Building the Enterprise - Booz Allen Hamilton

PREFACEWhen we launched this project one year ago, ourgoal was to define and articulate a set of reformsthat would help guide the presidentialmanagement agenda. We started by interviewing someof the smartest public management experts we know—seasoned practitioners and policy makers who have conceivedand implemented government reforms, scholarswho have studied and documented reform efforts foryears, and executives who are driving management innovationin the public and private sectors.It was immediately obvious that the task was goingto be complicated. Many good ideas were tested duringthe past two decades by the Clinton and Bush administrations.The Obama administration abandoned some andadopted others in whole or part, and in July 2013 recommittedto strengthening three pillars of its managementagenda—improved service delivery, reducing waste andsaving money, and increasing the transparency of governmentdata.While our experts offered a wide range of differingproposals for improving government operations, consensusemerged around two basic themes: one, that fiscal constraintsprovide both incentive and opportunity to findsmarter ways of doing the people’s business; two, that theproblems our nation faces—from national security to theeconomy to health care—are growing increasingly complexand cannot be solved by any individual agency. Mostchallenges today require the collective action of severalagencies and, in many instances, the engagement of local,state and international partners in the public and privatesectors. The problem is that our government is not set upto easily achieve such unity of effort and often has multipleagencies and programs acting separately to achievethe same or similar outcomes—a hindrance for both theemployees who must perform government missions andfunctions, as well as for those who depend on them.So the recommendations in this report focus on acentral premise: Our government must take a more coordinated,multiagency, whole-of-government approach—in other words, an enterprise approach—to the nation’smost difficult and enduring challenges.In times of crisis, Americans are very good at rallyingaround a desired outcome once it has been clearlydefined. Defeat the Nazis. Make sure war-torn Japan andEurope survive as democratic societies. Win the race tothe moon. Take care of the elderly. Clean the polluted airand water. Fight terrorism. Crises focus us and unify ourgovernment. Agencies collaborate and act as one. Government’sresources are marshaled and applied. But in theabsence of obvious, pressing crises, this unity of purposeand action is the exception rather than the rule. Giventhe nature of the challenges that our government and nationface, that must change. Our bottom line is that governmentmust approach its work as an enterprise everyday to tackle today’s critical challenges. Spur economicgrowth. Reduce joblessness. Fix education. Safeguardfood. Halt nuclear proliferation. Secure cyberspace.By taking a multiagency enterprise approach to thosechallenges, we can build on the progress of the past twodecades, improve the overall performance of the federalgovernment and, in so doing, restore the American public’strust and confidence in it.The outcome we seek is a federal government thatacts as a single, integrated enterprise—not a set of disconnectedagencies and programs—in taking on its biggestproblems.Max StierPresident and CEOPartnership for Public ServiceLloyd W. Howell Jr.Executive Vice PresidentBooz Allen HamiltonBUILDING THE ENTERPRISE 1