In July 2013, the Obama Administration recommitted to strengthening three pillars of its Management Agenda—improved service delivery, reducing waste and saving money, and increasing the transparency of government data. On August 8, the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton released “Building the Enterprise: Nine Strategies for a More Integrated, Effective Government,” a new report designed to assist the Obama Administration with its efforts. 

“Building the Enterprise” calls on the administration to take a more coordinated, multiagency, whole-of-government approach—in other words, an enterprise approach—to the nation’ most difficult and enduring challenges. From reducing homelessness and safeguarding food to securing cyberspace and reducing joblessness, the report lays out the case for our government to build on current efforts by acting as a single, integrated enterprise. 

The report claims that adopting an enterprise framework will “enable government to better husband its resources and reduce programmatic fragmentation and overlap.” It proposed nine overarching strategies that will provide the infrastructure and impetus to take the enterprise approach to scale. 

The recommendations largely focus on what can be done by the executive branch without action by Congress, although there are legislative changes that could improve the effectiveness of the enterprise approach and that will be needed to make improvements in the civil service. 

Strategy 1

• Strategy 1: Develop an enterprise performance plan with senior-level commitment to drive cross-agency goals and missions

• Strategy 2: Build portfolios of programs aligned against the enterprise plan’s goals

• Strategy 3: Designate and empower enterprise goal leaders

• Strategy 4: Develop career enterprise executives to lead cross-cutting missions and functions

• Strategy 5: Establish an independent office of evaluation to assess enterprise performance

• Strategy 6: Manage information technology as a true enterprise resource

• Strategy 7: Take shared services to scale

• Strategy 8: Adopt an enterprise approach to the acquisition of goods and services

• Strategy 9: Build an enterprise civil service system 

By implementing these nine strategies, the report argues our government can begin to eliminate program duplication and overlap, and align scarce resources toward defined goals to better serve the needs of the American people.