are expected to be delivered at lower costs to taxpayers.

Our goal is to provide valuable insights which will lead to successful initiatives within the government sector.

Displaying 11 - 20 of 125 resources matching your criteria.

Can You Build and Measure an Improvement Culture?

Contributed by:Shelley Sweet, Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

This is such a simple but such a critical question. And it has several critical elements:

Build – meaning this is going to take some time and it will start at one level and grow to another level.

Improvement – in other words we want to have an organization that wants to keep improving itself, which is necessary for any organization to succeed. If it doesn’t grow, it dies. But here the word is improvement – keep getting better, probably in several arenas.

Culture - the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization--a corporate culture could be focused on the bottom line

Let’s define success first. How would you know that you had an improvement culture? What would you measure and what would your score be?

Here are four determinants you could use:

NIEM - A Model for Sharing Government Information

Contributed by:Ken Mullins, Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is . . . not a benefit.”– William Pollard

Evolving From Human-Centric to Social-Centric BPM

Contributed by:Ashok Kumar C S, Industry Principal, Infosys

The need for evolution from Human BPM to Social BPM

With the significant cultural revolution brought about by social media resulting in a new set of social capabilities, enterprises are discovering value in collaboration and engagement of process users in the BPM execution environments. By traditional definition, human-centric business process management is an approach to BPM that focuses on human activities and human interventions in business processes, and supports them with automated functions 1. The emphasis was on operational efficiency, process visibility and control with business agility. Now, the adoption of social models and opportunities for collaboration are extending the traditional boundaries of human-centric BPM systems. There are many dimensions that necessitate this change in outlook.

Enhancing the Value of Your Government Transformation Road Map

Contributed by:Ken Mullins, Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.” – Earl Nightingale

If you are a government program or project manager, let’s say in the IT solutions (or services) delivery business, you’re probably devoting a lot of thought to the long term view of how you plan to deliver on the promise of your product(s), solution(s), or services(s) – even as you grapple with the day-to-day challenges, risks, and issues that inevitably arise to frustrate your best laid plans. I suspect that you’re also maintaining some form of a road map for each of your projects, to highlight the many intermediate goals that need to be accomplished along the way – perhaps feeling frustrated at times by the need to maintain all that information on a single, fairly intuitive page.

Simplifying Complex Processes

Contributed by:James Taylor, Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

There are lots of good reasons for adopting business process management as an approach, and a Business Process Management System as a technology. The benefits that can be gained are real but they can be undermined by over complex process designs. If the process you end up designing is the BPMN or BPEL equivalent of spaghetti code, then your process won’t be agile and it won’t be cost-effective. It’s also unlikely to deliver a positive customer experience or to be easy to continuously improve. The benefits of BPM are dependent on you developing processes that are reasonable, that are not over-complex.

To Deliver Business Value, Avoid Paving over Cow Paths

Contributed by:Ken Mullins, Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“Yesterday's adaptations are today's routines”–Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

I opened an earlier article[1] published in this forum some time ago by setting up the following scenario, which concludes with a simple question:

Imagine yourself as the owner of a business domain within a government agency. Let’s say you’re the Deputy Administrator of entitlement programs in an organization that processes claims for benefits. No matter the type of benefit(s) or entitlement(s) your agency administers, whether loan guarantees, educational benefits, [or] disaster-recovery relief . . ., your business model – at some level of abstraction - is as simple as receiving applications (or claims) for benefits, qualifying them, and dispensing an appropriate response to each . . . of your applicants (or claimants).

The Virtual BPM Facilitator - Part 1

Contributed by:Shelley Sweet, Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

A Facilitator helps participants in a group work together toward the meeting objective by providing a meeting structure, engaging the participants, keeping them focused on the content, and remaining neutral himself. A BPM Facilitator is a person who guides a business process improvement (BPI) project, using the same group process skills and behaviors of a generic facilitator but in the context of BPM. So the BPM facilitator needs to know the BPM Methodology, have a structured method of working with BPI teams, be able to coach a Process Owner, and be able to work with the BPI Project Leader toward the improvement targets of the Process Owner. And the Virtual BPM Facilitator needs to do it virtually – not face to face but using telecommunications by phone, by video conference, by Web Ex, or similar tools. That makes the medium a bit more challenging but it’s the reality of today’s global world.

Smarter Systems: Applying Decision Management

Contributed by:Gagan Saxena, VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

All systems are active participants in business decision making to some degree.

The logic coded into business systems allows a level of ‘smartness’, and this is then amplified by the decision logic used by users - resulting in smart business operations. So, if we want to make the entire business operations smarter, we need to focus on decision making across systems and their users. Business Decision Management seeks to explicitly define and improve operational decisions; and to automate them through targeted deployment of sophisticated decision management technologies like Business Rules Management, Advanced Analytics and Optimization.

Building a Process Catalog: Final Steps

Contributed by:Karen Tricomi, Consultant, The Process Geek

This is the final article in my series on building a process catalog for the organization in which I work. For reference and context, you can find the first three articles at these links: Building a Process Catalog: The Journey Begins; Building a Process Catalog, The Ongoing Journey; and Building a Process Catalog: Moving Ahead.

As we have wrapped up the calendar year, the Process Catalog that we began last October finally can be completed. Below is a brief recap of the stages we’ve gone through to get the catalog to the current state.

Government Transformation Depends On Dynamic Portfolio Management

Contributed by:Ken Mullins, Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

In the 21st century, government transformation initiatives have become increasingly more common, rather than exceptional. Some ambitious public sector initiatives turn out to be at least partially successful, though many others do not. Even when transformation success is declared, the outcome is often plagued by significant limitations that must be dealt with for many years.