Government News & Events

We must do so fully cognizant that a business-driven society that fails to embrace the values of its civil society, as Yankelovich has written, "without showing respect for its employees or customers, without inspiring people to give their creative best to their jobs, without employees and management understanding each other and without employees’ buying into management’s vision of the future (will) inevitably slip into mediocrity or worse."

Advocates for the insurance program, however, said Tuesday they’re disappointed the state is not abandoning the insurance contract with Blue Cross and insuring the program itself.

"We must look beyond traditional local turf politics to find creative ways to work together to make government better and less expensive.

Florida is a case in point. Home to a large and growing retiree population, the Sunshine State established a Cabinet-level department of aging in 1992 and has long been a bellwether for state aging policy.

"It’s a fairly sophisticated argument that the change in the government’s role in IT — to pull it off successfully — you need a change in government HR practices to allow for more people to come in at midcareer levels," he said. "HR has been a very transactional and control-oriented function, not a function that typically thinks strategically about how the management of people can help an agency reach its mission. It’s been much more processing paperwork and checking for rule compliance."

"Taxes that it was difficult to collect before will now be collected. And consumers will pay that,"

Idea was brainchild of two state employees who were awarded palladium coins for their efforts

But while 70% of state managers said large majorities of their professional employees had adequate skills, just one-third said clerical and support staff did. The report estimates the states spend $221 million annually on remedial writing training, sometimes sending workers to $400-per-employee classes.

While China promotes Internet use for business and education, government officials also say Internet cafes are eroding public morality. Authorities regularly shut down Internet cafes — many illegally operated — in crackdowns that also include huge fines for their operators.

Open government does not just imply that information is available some place where a researcher with enough savvy and diligence can dig it up. Information actually has to be pushed out through the information noise to connect. And this information has to be what citizens need to know — the good and the bad, the successes and failures, and the realistic options for the future.