I was honored to be invited to speak at the Potomac Forum’s conference held February 3-4 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, “Planning and Implementing Social Media and Open Government Strategy and Efforts: What Executives and Managers Need to Know”, http://www.potomacforum.org/.
I discussed two topics under the topic of Bringing Governance, Performance Management, and IT Together.
Here is the presentation:
The presentation is divided into parts.
The first part discusses my thoughts about what should we are trying to do with the Open Government initiative. I am a very enthusiastic supporter of these initiatives.
My major point, however, was that much of what has gotten public attention such as Transparency or externally published data sets are not the goal, it is what they are intended to accomplish that is the goal. Specifically, we want to cause something to happen that would not have happened if they were not performed.
As one of the other speakers noted, if this only became a compliance exercise then we would not be accomplishing enough.
The second part of the presentation dealt with how I attempted to use transparency and a status dashboard at the US Department of Transportation during my last year at the Department to improve oversight of cyber-security status. The approach turned out to be partially effective.
Our ability to see into the various networks, most of which were independently managed, improved a great deal. However, I was unsuccessful in setting up a process that carried over across the chasm of the change in Administration. I indicated some of the lessons learned and how I would have improved our approach.