Government Executive August 2012 : Page 30
All these things work to inhibit creativity. You have to go through layers of people to get things done. edward eitches “I think the starting proposition is we don’t have the same resources we used to and the pace of challenges has increased substantially,” says Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the non-profit Partnership for Public Service. “So we have to be innovative in government and adopt the best practices of the pri-vate sector.” The EIR programs’ chief critics, in fact, tend to fault Park for transforming the government building process too lit-tle rather than too much. Kathleen Allen teaches courses in entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California and directs the school’s Marshall Center for Technology Commercialization. She spent three years as an EIR at a major government aerospace contractor leading its first foray into commercial technology. Making a careful, risk-averse orga-nization that was used to operating like government run like a small startup required much more than simply over-seeing a few product launches, Allen says. It meant restructuring how the entire commercial division was organized, how employees worked together and how they were evaluated. It also meant changing the office’s overall philosophy. Assigning EIRs to narrow projects may yield some results, she says, but if those outsiders can’t look beyond their projects to reform agency culture more broadly, then their work is unlikely to create a paradigm shift. Allen’s model of an entrepreneur in residence as a sort of super-consultant with broad authority to shift office struc-tures and operations is common in the private sector. Park often references this definition by describing his own work in government as an EIR role. He’s defined EIR positions more gov ex ec.com of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of [a] field of endeavor,” the statute notes. Entrepreneurs are often at an early stage in their careers, but may show extraordinary promise, Ford says. “Have they flipped a company in the past? Created a startup? Been written up in Wired or The Wall Street Journal ? That’s pretty darn extraordinary,” he says. “A lot of times it’s about reading between the lines.” The EIR team was scheduled to wrap up its work at the end of July with rec-ommendations about how to revise USCIS training materials and policy documents. Besides adding private sec-tor perspectives to the visa adjudica-tion process, the program also brought together field adjudicators and policy-ma kers, which sparked new ideas and forged professional connections, Mayorkas says. He hopes to launch another program focused on reforming visas for the entertainment industry, he says, but there’s no time frame yet for when that will happen. LEAN STARTUP The entrepreneurs in residence system, for Park, is part of a larger enterprise: making government function like a “lean startup,” with projects being man-aged by ad hoc and energized tactical teams from throughout the agency—and occasional outsiders—rather than by the existing bureaucracy. These teams should include repre-sentatives from all phases of a project’s development to be sure nothing is missed along the way, he says, and the team should start building something right away—even the smallest component— so that members can spot bad presump-tions before it’s too late. In the software world this is known as agile develop-ment. Engineers contrast it with water-fall development, in which each project phase follows in succession. The lean startup model has been endorsed by a number of government watchers as a way to speed up notoriously slow agency operations and to benefit from private sector advances. 30 government ex ecutive | august 2012 S t e p h e n Vo s s
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