Member since 2 years ago
6 ideas posted
5 comments 46 votes
17 votes
Facebook and social media is great, when it is done in the right situation. Do we really need Facebook sites for all sorts of offices? I don't know any one that checks these things except to make fun of them. If there is an actual use for them I would be all for them, but I am yet to see one.
12 votes
This site is a great way for ideas to get out there. We need this type of site for all orgs. Managers would get all sorts of good ideas that people would not usually bring up to them.
17 votes
We keep saying that we are moving towards a paperless workforce, but I show up to countless briefs each day where I get handed a 20 page power point. There are often 10-15 people in each one of these briefs.
Where we have these briefs there is a display where we could put the power point up electronically.
This would reduce paper use, ink use, printer up keep, disposal and paper storage.
10 votes
We in the government need to start running as one. Many departments are undertaking the same projects, with little or usually NO collaboration. We need to utilize all the organizations within the government in order to do things better and not continuously recreate the wheel. There are plenty of administrative things that all departments within the government do that could be done the same. Here are some ideas that I ...more »
We in the government need to start running as one. Many departments are undertaking the same projects, with little or usually NO collaboration. We need to utilize all the organizations within the government in order to do things better and not continuously recreate the wheel.
There are plenty of administrative things that all departments within the government do that could be done the same. Here are some ideas that I have that work to have the government work as “ONE ENTERPRISE”:
1. We all purchase similar office equipment such as desks, chairs, computers, and other supplies. I don’t know why there is a requirement for DOD to have different office chairs that the DOE. We need to leverage our buying power in order to reduce price. We also do not need to go through the process to research chairs multiple times.
2. All government departments have lap tops that are used when officials travel. Why do we need to spend thousands of man hours across all the different departments to establish regulations for traveling with lap tops? No CLASSIFIED information should go on these devices, it is only PII, and it should be a single set standard across all agencies. Sadly this problem isn’t only between departments; it is also within the same departments. The Army and Navy have different policies on this. And within the Navy there are multiple policies on this because on one from the top has put in place a standard.
3. Use our CAC ID cards as our ID cards for where ever we are going. This sounds like it is a very logical solution and one that is already in place, but it is not. Every different place you go you need to use your CAC to get a building specific ID badge. The CAC identifies who you are, all access rights should be stored electronically and should be seen when your CAC is scanned. Hundreds of thousands of people spend countless hours getting new badges each year for every location they go to. Also at each of these locations there is at least one person who has the full time job of issuing the new badges. In the last year I have gone through the process of getting 7 different security badges.
The point is that there are thousands of examples out there where there is redundancy in the way we do things. We need to start taking an enterprise approach to our problems, not having dozens of teams trying to do the same thing differently. If there is no reason that the DOD and DOE are different on an issue, they should have a single unified approach.
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5 votes
The power and authority that a manager in the government is seen to have is based on the amount of people that are under them. It doesn't matter how much the division actually does, just how much they say they do and how many people they have under them. It has been tried before to have result based pay, but we need to change the culture from the top to promote leaders who actually get things done, and don't keep projects ...more »
The power and authority that a manager in the government is seen to have is based on the amount of people that are under them. It doesn't matter how much the division actually does, just how much they say they do and how many people they have under them.
It has been tried before to have result based pay, but we need to change the culture from the top to promote leaders who actually get things done, and don't keep projects around inorder to stay looking busy.
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15 votes
When on TDY there are all sorts of ways to reduce costs. 1. Create incentives for employees to stay at hotels that cost under the per diem amount. If a TDY employee spends less than the allowed amount for lodging let them keep half the difference. The government would be able to keep the remaining savings. I went TDY for 4 months with another person. The lodging per diem was over $100 per day. Under my proposed plan ...more »
When on TDY there are all sorts of ways to reduce costs.
1. Create incentives for employees to stay at hotels that cost under the per diem amount. If a TDY employee spends less than the allowed amount for lodging let them keep half the difference. The government would be able to keep the remaining savings. I went TDY for 4 months with another person. The lodging per diem was over $100 per day. Under my proposed plan we could have shared a lodging location, saving the government over $6000.
2. Reduce the personal per diem amount for government officials. I love going on TDY because I always come back with a lot of extra money. There are many places that people go that their personal per diem is $60 or $70 a day. The majority of working class Americans spend a lot less than that each day for personal expences. We should not be encouraging our officials to live like Kings when they go out of town.
3. There are a lot of bases that have on post housing for people visiting TDY. These government run hotels are being paid for by the government, but officials on TDY are not required to stay in the provided lodging. Either force the officials to stay in these "hotels" or get rid of the hotels.
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