eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
Written by leading experts with decades of experience as managers and consultants, It's Time for High Performance Government provides executives, managers, and elected officials at all levels practical advice to improve government performance.
In 2003, the National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by Paul Volcker, issued a report detailing problems within the federal government today and recommending changes in its organization, leadership, and operations. This book suggests practical ways to implement the recommendations and defines a research agenda for the future. Thirteen essays address the primary problem areas identified by the Volcker Commission, and the commission report itself is included.
The more than three dozen cases presented here will help you understand what high-performance organizations are and develop a clearer understanding of the preconditions to major change, the steps essential to getting started, and ways to overcome common roadblocks. This book details the eight characteristics common to high-performance agencies, illustrating each with concrete examples.
Stewart Lifflooks at government process as being built around six major systems, separate entities with interdependent needs and purposes. --
With over three decades of experience in public sector HR, Bob Lavigna gives managers the tools they need to leverage the talents of government's most important resource: its people. You know firsthand that your government workers are not underworked, overpaid, or mindless clones just carrying out the morally compromised work that politicians forced through the pipeline. Besides having to daily overcome the persona of being a government employee, your hard-working employees face enormous pressures and challenges every day and are asked to solve some of our country’s toughest problems, including unemployment, security, poverty, and education. To be able to return to their desks daily with the passion and commitment required to accomplish these overwhelming duties will require a manager who knows how to leverage talent, improve performance, and inspire passion within these true servants. In Engaging Government Employees, you will learn: Why a highly engaged staff is 20 percent more productive How to get employees to deliver “discretionary effort” How to assess the level of engagement Why free pizza and Coke every Friday is not a viable strategy Engaging Government Employees rejects the typical one-size-fits-all approach to motivation. Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence, this indispensable resource shows how America’s largest employer can apply the science of engagement to get team members passionate about the agency’s mission and committed to its success.
Improving how our government works is urgent business for America. In this book experts from the RAND corporation provide practical ways for government to reorganize and restructure, enhance leadership, and create flexible, performance-driven agencies.
Few developments have had broader consequences for the public sector than the introduction of the Internet and digital technology. In this book, Darrell West discusses how new technology is altering governmental performance, the political process, and democracy itself by improving government responsiveness and increasing information available to citizens. Using multiple methods--case studies, content analysis of over 17,000 government Web sites, public and bureaucrat opinion survey data, an e-mail responsiveness test, budget data, and aggregate analysis--the author presents the most comprehensive study of electronic government ever undertaken. Among other topics, he looks at how much change has taken place in the public sector, what determines the speed and breadth of e-government adoption, and what the consequences of digital technology are for the public sector. Written in a clear and analytical manner, this book outlines the variety of factors that have restricted the ability of policy makers to make effective use of new technology. Although digital government offers the potential for revolutionary change, social, political, and economic forces constrain the scope of transformation and prevent government officials from realizing the full benefits of interactive technology.
This book is about urban terror - its meaning, its ramifications, and its impact on city life. Written by a well-known expert in the field, "Cities in a Time of Terror" draws on data from more than a thousand cities across the globe and traces the evolution of urban terrorism between 1968 and 2006. It explains what kinds of cities have become prime targets, why terrorism has become increasingly lethal, and how its inspiration has changed from secular to religious. The author describes urban terrorism as an attempt to use the city's own strength against itself, forcing it to implode, and delineates three basic logics of terrorist choices for targeting cities. The book also includes a discussion of local resilience - the city's capacity to bounce back from attack - and suggests how that can be sustained. Examples from New York, London, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Moscow, Paris, and Madrid illustrate the book's central themes.
This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of 13 workshops held at the 33rd International ISC High Performance 2018 Conference, in Frankfurt, Germany, in June 2018: HPC I/O in the Data Center, HPC-IODC 2018; Workshop on Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems, WOPSSS 2018; 13th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing, VHPC 2018; Third International Workshop on In Situ Visualization, WOIV 2018; 4th International Workshop on Communication Architectures for HPC, Big Data, Deep Learning and Clouds at Extreme Scale, ExaComm 2018; International Workshop on OpenPOWER for HPC, IWOPH 2018; IXPUG Workshop: Many-Core Computing on Intel Processors; Workshop on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems; Approximate and Transprecision Computing on Emerging Technologies, ATCET 2018; First Workshop on the Convergence of Large-Scale Simulation and Artificial Intelligence; Third Workshop for Open Source Supercomputing, OpenSuCo 2018; First Workshop on Interactive High-Performance Computing; Workshop on Performance Portable Programming Models for Accelerators, P^3MA 2018. The 53 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. They cover all aspects of research, development, and application of large-scale, high performance experimental and commercial systems. Topics include HPC computer architecture and hardware; programming models, system software, and applications; solutions for heterogeneity, reliability, power efficiency of systems; virtualization and containerized environments; big data and cloud computing; and artificial intelligence.
