Agencies advised to be strategic in gathering online feedback

Federal agencies that solicit feedback on policy changes and management reforms, in keeping with Obama administration goals of making government more transparent, should follow a deliberate strategy, former government executives said during a panel discussion in Washington on Monday.

Officials should "take the time to do it right -- to engage the workforce, to bring people together and to actually discuss how the agency is going forward," said Nancy Killefer, senior director at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., during the Excellence in Government conference, which is hosted by Government Executive. Killefer was President Obama's first pick to be chief performance officer and deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, but withdrew her name for tax reasons.

Web 2.0 collaborative technologies, such as online forums and surveys, are an effective way of gathering feedback "on the cheap," said Jenna Dorn, president and chief executive officer of the congressionally chartered National Academy of Public Administration. Dorn also served as administrator of the Federal Transit Administration under President George W. Bush, assistant secretary for policy at the Labor Department under President George H.W. Bush, and associate deputy secretary of Transportation during the Reagan administration.

The first step is to identify and understand the community, Dorn said: "Is it every person in America, or only stakeholders that care about a specific issue? Or is it the internal workforce? The outreach for each community is very different, and in that outreach you need to ensure there's a valuable exchange happening between the people you're asking and those listening."

The community then drives the content. Agencies must ask specific questions that prompt discussion of the issue at hand, Dorn noted. Otherwise the result will be "garbage in, garbage out," she said.

Once the community is identified and content is finalized, agencies should choose an appropriate technology platform. Among the questions to ask, according to Dorn, are: "Does [an agency] need something robust, that can rate and rank ideas, and supports [online] conversations, and sweeps the Web to find key documents to make the conversations more rich, or can they use a smaller technology that allows for conversations only?

The National Academy followed these three steps to solicit feedback on Recovery.gov, the Obama administration's official Web site for tracking Recovery Act spending, and on strategies for expanding the use of electronic medical records, Dorn said.

In addition, federal agencies still face the challenge of "separating the wheat from the chaff," said Robert Shea, director of global public sector operations at consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP and former Office of Management and Budget associate director for administration and government performance. Shea estimated that typically, about 20 percent of feedback is valuable, while 80 percent is not.

"This is not a technology issue," Shea said. "We just use technology to broaden the outreach that we should've been doing all along. The result of having not done it before, is we don't have a proven methodology to deal with all the feedback we're getting, which can undermine the [influence] of those providing the feedback."