A new opportunity to solve government effectiveness problems

Terry Gerton I know IBM has long been a sponsor of research that offers practical solutions for government problems. You’ve got a new call for research proposals that’s out for 2025-2026. Tell us about that. What are the main objectives of the research for this cycle?

Dan Chenok The IBM Center for the Business of Government is an independent research organization within the IBM Corporation. We take a sort of evidence-based, research-focused look at problems affecting government leaders, and we identify our agenda by talking to government leaders about what are the problems that they need the most help with in terms of research, innovative thinking, new ideas, both now and in the future, say the next five years or so. We’re not a futurist society; those groups play a valuable role, but our focus is really on the two to five years in terms of the results that we’re trying to help government achieve and then setting the foundation for future actions. In order to produce our research agenda, we listen very attentively to what government leaders across the political spectrum and at the career level and also stakeholders are saying are the areas where research can provide the most value. And then we bring together a group of esteemed, current and former government leaders, academic experts, nonprofit partners, to curate a discussion of those topics. And then from there, we kind of refine the research agenda. And that is that refinement is what we just put out as our new call. When we put one of these out, we share it with the world; any academic, usually university professors are our top audience who are teaching often in schools of public administration or public affairs, but can come from other parts of the university if they have an interest in supporting government research. We also partner with nonprofit partners, your former organization, the National Academy of Public Administration, among the foremost, and others, the Partnership for Public Service, the Senior Executives Association, the Shared Services Leadership Council are some of the groups that we’ve partnered with over the years. So in sharing this new research call, we have identified five topics and I can go over the five topics, Terry, if that works.

Terry Gerton Let’s dig into the five. And as you go, I’m really interested to hear if you’ve had conversations with the current administration about these five and how they align.

Dan Chenok So I’ll just give a general answer to that. The answer is it’s very new. We’re just really starting to get in touch, as it can be expected with the beginning of any new administration with new leaders. And we have a number of initiatives that we’re starting up that may be a consonant with the interests of leaders coming in to take over agencies. And I’ll talk about those as we go through. But we have stayed in touch with the career leadership center of government agencies like OMB and GSA as well as across the agencies. And importantly, I should note that our center’s remit is federal, state, local, and international. So although we do more of our work for the federal government, by nature of real estate, we’re in Washington, all of our work has lessons learned that the federal can take advantage of. We also do work at the state and local level and with other countries.

Terry Gerton So let’s dig into those five topics.

Dan Chenok The first is multi-sector partnerships. And we use the word multi-sector very deliberately, as opposed to just public-private, which is sort of the traditional term. And this is to identify the fact that you’ve got partnerships that can involve industry in non-traditional ways. It can involve working with civil society or nonprofits. It can involve working with other levels of government. Any sort of hard, large problem of national scope often requires collaboration across these kinds of boundaries. And there are very few rules; there may be some norms that have been set up around collaborative partnerships and the Center has done some research on this. Brent Millward has done foundational work with us, a great scholar on this topic, and we’d like to deepen our understanding to help the federal government work with other levels of government and the converse, and to identify ways that, let’s say, if we’re doing a report on how best to manage in the health care space, that we understand how best government can engage with the health care industry in that. Not in a regulated sense, but more in a co-production kind of sense to deliver services in a multi-sector way.

Terry Gerton Well, I think the multi-sector approach is really interesting, and your point about few rules and some norms is going to come into practice as this administration is very focused on sort of pushing federal power back down to the state. So that will be an interesting one to follow up on.

Dan Chenok And that’s one of the topics that we may start to look into more. So, previews a coming attraction. The second topic is what we call operational and financial effectiveness. And this is basically, you know, people often talk about financial management and risk management, program delivery, service delivery. What we’re looking for are how do you actually drive outcome-based results from the delivery of government programs, and how do you do so in a way that maximizes the return on investment across in the manner in which the program is delivered? So the Agile Government Center, for example, a partnership that we have with the academy, is something that helps government identify, what are ways to work in a more agile fashion with iterative feedback, small teams, cross-functional teams, etc. And we have a whole set of research that we’ve done together on that. That’s an example of a methodology by which you would achieve greater operational effectiveness. You might imagine more outcomes-based contracting, another topic that we’re looking at that the new administration has said they’re interested in, as something where you can get faster results from contracted dollars without as much acquisition process necessarily, while maintaining program integrity. The use of technology to drive better addressing of fraud, waste, and abuse in benefit programs and making those operationally more effective, both to serve the vast majority of citizens who have legitimate needs from those programs to deliver their benefits faster and more accurately, and also to get ahead of those adversaries who would attempt to intercede and take money away from those programs, what people think of traditionally as fraud, but also looking at waste and are there ways to improve that? So there are a whole set of activities around, how do you operate programs? How do you fund them? And how do you get better outcomes that kind of wrap around that topic?

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Dan Chenok. He’s the executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. So what’s topic number three?

Dan Chenok Topic number three is a technology topic. We talk about technology for delivery and efficiency. And this where we think about AI, cloud computing, other types of emerging analytics technologies, as well as making sure those technologies are secure, not just because it’s a good value in sort of technology management, but for the purpose of driving better outcomes. We call out health care and service delivery specifically in this request. And we’re really looking at how can these technologies be used in a way that improves customer service, provides a better experience for citizens, enables government officials who may be working under resource constraints. That’s certainly the reality of the environment that we’ve lived in for many, many years at the federal level and certainly true now. How do you do that? How do we increase productivity of the government workforce using these technologies? So a whole set of activities around, how does technology matter for better outcomes for citizens, small businesses, and others who rely on government?

Terry Gerton I love that this is not just more efficiency but really linked to effectiveness kind of across all of these.

Dan Chenok There’s a bit of overlapping, you know, a Venn diagram with overlapping circles. There are five topics, so we think of this as the Olympic rings. I just made that up, by the way. But there are commonalities across the topics. In the technology area, we’re really primarily interested in the efficiency play, but that has a strong relationship, as I said earlier, to the operational and financial outcomes and effectiveness in the last topic. So scholars can propose a topic that cuts across multiple topic areas. I’ll talk about that at the end.

Terry Gerton Let’s go on to four and five.

Dan Chenok Four and five are data and workforce. Traditionally we’ve always had a research topic around using data to make better decisions. Now you’ve got different ways that data can be brought together, both through technologies and also through information-sharing regimes, common operating pictures that can integrate data across, so you don’t have to go up and around silos to share data when you’re dealing with a multi-agency delivery, like housing, which requires, you know, HUD, local level community organizations, etc. So how do those organizations share, especially in an environment where federal law is can be somewhat outdated? The Privacy Act of 1974, if I do my math right, is 51 years old. And that governs a lot of the way that agencies still share data today. So, how do you think about operating in those environments? And then through all of these topics, a skilled federal workforce and I’ll add a skilled partner workforce, is important. You know, the government does typically 80% of technology through contractors. Many services are done through contracts; service contract volume annually is somewhere north of $500 billion a year. So how do we make sure that the workforce that works with the government, as well as the workforce in the government, have the necessary skills to understand AI and data, and effectiveness and efficiency. And how do you work together collaboratively? Not just through traditional training, but through things like teaming activities, exchange programs, etc. What are ways that the government can re-skill its workforce?

Terry Gerton That’s a really exciting agenda, and I think it offers a lot of opportunity for people to propose real innovations in the space. If someone is thinking about submitting a proposal, what are the key logistic things you want them to know about?

Dan Chenok Our current round is open until July 15th. The research agenda is available at businessofgovernment.org, our website, and you’ll see it at the top of the page. We really look for proposals that A, are well written, because that’s how we know that the researcher is going to write a good report; B, that there’s a good research methodology. It could be a case methodology, it could be literature review, it could be some sort a focus group or survey, but it really has to be strong and empirical. Also, we look for a methodology that says, here is the way we will develop actionable practical recommendations. Because in every report the center puts out, that’s really the coin of the realm in terms of how we make sure the report is relevant so a government leader can pick up the report and hand it to his team or his partners and say, let’s go do this.

Terry Gerton Well, I know many of the reports from the past rounds had had real impact, and they’ve been referenced and used. And so we’ll look forward to hearing the results from this round. When you get the papers in, come back and share them with us.

Dan Chenok Thanks so much, Terry. And one last point I’d make is that we are also looking at research that cuts across all five topics. How do you think about the government as a strategic enabler at a high level? And we talked about that as well in the report. So don’t just think that we’re thinking in silos. We really are looking for integrated approaches to improve the whole of government.