The federal government must embrace and accelerate the current shift toward greater collaboration and information sharing, Steir told the committee.
Advances in IT are driving that shift, but it’s also being championed by a White House that has been setting cross-agency priority goals and placing an emphasis on shared services (while Congress has taken up the mantel of reducing program overlap and duplication).
Steir told the committee the government should be viewed and treated as a single enterprise, observing, “today’s challenges are complex and can rarely be resolved effectively by one agency acting alone.”
The White House should redouble efforts to establish an “enterprise approach to a broader array of cross-cutting goals, missions and administrative functions, investing in the infrastructure necessary to ensure that this approach becomes the accepted norm,” Steir said.
Another key area he focused on was employee morale. He asked the legislators present to question civil servants that come before the committee about whether and how employee morale is affecting agency performance and what they are doing to improve morale – driving home the importance of the issue.
