Fw: Performance.gov

[Owen Ambur]

Naval & Pradeep, thankfully, in the interest of the taxpayers and with the assistance of Tableau, the Performance.gov site is being improved, as shown at https://www.performance.gov/explore/goals/

However, the ability to do so is limited by lack of compliance with section 10 of the GPRA Modernization Act.

I hate to think how much money has been needlessly spent dealing with that short-coming, but the opportunity for us is to show how: 

a) the collection of goals and objectives can semi-automatically be made more comprehensive, and 

b) the query features can be improved by leveraging the semantics and structure of the StratML schema.

Gaya, it will be good if we can use the South Carolina agency accountability reports to demonstrate such capabilities, if not necessarily to automatically create graphics for the performance indicators contained in those reports.  

It doesn't look like the Performance.gov site is doing that yet but Chris Fox's StratNavApp has some basic capabilities in that regard.  If you are able to automate conversion of the SC agency reports to StratML Part 2 format, Chris may wish to import them into his app and help us demonstrate visualization of performance indicator trends.

Owen Ambur

https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenambur/

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: Owen Ambur <owen....@verizon.net>

To: Owen....@verizon.net <owen....@verizon.net>

Sent: Friday, October 14, 2022 at 10:07:43 AM EDT

Subject: Performance.gov

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/performance-gov_datavisualization-activity-6986330589133946880-CaMI?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android

Sent from the all new AOL app for Android

[Chris Fox]

Thanks Owen,

If you import your plans into StratNavApp.com - or better yet, create them there in the first place - it will automatically render your performance indicator trends graphically. There is no need for me to do anything.

Kind Regards,

Chris

--

Chris Fox

Chris C Fox Consulting Limited

 ch...@chriscfox.com
 +44 77 860 21712

            

Have you tried https://www.StratNavApp.com, the online collaborative tool for strategy development and execution?

Chris C Fox Consulting Limited is registered in England and Wales as a Private Limited Company: Company Number 6939359. Registered Office: Optionis House, 840 Ibis Court Centre Park Warrington Cheshire WA1 1RL

[Owen Ambur]

Naval, I wouldn't necessarily call them "requirements" but the Performance.gov site does provide a baseline upon which to demonstrate improvement -- particularly in terms of user-focused query/discovery services.

I hate to think how much of the taxpayers' money has been wasted on the multiple versions of the site as each adminstration threw out the previous adminstration's site and started over, focusing on the appearance of the site (to make the adminstration look good) rather than standardizing the data (so that performance -- good, bad, and indifferent -- can easily be evaluated).  Those costs are not addressed in their FAQ:  https://www.performance.gov/about/faq/  

One of the good things about the latest version is that they now at least provide links to the previous versions in the Archives section at the bottom of the home page.  However, that doesn't allow for tracking of performance on objectives across adminstrations, and until agencies comply with section 10 of GPRAMA, getting data into the Performance.gov site will be more cumbersome and costly than it should be.

A related issue is whether and, if so, when governmentwide performance data will be made available through the Data.gov site so that others can add value to it for specialized communities of interest.  

To further hightlight the problem (and the potential) the only reference to "performance" on Data.gov's strategy page is in a link to GSA's performance reports at the bottom of the page, and I doubt that either the Data.gov strategy or any of GSA's performance reports are available in an open, standard, machine-readable format... which means I'll need to consider whether it might be worth my time and trouble to do it for them.

Along with improved query services, demonstrating that *all* .gov goals and objectives (not just the so-called "priority" objectives) can automatically be included is a key point that I want to demonstrate.  All that is required is for federal agencies to comply with the law, i.e., sec. 10 of GPRAMA (and for State and local agencies to publish their plans and reports in standard, machine-readable format simply because that is good practice, in the public interest).

The bottom line is that, while the Performance.gov site is being enhanced and does now provide useful data for those committed enough to spend some time to find it, improvement is always possible ... and there is still lots of room for that.

Owen Ambur

https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenambur/

On Friday, October 21, 2022 at 08:46:30 AM EDT, Naval Sarda <nsa...@epicomm.net> wrote:

Hi Owen,

We will review Performance.gov related requirements soon.

Naval

On 20/10/22 8:36 pm, Owen Ambur wrote:

Chris, I don't have any control over how the State of South Carolina compiles its agencies' performance reports.  They have chosen to use Excel.  However, we do have the opportunity to show them how the data contained in those reports can be more usefully presented and the Chairman of the Legislative Oversight Committee has expressed interest in seeing what we can do.  He is among the prime stakeholders for such data and is well aware of the difficulty in making sense of it.

BTW, I am thinking about deleting all of the plans I previously imported into StratNavApp and importing the current U.S. federal agency plans instead.  My purpose would be to explore how your query capabilities might support selective querying of those plans.  However, if it were possible to segregate them from the others that are publicly available on your site, I would not need to delete the others.  Of course, too, it would be nice if anonymous users could query publicly available plans/reports on your site for view-only (rather than edit) access.

Also, since the federal agency plans don't contain performance indicators, the South Carolina agency accountability reports might be a better set to use for demonstration purposes.  So I'll probably wait to see if Gaya can convert them to StratML Part 2 format before exploring further what might be done with your app.

Owen Ambur

https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenambur/