Now that Congress has agreed to a two-year budget framework and passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill, the federal government finally has the opportunity for budget predictability that has eluded most agencies since 2010.
The bad news is, the pressure to cut costs is not likely to lessen much despite the long-needed budget stability. Rather than the same old “do more with less” dictum, however, there is another way to look at this push: creating value.
In practice, for most government agencies, the typical annual top-down direction is to cut back overall budgets by 5 percent or 10 percent across the board, without meaningful discrimination between high-value, high-priority activities and low-value, low-priority activities.
In the commercial sector, the creation of value, coupled with an efficient cost management process, is the result of an enterprise management focus to sustain the viability of the corporation. The government’s “spend it or lose it” orientation detracts from the ability of the agency to have a meaningful approach to how and where value is created for the taxpayer.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.federaltimes.com/story/government/solutions-ideas/2015/12/23/better-idea-than-do-more-less/77803910/
