Terms, Terminology, Existing Government Controls, Management Life Cycle

What is the idea?

1. While the recovery act is understood by some, it needs more clarity in its terms.

The following terms need to be clearly defined on the Recovery.gov site.  These terms need a very simple 6th grade-level definition, a high-school-level definition, and a technical or college-level definition, each with examples or descriptions to ensure that the diverse audience has a shared understanding of the ARRA intent and mechanisms.

• Recovery
• Reinvestment
• Transparency
• Accountability
• Openness
• Strategic
• Oversight
• private sector
• public sector
• fraud
• waste
• abuse
• mismanagement

The terms fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement need to be especially well defined, as well as why the ARRA is seeking to prevent them by taking actions to ensure that their opposite behaviors (antonyms) take place within the ARRA implementation, tracking, and reporting.  See the table below.

Due to the multiple areas of crisis facing our country and the world, we need (across all aspects of the ARRA as well as across all aspects of our Governments, Commercial Organizations, Non-Profit Organizations,, Volunteer Organizations, diverse groups, and individuals) a means to keep our terms clearly defined, understood and consistently applied.  We need a "National Recovery, Capabilities, Operations, and Governance Terminology" (See Wikipedia for explanation of Terminology). 

There are many open-source and commercial technologies and approaches that can built various terminologies having different capabilities.  However, this suggested National Terminology more than simple lexicons, glossaries, and dictionaries.  A terminology is a rich, meaning-focused, structured arrangement of terms, their meanings, and how they relate to each other. 

A terminology, when well-developed and shared, provides a means to translate the jargon that often makes it difficult for one person, group, or organization to accurately communicate with another. 

A terminology can enable all participants in an effort to know and validate each other’s meaning, understand and operate well with shared processes and rules, and understand the data and information from the effort. 

Terminology is an implementation of "semantics".  I suggest we use a public domain approach like that at http://sites.google.com/a/one-world-is.org/gem-ema/Home/gem-approach/gem-metamodel as a starting method for developing this shared National Terminology to enable better, faster, and cheaper capabilities, operations, and governance across the country.

2. There also needs to be communication about previous U.S. Government actions to reduce Fraud, Waste, Abuse, and Mismanagement within the Federal Government and by those who receive Federal funds.  This is the same reason that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency (RAT) Board is comprised of Inspectors General (IG).

Federal Laws Established to combat fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. Public Law  = P.L., Executive Order = E.O., Title and Code = Rules

a.       P.L. 95-452, the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended [Title 5 United States Code (U.S.C.), App. 3], which sets forth authority and functions of the Inspector General.

b.      P.L. 101-12, Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which strengthens the protection available to Federal employees against prohibited personnel practices.

c.       Title 10 Code of Federal Regulations Part 1010, Conduct of Employees, which requires an employee to report fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption in Federal programs.

d.      Title 18 U.S.C., Crimes and Criminal Procedures, Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure which prescribes rules that govern all criminal procedures in the Federal courts of the United States.

e.       E.O. 12731, “Principles of Ethical Conduct for Government Officers and Employees,” dated 10-17-90, which establishes the requirement for Government employees to disclose fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption.

f.       P.L. 110-409, Inspector General Reform Act of 2008

g.      P.L. 111-5, February 17, 2009.American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act)

The standing organization by which IG's across the government collaborate is the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE). (see http://www.ignet.gov)  Quoted from that site:

"In October 2008, the President’s Counsel on Integrity and Efficiency previously established under Executive Order was abolished and replaced by provisions of the Inspector General Reform Act (Act). The Act established a new entity, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), which is an interagency council headed by a Chairperson, an Inspector General and an Executive Chairperson, the Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The CIGIE is composed of presidentially and agency-head appointed Inspectors General, respectively, with a mission to address integrity, economy and effectiveness issues that transcend individual government agencies and to increase the professionalism and effectiveness of personnel by developing policies, standards, and approaches to aid in the establishment of a well trained and highly skilled workforce in the Offices of the Inspector General.”

The Functions and Duties of the Council include:

• Continually identify, review, and discuss areas of weakness and vulnerability in Federal programs and operations with respect to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement;
• Develop plans for coordinated, government-wide activities that address fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement and promote economy and efficiency in Federal programs and operations. These plans include interagency and inter-entity audit, investigations and evaluation programs and projects to deal efficiently and effectively with those problems concerning fraud and waste that exceed the capability or jurisdiction of an individual agency;
• Develop policies that will aid in the maintenance of a corps of well-trained and highly skilled OIG personnel;
• Maintain one or more training academies for the professional training of auditors, investigators, inspectors, evaluators, and other OIG personnel;
• Submit recommendations of individuals to the appropriate appointing authority to fill Inspector General vacancies, and
• Maintain an Integrity Committee to receive, review and refer for investigation allegations of wrongdoing that are made against Inspectors General and staff members.

All of these responsibilities to prevent mismanagement, and thus reduce the likelihood of abuse or waste of Federal resources, or fraud involving Federal Resources, exist for all Federal activities, including the new ARRA.  This needs to be emphasized, especially the role that the current administration's drive towards "transparency" in making this long standing requirement for stewards' accountability more visible to those who own the resources under their stewardship.

3.  National Management Methodology is needed.

The "Rational Thought Process" described by Norman V. Peale is paraphrased as: "knowing where you are, knowing where you want to go, and knowing how to get there". 

• Path = interdependent transition plans. 
• Destination = To-Be state. 
• Starting Point = As-Is state. 

You don't necessarily need to know much detail about the starting point - you do need to know enough about what needs to change (i.e., gap, deficiency, shortcoming, overlap awareness).  Customers are the best sources of this information, i.e., customers of each outward-facing value-chain and each internal value-stream.

I use the following simplified definition of "management": resolving natural and continuous disorder into intended order.  Another way of expressing what management consists of is:  knowing your Current (As-Is) state, knowing your intended (To-Be) state, and building, implementing, and adjusting transition plans to achieve your intended state by intentionally changing your current state.  Wikipedia's definition elaborates on this. 

Any management repository (e.g., an extension of an enterprise architecture (EA) repository), must have a metamodel that can capture the steps and details of the management life cycle methodology followed by the organization and its participants. 

If there is no cohesive, coherent, and consistent management life cycle methodology applied by the organization and all of its parts, then the organization is operating in a non-rational, fragmented/partial/compartmented, wandering, impulsive, non-ordered manner.  This sounds like insanity as a worst case, or aggressively acting in ignorance as a best case!  Since educated management knows this, acting without a common management life cycle approach is mismanagement in any case, which opens up increased probability of waste, abuse, and fraud in every case.

So, if you don't have continuously refreshed knowledge, through a shared terminology, of your current As-Is state, haven’t specified and continually updated your To-Be state, and continually created, refined, and priority-sorted your plans to transition from As-Is to ToBe states, then any changes being pursued are wild, uncontrolled, lunges by leaders and managers towards shiny new things - i.e., the absence of management, i.e., mismanagement.

Why is it important?

If we don't have a common terminology (terms, definitions, concept maps, taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology, axiology) then we very likely to not understand each other, and very likely to hide information, thereby making mismanagement likely, thereby making waste, abuse, and fraud more likely.

We all need to recognize that the ARRA is giving increase transparency over long-standing law, orders, and rules that apply management controls to all Federal efforts and resources, including those funded through the ARRA.  Inspector Generals in all Federal Agencies and their other government, commercial, and non-profit counterparts, have clearly defined and long-standing responsibilities for ensuring adequate control of Federal Resources. 

Organization Owners/Citizens/Investors, Boards/Legislatures, Executives, Managers, and Workforce all have responsibilities to establish and comply with those controls.  Positions that have the duty and authority to look across all elements of an Organization's staff and subordinate organizations (e.g., Chiefs of Staff, Deputies for Administration) are typically those most likely to ensure controls exist and are enforced, and therefore would pass the scrutiny of the IGs and auditors