Obama picks McKinsey partner as country's CPO

January 7, 7:50 PMProgressive Politics ExaminerJay McDonough

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    MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Imagea

President-elect Barack Obama announced today the appointment of senior McKinsey partner, Nancy Killefer, as the country's first "chief performance officer".  In her new role, Ms. Killefer will be responsible to improve efficiency and stamping out governmental waste. 

From Business Week:

The task ahead of her is exceptional. Even as Killefer is charged with making government more efficient, her new boss has warned of trillion-dollar deficits for years to come. Killefer will oversee the "line-by-line" scrutiny of the vast federal budget Obama mentioned frequently during his campaign. And filling government jobs with talented, efficiency-minded individuals will be a major challenge as federal employees begin retiring en masse: The average age of federal employees is 46 and rising, according to a McKinsey paper Killefer co-wrote.

What will Killefer's priorities be? If McKinsey white papers are any indication, she'll focus on improving transparency and reviving government productivity metrics. As Killefer and her colleague Lenny Mendonca wrote in a 2006 BusinessWeek column, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped measuring productivity in 1996. "We think a radical new approach to transparency of how government programs are performing is required," the pair wrote in "Unproductive Uncle Sam." "Only this will push Congress to exert performance pressure on government agencies." They go on to suggest a Morningstar-like body called "Gov-Star" that would provide "completely independent measurement of government program performance."

One of the business fundamentals McKinsey stresses is the need for accountability.  Individuals and groups are encouraged to make personal performance commitments and expect to be evaluated according to their performance to the metrics of those commitments. 

One gets the feeling that kind of thinking may be a bit foreign to some in government.