Around the Corner

I hope that by now you've had the opportunity to follow the speakers who appeared at the Management of Change Conference. Aneesh Chopra, Rob Carey, Clay Shirky and Vivek Kundra were all very well received. Vivek Kundra provided his very compelling vision for a Federal government that is open by default. "Open by default" means that the beginning presumption for federal agencies is that their data should be published and publicly available, unless privacy or security considerations indicate otherwise.

Several days ago Vivek Kundra, our federal Chief Information Officer, spoke at Wired magazine's Disruptive by Design Conference where he elaborated on that vision by describing the work of Federal Agencies on data.gov. Nancy Scola of Wired reports: “The premise behind behind Data.gov goes to the philosophy around transparency and open government that the president has been talking about. What we want to do is democratize data and democratize information and put it in the public square,” said Kundra. “The default setting of the United States should not be that everything should be secret and closed.”

An open default setting allows the American people to find innovative paths to society's most compelling challenges. You might remember that in my first post here on Around the Corner I mentioned Nassim Taleb's Black Swan. In the Black Swan, Taleb, a notable economic skeptic, identifies selection bias as a high risk to large-scale problems. The Skeptic's Dictionary defines selection bias as the "self selection of individuals to participate in an activity or survey, or as a subject in an experimental study." Of course, Federal IT investments are not experimental studies, but the open by default setting removes selection bias by allowing any and all American citizens to actively participate in mashing up their own data in ways that they determine. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation play an instrumental role in democratizing data by sponsoring x-prizes or contests like the ongoing Apps For America 2.

This week the government is accelerating the publication of data. Data will be published in as many formats as possible, as close to raw as possible, and there is a preference for machine readable formats.

I hope you will have the opportunity to mashup your data. You can find it here. If you can't find it yet, there's more on the way.

Add/View Comments (2) | Permanent Link

Each day in the workplace we hear the sound of the fluorescent lights around us and the fans in the computers under our desks. We smell pop corn cooking down the hallway. We might be too cold, or too hot. We subconsciously filter most of these stimuli; others may be more difficult to filter, some directly affect our productivity.

We often assume that technology is our primary source of productivity. Workplace design, or what architects sometimes call the built environment, can also be a source of productivity. Light, color, sound and comfort have been shown to enhance productivity. Vivian Loftness, University Professor and Head, School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, in her presentation on Sustainable Design for Health and Productivity describes how factors such as health, reading comprehension and task execution can all be improved through ventilation, natural light and temperature control. Professor Loftness and her team of researchers have identified more than 100 studies that scientifically link physical infrastructure to organizational performance. Better surroundings result in less use of sick leave, lower expenses on health claims, and productivity increases. The salary and benefit costs of people in an office building are typically 10 to 12 times greater than the cost of the building’s real estate and utility costs, so the potential return for smart design choices upfront is significant. (see GSA’s WorkPlace Matters, p.8)

GSA’s Public Buildings Service has a lot of fabulous research on productive workplaces. The PBS Workspace Delivery Program has published interior basics, a framework for designing functional, flexible, healthful and sustainable places for federal employees to work. I’ve written before about the need for innovation in management practices, to move beyond the industrial-era approach and maximize the productivity of today’s knowledge workers (a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959). We need innovative design for our offices as well. The old model, where more space and better furniture is given to more senior employees, holds little appeal to modern workers and does not address the complex and fluid nature of work today. The Workspace Delivery Program has adopted a structured, balanced scorecard-based approach to designing spaces for GSA’s federal clients. You can read a few of their success stories with clients such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, US Coast Guard, and the Department of Energy.

So what are the implications for us? The link between physical infrastructure and a high-performance organization is real. A well-designed workplace offers great potential to improve organizational performance and realize financial return far greater than the initial investment. Thoughtful design that integrates with our work rather than impedes it, makes it possible for all of us to be productive in place.

Add/View Comments (6) | Permanent Link

Thanks to everyone who helped plan and execute as well as those who attended this year's Management of Change Conference. I believe our experience together with Vivek Kundra, Clay Shirky, Rob Carey and Aneesh Chopra was truly transformative. And I hope those who were not able to attend will search Twitter on our hashtag #MOC to follow our tweet stream. Feel free to retweet or share your thoughts here.

Over the next few posts I'll share my thoughts on topics covered by the speakers. I'll start with Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, whose role is to foster technology related economic development. If you haven't heard Aneesh, be sure to watch this video from January's State of the Net Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus. He's a truly inspiring speaker.

As GCN's Wyatt Kash describes here, Aneesh revealed his early plans on open standards, crowd sourcing, cyber security and government research and development. One of his key priorities is to identify “game-changing” innovations that improve government performance dramatically rather than incrementally. As an example, Aneesh referred to a recent partnership between the Commonwealth of Virginia and NASA Langley to upgrade the Viriginia high school physics curriculum. The curriculum had not been updated in many years and topics such as nanotechnology were not adequately covered. Through an open, collaborative process, the group developed and launched the “21st Century Physics Flexbook,” in a matter of months rather than years as would normally be the case, and at almost no cost to taxpayers.

Aneesh also spoke extensively about the importance of the government's research and development mission. So, just some R&D background for my readers. In previous posts I mentioned the World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology and Global Competitiveness reports. These reports show wide ranging outcomes from research and development policy. How a policy differentiates research from development, basic from applied research and private sector from public sector investment strongly affect Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The National Science Board, part of the National Science Foundation maintains, annually, a report called the Science and Engineering Indicators that provide insights into national and international trends in R&D. Although U.S. R&D spending has fallen to about 2.6% of GDP, the U.S. maintains a very competitive position in R&D. The U.S. spends more than any other nation on R&D and more than the entire G7 nations. A few other nations like Brazil, India and China are increasing R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Private sector investment is a very large percent of U.S. R&D funding, upwards of 70%. Private sector expenditures focus on development. About 60% of U.S. basic research is conducted is universities and most of that is Federally funded. U.S. R&D is geographically concentrated. Four states - California, Massachusetts, Texas and Illinois perform more than 70% of all computer and electronics R&D. The U. S. is the leading source of new patent inventions compared with Europe and Asia. Finally, multinational corporation's R&D expenditures outside their own country continue to rise. Overseas R&D by U.S. multinationals is shifting away from Europe to emerging Asian markets.

It's a very nice report, and I highly recommend it. However, as Aneesh pointed out, it is difficult to capture and measure the return on investment from R&D spending. He also mentioned the need to capture outcome metrics that help us understand the benefits accrued from R&D.

Welcome Aneesh Chopra and thanks again to all who participated in this year's Management of Change Conference!

Add/View Comments (0) | Permanent Link