On Organizational Change & Government

In his last post, Dr. S mentioned the issue of war budgeting as addressed by the Iraqi study group. I want to open this issue up a bit. Pentagon budgeting is hardly transparent.

But using emergency funding to cover war expenses has had far reaching effects on the DoD budgets. Namely, it makes it very hard to separate war expenditures from basic operations for the daily DoD activities.

For example, let’s take the Center for Lessons Learned, which opened a few years ago as part of the Military’s transformation plan. They are training people to fight wars. And they will do this regardless of whether there is a war or not. But at the same time, they are critical to the war effort now. So how much of an emergency appropriation goes to them for their role in the current war and how do you separate that from the regular budget? How do you track the funds? It isn’t clear.

To track these new funds, the Pentagon has created whole new levels of bureaucratic hell. The levels of bureaucracy have increased 4 fold. Long time DoD employees tell me that they have never seen or experienced anything like it before.

Private contractors are proving to be mixed blessing. The government has always had contractors, but now there are so many and the sums of money are so big that we are back to the days of $500 toilet seats and gold plated hammers. Contractors who are brought in as consultants encounter a lot of polite smiles but little action. Some of these contractors are honest players whose job is to help guide organizational change. The resistance to this type change is serious. Rumsfeld wasn't all wrong when he talked about the "anchor chain" in the military.

But there is some good that is happening as well. Government is trying desperately to update itself, its organizational structure, and its methods of doing things. Government is turning to private industry because it needs to become more like private industry. At the same time, private industry is grabbing the most promising employees from government to help fulfill government contracts by waving huge sums of money in front of them. Those yonger workers who to want to stay in government find themselves increasingly frustrated.

The government sector is facing 3 huge issues 1) an office technology gap 2) an aging workforce that needs to be replaced. 3) a lack of solid leadership to help make needed changes. Notice that money is not the problem. There is more than enough of that. And while we knock the philosophy of the Ayn Rands of the world, she is on to something: the ability to block needed change under the cover of "the greater good".

Due to the burgeoning bureaucracy, government institutions suddenly need electronic document management technologies because funding allocations are getting lost in the approvals process. This means that managers spend more time filling out complicated paperwork and following up as it passes through the various gates rather than leading. Bureaucracy has replaced leadership and is sucking up energy. Great minds are spent tyring to comply with contradicting rules that change daily. Decisions, if htey can be made at all, are being made based on individual ego trips rather than on logic or reason. Middle managers are ignoring chains of command and forming quiet resistance movements simply to get things done.

The whole government salary system is being trashed and replaced with a new, more flexible merit based system, which is a good thing. But older workers aren’t rotating out as they should be and they aren’t keeping up either. They either stay in place, sleeping at their desks and collecting a salary while younger workers who are ready to grasp the reins are being blocked. If older people retire, they sign back up as contractors. So the revolving door that used to belong to Congress has filtered down to mid level functionaries.

So I ask, how can you win a war abroad when you don't even have the capacity to operate effectively and efficiently at home?