Building the Enterprise - Booz Allen Hamilton

THE CASE FOR ENTERPRISEWhen Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc in themid-Atlantic region during the fall of 2012, theFederal Emergency Management Agency coordinateda massive federal response, drawing life-savingsupport services from the Department of Defense (DOD),help for utilities from the Department of Energy (DOE),housing assistance from the Department of Housing andUrban Development (HUD), medical teams from theDepartment of Health and Human Services (HHS) andmuch more.The response to the destructive hurricane demonstratedhow government can and must act collectivelyduring a crisis and incorporated the lessons learned frommissteps seven years earlier during Hurricane Katrina.Perhaps the most important of those lessons was theneed for a comprehensive management framework tounify federal, state, local and nongovernmental disasterresponse efforts. That framework was put in place, and itproved its worth in the aftermath of Sandy.But coming together as an enterprise only duringa crisis is not sufficient. Increasingly, the problems ourgovernment faces require that same sort of collective actionday in and day out. In other words, the remarkableinteragency collaboration we saw during Sandy mustbecome the rule rather than the exception. However, ittakes more than just a declaration to that effect. As welearned in the aftermath of Katrina, it takes managementrules, procedures and leadership to enable federal agenciesto work in a more unified and coordinated manner.Historically, the federal government has been structuredwith each department and agency having its ownmission. Today’s challenges rarely fit into nice, neat bureaucraticboxes. By virtue of its very structure, the federalgovernment does not often act as a single enterprisebut typically performs just the way it is organized—asseparate, largely independent agencies that do not integrateand leverage their resources and expertise towarda common end.Examples of such fragmentation are numerous. TheGovernment Accountability Office’s (GAO) 2013 updateof government operations that are considered to be highrisk cited the 15 agencies that have overlapping responsibilityfor administering our nation’s food safety laws. 1All have different officials in charge, different chains ofcommand, different budgets and different overseers inboth the executive and legislative branches, despite theirshared, common mission. It is a testament to their commitmentto that mission that it is performed so well, butimagine how much more efficiently and effectively itcould be accomplished (and how much safer our foodsupply would be) if the efforts of those 15 agencies weremore integrated and unified.The GAO also reported that HUD, the Departmentsof Commerce and Agriculture, and the Small BusinessAdministration operate 53 different economic developmentprograms for businesses in poor and disadvantagedareas. Yet these separate training, counseling, grantand loan programs seldom work in tandem to meet theneeds of entrepreneurs or taxpayers. These departmentsand agencies are attuned to their own missions, budgets,programs and different congressional authorization andappropriations committees even though they all have astake in a common goal. 2Overlap and redundancy are by no means limited to1 Government Accountability Office, High Risk Series, an Update, Feb.2013, 196–201.2 Government Accountability Office, 2012 Annual Report: Opportunitiesto Reduce Duplication, Overlap and Fragmentation, Achieve Savingsand Enhance Revenue, Feb. 2012, 52–61.BUILDING THE ENTERPRISE 3