On behalf of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, we are happy to provide our members with the link to Canada’s Performance: 2008-09: The Government of Canada’s Contribution. You will note in the message from Mr. Alister Smith, Assistant Secretary at the Treasury Board Secretariat, that a contact has been provided if you wish to give feedback to the Board.

(Scroll down for English text)

Spécialistes et chercheurs du Canada, certes, mais également de Colombie, de Belgique, d’Haïti et du continent africain ont ausculté la thématique et partagent leurs points de vue. Comment les institutions internationales ont-elles procédé pour démystifier puis diffuser de nouvelles valeurs de gouvernance? Comment les pays souverains visés ont-ils accueilli les préoccupations grandissantes des bailleurs de fonds en matière de transparence? Quelles difficultés ont-ils rencontrées pour traduire dans les faits les composantes de la bonne gouvernance? Cette démarche a-t-elle entraîné des changements réels et durables? Telles sont les questions auxquelles les experts tentent de répondre.

http://www.enap.ca/OBSERVATOIRE/docs/Telescope/Volumes12-15/Telv15n2_org_internationales.pdf

http://www.enap.ca/OBSERVATOIRE/fr/telescope-menus.aspx?sortcode=1.16.18.19

Bonne lecture!

(available in French only)

The theme of this issue of “Télescope” is international organizations and the dissemination of governance systems. The contributing specialists and researchers who delve into this theme and share their views hail from Canada, obviously, but also from Colombia, Belgium, Haiti and the African continent. How did these international institutions go about demystifying and then disseminating new values of governance? How did the targeted sovereign nations respond to the growing concerns of financial backers respecting transparency? What difficulties did these countries encounter when translating the components of good governance into reality? Did this process produce genuine, lasting change? To these and other questions like them our experts have ventured some responses.

http://www.enap.ca/OBSERVATOIRE/docs/Telescope/Volumes12-15/Telv15n2_org_internationales.pdf

http://www.enap.ca/OBSERVATOIRE/fr/telescope-menus.aspx?sortcode=1.16.18.19

Enjoy your reading!

Results-Oriented Management: Strengthening Key Practices at FEMA and Interior Could Promote Greater Use of Performance Information. GAO-09-676, August 17

http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-09-676

Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d09676high.pdf

These and other GAO products are available from the "Reports and Testimonies"

section of GAO's Internet site, http://www.gao.gov

http://www.optimumonline.ca/frontpage.phtml?

It is very rare that this journal publishes a thematic issue. It has not been done for some 15 years. Largely, this is ascribable to the fact that our readership is quite varied and that it is difficult to find a theme that is likely to be of interest to all. Ombusdmanship is a poorly understood phenomenon even though it has flourished at breathtaking speed over the recent years. Forty years ago, it was confined to a few countries - now it exists in six continents, and in the private, public and social sectors.

To get complete access to ALL areas of Optimum Online site, you must be a registered user. However, registration will take you less than 30 seconds to do, and best of all, REGISTRATION IS FREE! Visit our registration page or click on the link below to register:

http://www.optimumonline.ca/register.phtml?

Subscribers will note that another unusual feature of this issue is a short editorial.

http://www.optimumonline.ca/frontpage.phtml?lang=french

Il est bien rare que cette Revue publie une complète livraison sur un seul thème. En fait cela ne s'est pas fait au cours des derniers 15 ans. C'est qu'il est difficile de trouver un sujet assez important pour intéresser un lectorat aussi varié que le nôtre. L'ombudsman est un phénomène mal compris même si la fonction s'est répandue à un rythme d'enfer au cours des dernières années. Il y a 40 ans l'ombudman était confiné à quelques pays; il est répandu maintenant dans les secteurs privé, public et social sur les six continents.

Pour accéder à toutes les sections du site Optimum Online, vous devez vous y inscrire. Cela vous prendra moins de 30 secondes et c'est absolument GRATUIT! Pour accéder à notre page d'inscription en ligne, il vous suffit de cliquer sur le lien ci-dessous.

http://www.optimumonline.ca/register.phtml?lang=french

J'espère que vous aimerez la nouvelle livraison d'Optimum et que vous nous direz ce que nous pouvons faire pour vous aider encore davantage.

Nos lecteurs vont noter qu'une autre singularité de cette livraison ets un court éditorial..

Soyez assuré de l'expression de notre considération.

Government Performance: Strategies for Building a Results-Oriented and Collaborative Culture in the Federal Government. GAO-09-1011T, September 24 http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-09-1011T

Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d091011thigh.pdf

Introduction

The notion of leadership is not unlike the ink spots on the slides used in a Rorschach test: one may read almost anything into these meaningless spots, and project into them any fantasy.

This weasel word – leadership – is popular for two main reasons:

• First, leadership is anchored in the notion of hierarchy: it assumes that someone is in charge, and that he/she is responsible for the guidance of the organization and responsible and accountable for anything good or bad that may ensue from such guidance.
• Second, leadership has mystical dimensions: it ascribes to the leader exceptional qualities, the source of which is somewhat mysterious, and a power of seduction that cannot be entirely explained by rational means.

The attraction of such a notion lies fundamentally with its reassuring power: someone clairvoyant and wise is (or should be) in charge, and will take the organization to the promised land, sparing the rest of the crew the need to worry about where the ship is going. The followers can wallow in servitude volontaire.

The fact that, in the real world nobody is in charge, and that these exceptional qualities are so elusive, makes the discussions about leadership somewhat surreal. Such discussions quickly slump into circularity and seek intellectual comfort in tautology: the leader is identified as a person who has leadership qualities, and these leadership qualities are said to be the capacity of the leader. Leadership is not unlike phlogistics for proto-chemists, centuries ago, who explained inflammability by the existence of flammable substance in objects

Yet a whole literature has burgeoned around the notion of leadership, and it has become associated with a wide range of disparate properties purported to invest particular individuals with particular capacities to take charge. Indeed a certain scholarship claims to have identified those properties, and some management schools are unashamedly claiming to be able to inject them, like steroids, into willing souls.

In the rest of the paper, I underline the inadequacy of this notion, and suggest replacing it by the alternative notion of stewardship – a concept that would appear to be better adapted to a networked world (Goldsmith and Eggers, 2004), where nobody is in charge because power, resources and information are widely distributed (Cleveland, 2002). The notion of stewardship has the added benefit of not requiring any mystical garb, and of being based on certain understandable mechanisms. The paper explores those mechanisms.

http://www.optimumonline.ca/article.phtml?id=317

Introduction

There is plenty of evidence that the traditional understanding of the complex relationship between politicians and public servants in Canada has been disrupted by a number of factors. In fact, Paul Tellier, the co-chair of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Advisory Committee on Public Service Renewal has recently stated that relations between politicians and the senior levels of the bureaucracy have never been more strained and he would know having served as Mr. Mulroney’s Secretary to the Cabinet in the mid 1980’s.

Paul Tellier could be referring to recent issues like the removal of the chairperson of the Nuclear Safety Commission and of frictions between the government and the chief electoral officer. He could also be thinking of the confrontations between public servants and members of some parliamentary committees. Unfortunately, these high profile examples are only the tip of the iceberg.

Distrust between politicians and public servants is also apparent in a number of provinces – including Saskatchewan – where a large number of public servants have been dismissed following the recent change in government.

Let me first look at the reasons why we are experiencing this tension today. I will then move on to discuss the characteristics of a good working relationship, followed by a brief conversation about the weak elements in the traditional Canadian model. I will complete my remarks by looking at the so-called independent agencies that offer an interesting perspective on the issue given their legislative structure, and then by offering some conclusions.

Why such tension?

In my view, there are both long term and short-term trends at work.

Ezra Sulieman, a professor of politics at Princeton University, noted in a recent book that “in almost all democratic societies we have witnessed over the past two decades an incontestable phenomenon: relentless attacks on and denigration of the state.” Why has the bureaucracy served as the punching bag for so many would-be reformers he asks? He points out, and I quote, that “the attacks on the bureaucracy have largely come from the politicians, in part to ward off attacks and to deflect criticism of their own incapacity to solve society’s pressing problems. Instead, they turned their wrath and frustration on their own state and on the way it was being managed.”

As James Q. Wilson noted in his well know 1989 book entitled, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It, and at the height of Reaganism in the United States, “no politician ever lost votes by denouncing the bureaucracy.”

There are a number of reasons for this development.

First, on a global scale, some have argued that the decline in legitimacy is the result of the ascendancy of the so-called new public management practitioners, who see government institutions as organizations of questionable value.

http://www.optimumonline.ca/article.phtml?id=319

http://www.optimumonline.ca/frontpage.phtml

• Guide de planification stratégique
• Guide de planification stratégique PDF
• Guide on Strategic Planning

• Guidance and Requirements for Crown Entities: Preparing the Annual Report 2008
• Guidance and Requirements for Crown Entities: .PDF

B.C. Auditor General Reports on Trends and Opportunities in Performance Reporting

A recently released report from the Office of the Auditor General of British Columbia; Strengthening Accountability in British Columbia: Trends and Opportunities in Performance Reporting on the state of performance reporting in the BC government summarizes progress to date and documents avenues for continued improvement.

Le BVG de la C.-B. fait rapport sur tendances et les possibilités au chapitre de la présentation de l'information sur la performance

Dans un rapport publié récemment par le bureau du vérificateur général (BVG) de la Colombie-Britannique, intitulé Strengthening Accountability in British Columbia: Trends and Opportunities in Performance Reporting et portant sur la situation de la présentation de l'information sur la performance au sein du gouvernement de la province, on résume les progrès réalisés à ce jour et recense les possibilités d'amélioration continue.

This COER NEWS UPDATE includes information on:

• BEST PRACTICE BRIEFS
• RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES
• EVENTS
• JOSEPH JURAN
• CURRENT PROJECTS

This book examines the experiences of eight OECD countries that have integrated performance information into their budget process – namely, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Denmark, the United States, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Sweden. The book also offers guidelines and recommendations on adapting budget systems to promote the use of performance information.

Over the last few years, the Government of Canada has been cutting down on its policy research and analysis activities. However, there has been no corresponding decline in the need for continual assessing administrative policies in keeping with efforts to successfully implement policies. Taking a cue from a series of case studies and the experience of national and international experts, this report urges an increase in research concerning government policies and policymaking.

The Conference Board of Canada

This book, the third in a series dedicated to documenting and exploring leadership practices in the areas of learning and communication, discusses the art of storytelling. In particular, it presents storytelling from the angle of constituting an effective tool for training and knowledge transfer. To this end, it describes the core concepts and the theory of storytelling in a management context.

Volume 1 is the formal audit findings on the £13.3 billion reported to date, while Volume 2 is a series of opinion pieces on government efficiency from business leaders, academics and thinktanks.

While I'm hestiant to inflict a 100 pages or so of materials about efficiency in the UK on you, you might find some sections of interest, such as the opinion pieces by Boyne (p.14, Vol.2) and Levy et.al. (p.27, Vol.2). The UK efficiency initiative seems to have has the same objective as our progam review/expenditure review exercises, namely, to identify programs that don't work well (or are inefficient) and to reallocate the funds elsewhere. But there are still some elements of traditional notions of efficiency in there.

from Barry Leighton, PPX Board Member

The objective of the "across agencies" audit was to assess the application of the outcomes and outputs framework in Australian Government agencies. The audit included a review of:

• the outcomes and outputs of agencies and the integration of the outcomes and outputs framework into agencies’ operations;
• the extent to which agencies’ performance indicators incorporated better practice characteristics to enable agencies to meet their performance reporting obligations;
• agencies’ processes for capturing, monitoring and reporting financial and performance information and the extent to which outcomes and outputs information was used in agency decision-making; and
• the extent that agencies met their external reporting and accountability obligations.

The audit consisted of a survey of 44 agencies subject to the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997 (FMA Act) undertaken in October 2005 and detailed audit testing in three of those agencies. The purpose of the survey was to provide cross-agency data in relation to agencies’ implementation of the framework during the period 2002–03 to 2005–06. The ANAO received responses from all 44 agencies, although not all agencies responded to all questions. The ANAO did not audit the information provided by survey participants and the reported results are based on agencies’ responses to the survey.

The agencies at which detailed audit testing was undertaken were:

• Department of Education Science and Training;
• the then Department of the Environment and Heritage; and
• IP Australia.

See second report on list at:
www.anao.gov.au/director/publications/auditreports/2006-2007.cfm

Government watch groups can begin to expect more from ExpectMore.gov, the government-run Web site which reports on the performance and progress of federal programs. The Web site, launched a year ago by the Office of Management and Budget, is introducing several new online tools beginning this week. The new features will make it easier to analyze the performance of nearly 1,000 federal programs, representing over $2.5 trillion in government spending, said Robert Shea, associate director for management for the Office of Management and Budget.

The Web site raised eyebrows when it debuted last February by making public the OMB’s ratings of federal programs using its program assessment rating tool, or PART, scores. The ratings assess how effectively federal programs are, and in some cases, are not performing relative to their missions and what steps programs are taking to improve. Among the site’s new features is the ability to download CSV (comma space delimited) zip files of data, which can be readily imported into database or spreadsheet programs. The new feature includes a diagram showing the relationships between the data and the CSV file, making it easier for analysts to map the federal data into spreadsheets.

Source: http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/43080-1.html?topic=e_gov