GovernmentExecutive.com

It appears that the season of departmental reviews is upon us. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced earlier this month that her department would conduct its first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which she said would help align performance goals within State, and help make the case for increased resources to people outside the department. Now, Janet Napolitano is taking the Homeland Security Department's own review collaborative, soliciting comments on DHS's website. And OPM's strategic plan has gone live online as well.

These reviews will proceed in different ways, of course, and they're addressing a very different set of needs at each agency. The State Department has management challenges in terms of the need for more staffing and more resources, but I don't think anyone's arguing in favor of a major reorganization of the department. The Homeland Security Department, on the other hand, has never particularly gelled as a coherent institution, and a review is a chance to pull the component agencies together on a common project. And the Office of Personnel Management could probably use more resources, and talk of reorganization has been in the air since late June, when OPM Director John Berry said it was a possibility--and some Congressmen have long wanted to undo parts of the 2003 reorganization of the agency that eliminated the office dedicated to the Senior Executive Service.

But they'll all face common challenges. How do you sort the totally frivolous responses from the serious ones? Within the serious responses, how do you categorize and process them? For the departments that are conducting public, collaborative reviews, how do you control those conversations without censoring them? How do you decide, at the end of the day, what's actionable and what's not? How do you avoid missing great, innovative suggestions that don't appear en masse because they're innovative? If the reviews can answer those questions, they'll be useful for government as a whole, beyond the recommendations they generate for specific reforms. Not all reviews will be collaborative in the future, but some will be. And the large number of conversations happening right now are a valuable test case for technologies and techniques in moderation, content-sorting, and study.