Piling on

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Smart way to eliminate unnecessary government paperwork

Dumb way to eliminate paperwork

Let me begin by saying an executive order to eliminate paperwork is not the way to start. It presumes too much.

I wrote a book describing the smart way called Smart Data, Enterprise Performance Optimization Strategy. I put the President in the book along with some cabinet secretaries and used his agenda as a case study. I conducted a workshop hosted by the Association for Enterprise Information at which several government CIOs were in attendance. They got the idea but said buck it upstairs.

I attended lunch with David Plouffe and mentioned that I have some solid ideas to improve the President’s management approach to such things. He acted interested and then I got an email from him asking for more money. Hey, I gave already.

If there is too much paperwork, the chances are there are a number of causes:

1.      Legislation – Congress passes laws that include requirements for accountability that requires paperwork. This results in “data calls,” that are requirements passed down and down until it gets to the constituent community – businesses and citizens. It manifests in “please complete this form.”

2.      Executive and management – Government department and program managers are compelled to prove their worth, aka cover their ass, and that result in all sorts of documentation, some of which becomes contractual and passed onto the government contractor community. Call it transparency or bureaucracy. It doesn’t matter.

Of course data gathering and reporting is important to some degree, though the smart way to generate meaningful data and to manage it begins by engineering smart processes and smart data. Using information technology effectively, everyone should be able to access and extract what they need to support planning, problem solving, decision making, sense making, and predicting.

Process improvement that results in “eliminating paperwork” consumes resources – labor and technology expense. So, when departments are already broke – the government is out of money – a decree to “eliminate paperwork” is simply piling on.