There are a lot of ways in which the federal government operates very differently than the private sector, but there are enough similarities that government can learn from the foundations of business change, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s deputy director for management.
Margaret Weichert, who spoke Oct. 15 at the ACT-IAC Imagine Nation ELC 2018 conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said that when she moved from the private sector into government, she had to contend with new financing structures and understandings of digital terminology.
“We have real challenges in modernizing IT, particularly because capital allocation doesn’t work the same way that I’m used to in the private sector. In the private sector the chief executive puts out a series of priorities, even if they’re in boring areas like IT, and then the capital flows behind those priorities. That’s not how it works in the government,” said Weichert.
“I don’t think the framers of the Constitution and the creators of the checks and balances really anticipated the amount of overhead that would be involved in mission delivery 240 years in the future.”
Parts of government that have checks on each other, such as Congress’s oversight of the Executive Branch, also have differing definitions of important components of modernization, which makes conversations about the future of government modernization even more complicated.
“When I came to government and said, ‘big data,’ in the private sector everyone knew what I was talking about. I was talking about all of it, all the sources, all the uses, all the ways you need to invest so that you can use common datasets to do multiple things,” said Weichert.
“But in government, when I said data to someone who did evidence-based policy-making, it meant one thing. If I was talking to staff on Capitol Hill, it meant something different. If I was talking to OMB it meant reports. And almost none of these things were interoperable or able to achieve more than one purpose.”
Weichert said that when she brought up concepts like robotic process automation, an easy way for the private sector to clean up money to deploy to other projects, she got blank stares in government, because the laws and regulations made it impossible to redeploy capital.
But those differences don’t mean that government can’t learn from the processes of business.
“There are a lot of challenges in government — I’ve learned a lot of things in terms of operating in the complexity of the government environment — but it’s not really more complex than any other environment. Because the foundation of change in any business system is a human foundation,” said Weichert.
“Underling every challenge I saw in government was a challenge around people.”
The private sector has already demonstrated that acquiring new people is often expensive and risky, while retraining current workers is much more effective, and this lesson learned informed the White House imperative to reskill federal workers to IT positions.
Government could also stand to learn from industry experience through the recently proposed Government Effectiveness Advanced Research Center, which would bring the private sector, government and academia together to brainstorm ways of improving government processes.
The center released a request for information on the GEAR center in August, which Weichert said received about 40 responses.
“I had this thought that if we could leverage the power and the capital and the ingenuity and the test-and-learn capabilities that the private sector have, link it to the evidence-base and the research and the knowledge from academia, and then focus it with mission, service and stewardship and where we’re going in government, might we be able to move faster, farther together?” said Weichert.
