Dot-Gov Performance: Grading on a Curve

Public Information Officers have a tough job. Consider how hard one or more federal PIOs had to work to squueze lemonade from a bucket full of lemons. The White House uses the stop light metaphor common to scorecard programs everywhere - green is go or good, yellow is slow or mediocre, and red is stop or just plain bad, bad, bad. Here's the brave face put on the most recent report:

In the President's Management Agenda Scorecard for the second quarter of FY 2008, nearly 50% of agency "status" scores were green, and more than 75% of "progress" scores were green. The Department of Labor, the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, continue to be the only three agencies to receive green scores for both "status" and "progress" in all five of the governmentwide initiatives: human capital, competitive sourcing, financial performance, e-gov and performance improvement.

Put slightly less charitably, (a) more than half of all federal agencies have a worrisome status of yellow or red; and , (b) only 3 of 26 -- 12% -- of federal agencies had their act together and were still moving forward on this handful of priorities. Singling out a vertical or two, 20 agencies were making green-level progress on e-government but 17 are digging out of a hole (14 yellow, 3 red) on the status measure. Ironically, the reddest of the red status belonged to the Department of Commerce -- an interesting spot to end up for a department the name of which shares a root word with "e-commerce." Apparently, not much to show for the last 13 years of playing in the Internet sandbox. On the competitive procurement watch, more than two-thirds (69%) of agencies were mired in red and yellow lights. Some 58% were making progress on this front, which may be akin to being lost but making good time.