Little progress on e-gov in latest management scorecard

“More than meets the eye” is how senior administration officials today described the latest scores for agencies’ work on the President’s Management Agenda.“This is the most agencies have changed in two years from one quarter to the next,” said Clay Johnson, the Office of Management and Budget’s deputy director for management.OMB today released the midyear scorecard for the 2-year-old initiative. Although most agencies still received red scores for overall progress, many have moved into the implementation work on agenda items after spending most of the last 18 to 24 months on planning, Johnson said. Over the next 12 months, OMB expects agencies will begin to be better managed and focus on delivering results to citizens, he said.Nine agencies improved their ratings in at least one of the five PMA areas, which are budget and performance integration, competitive sourcing, e-government, financial performance and human capital management. “We have demonstrated what is possible,” Johnson said, adding, “It is a significant milestone to move from red to yellow and even more to go from yellow to green.”OMB rated the 26 major agencies’ progress using scores of green, yellow or red. Green means an agency has met all of OMB’s criteria for success; yellow means it has met some criteria; and red means there are serious problems. The administration gives agencies a pair of scores, one for their overall status and one for progress in implementing agenda items.No agencies improved their overall scores in the e-government area from the latest ratings, issued March 31. OMB scored one agency in the green, 11 in yellow and 14 in red. As to the progress ratings, three agencies—the Transportation and Treasury departments and the Army Corps of Engineers—improved to green and two—the Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration—were downgraded to yellow. “Sometimes the scorecard masks the progress of agencies,” said Norm Lorentz, OMB’s chief technology officer. “If you look at how far we have come, it is pretty impressive.”On the e-government front, agencies in the last month only received the tools to improve their scores when OMB released the latest version of the Business Reference Model, Lorentz said. Plus, agencies have not quite caught up in making improvements necessary to meet the administration’s security demands, he said.The Defense and Education departments and the Office of Personnel Management are the first agencies to move to yellow under competitive sourcing. Four agencies—State, Transportation, Army Corps and the SBA—improved to yellow in Human Capital.EPA and the Social Security Administration received the first green scores, in the financial performance area.