The massive round was led by existing investor General Catalyst, with participation from other returning backers.

You just left a high-level meeting with agency leadership. You and your colleagues have been informed that Congress passed new legislation, and your agency is expected to implement the new law with your existing budget and staff. The lead program office replied, “We can make this work.” The agency head is pleased to hear this, but has reservations. How?

Another situation: The president just announced a new priority and has assigned it to your agency. Again, there is no new funding for the effort. Your agency head assigns the priority to your program with the expectation for success. How do you proceed?

Today, given the recent reductions in force (RIFs), people voluntarily leaving government, and structural reorganizations that have taken place and will likely continue, answering the question “How to proceed?” is even more difficult. There is a real need to “know” with a level of certainty whether there are sufficient resources to effectively deliver and sustain new programs or in some cases even the larger agency mission.

Members of the Management Advisory Group — a voluntary group of former appointees under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump — and I believe the answer to these and other questions around an organization’s capabilities and capacity to perform can be found by employing the Operational Readiness and Resiliency Index (ORRI). ORRI is a domestic equivalent of the military readiness model. It is structured into four categories:

• Workforce
• Performance
• Culture
• Health

Composed of approximately 50 data elements and populated by existing systems of record, including payroll, learning management systems, finance, budget and programmatic/functional work systems, ORRI links capabilities/capacity with performance, informed by culture and health to provide agency heads and executives with an objective assessment of their organization’s current and future performance.

In the past, dynamic budgeting and incrementalism meant that risk was low and performance at some levels predictable. We have all managed some increases or cuts to budgets. Those days are gone. Government is changing now at a speed and degree of transformation that has not been witnessed before. Relying on traditional budgeting methods and employee surveys cannot provide insights needed to assess whether current resources provide the capabilities or capacity for future performance of an agency — at any level.

So how does it work?

As is evident with the illustration above, ORRI pulls mainly from existing systems of record. Many of these systems are outside of traditional human resources (HR) departments to include budget, finance and work-systems. Traditionally, HR departments relied on personnel data alone. These systems told you what staff were paid to do, not what they could do. It is focused on classification and pay, not skills, capacity or performance.

Over the years, we have made many efforts to better measure performance. The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) as amended, the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), category management and other efforts have attempted to better account for performance. These tools — along with improvements in budgeting to include zero-based budgeting, planning, programming and budgeting systems, and enterprise risk management — have continued to advance our thinking along systems lines. These past efforts, however, failed to produce an integrated model that runs in near real-time or sets objective performance targets using best-in-class benchmarks. Linking capabilities/capacity to performance provides the ability to ask new questions and conduct comparative performance assessments. ORRI can answer such questions as:

• Are our staffing plans ready for the next mission priority? Can we adapt? Are we resilient?
• Do we have the right numbers with the right skills assigned to our top priorities?
• Are we over-staffed in uncritical areas?
• Given related functions, where are the performance outliers — good and bad?
• Given our skill shortages, where do I have those skills that are at the right level available now? Should we recruit, train or reassign to make sure we have the right skills? What is in the best interest of the agency/taxpayer?
• Is our performance comparable — in named activity, to the best — regardless of sector?
• What does our data/evidence tell us about our culture? Do we represent excellence in whatever we do? Compared to whom?
• Where are we excelling and why?
• Where can we invest to demonstrate impact faster?

Focusing on workforce and performance are critical. However, if you believe that culture eats strategy every time, workforce and performance needs to be informed by culture. Hence ORRI includes culture as a category. Culture in this model concentrates on having a team of executives that drive and sustain the culture, evidenced by cycles of learning, change management success and employee engagement. Health is also a key driver for sustained higher performance. In this regard, ORRI tracks both positive and negative indicators of health, as is evident in the illustration. Again, targets are set and measured to drive performance and increase organizational health. Targets are set by industry best in class standards and strategic performance targets necessary for mission achievement.

Governmentwide, ORRI can provide the Office of Management and Budget with real-time comparative performance around key legislative and presidential priorities and cross-agency thematic initiatives. For the Office of Personnel Management, it can provide strategic intelligence on talent, such as enterprise risk management based on an objective assessment: data driven, on critical skills, numbers, competitive environment and performance.

ORRI represents the first phase of an expanded notion of talent assessment. It concentrates on human talent: federal employees.

Phase two of this model will expand the notion of operating capabilities to include AI agents and robotics. As the AI revolution gains speed and acceptance, we can see that agencies will move toward increased use of these tools to increase productivity and reduce transactional cost of government services. Government customer service and adjudication processes will be assigned to AI agents. Like Amazon, more and more warehouse functions will be assigned to physical robots. Talent will need to include machine capabilities, and the total capabilities/capacity reflect the new performance curve — optimizing talent from various sources. This new reality will require a reset in the way government plans, budgets, deploys talent, and assesses overall performance. Phase three will encompass the government’s formalized external supply chains which represent the non-governmental delivery systems — essentially government by other means. For example, the rise of public/private partnerships is fundamentally changing the nature of federated government; think of NASA and its dependence on Space X, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and others. ORRI will need to expand to accurately capture these alternative delivery systems to overall government performance. As the role of the federal government continues to evolve, so too do our models for planning, managing talent and assessing performance. ORRI provides that framework.

John Mullins served on the Trump 45 Transition Team and later as the senior advisor to the director at OPM. Most recently Mullins served as strategy and business development executive for IBM supporting NASA, the General Services Administration and OPM.

Mark Forman was the first administrator for E-Government and Information Technology (Federal CIO). He most recently served as chief strategy officer at Amida Technology Solutions.

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