National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme in English Local Government: Annex 4: Follow On Study of Progress in Seven Case Study Improvement Partnerships

This report is one of a series of outputs from the national evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme for local government in England (CBP), being undertaken by a team of researchers at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Cities Research Unit at the University of West of England. This report summarises the findings from the second phase of fieldwork with regional and sub-regional Improvement Partnerships, established to facilitate capacity building and improvement activity in local authorities. The research underpinning this report was undertaken in seven case study Improvement Partnerships (see Section 2) in October and November 2006 and follows a similar – baseline – exercise undertaken during the same period during 2005. It thus both draws on the earlier research (see Section 3) and identifies evidence of progress and impact (see Section 10) since the baseline phase

Budgetary institutions and expenditure outcomes : binding governments to fiscal performance

The authors examine how institutional arrangements affect incentives that govern the size, allocation, and use of budgetary resources. They use a diagnostic questionnaire to elicit the relative strengths and weaknesses of specific systems in terms of instilling fiscal discipline, strategically assigning spending priorities, and making the best use of limited resources. In applying their methodology to a sample of seven countries (Australia, Ghana, Indonesia, Malawi, New Zealand, Thailand and Uganda) they also examine how donor assistance affects expenditure outcomes. In New Zealand, reform focused on achieving general fiscal discipline and technical efficiency. In Australia, reform focused on strategic priorities and a shift from central to line agencies. The two countries took different paths, but both sought to alter incentives that affect the size, allocation, and use of resources and to improve transparency and accountability. Systems in Indonesia and Thailand were reasonably effective in instilling fiscal discipline, butIndonesia seemed better at allocating resources to protect basic social services and alleviate poverty during fiscal austerity periods. Thailand's overcentralized system did not capitalize on useful information from line agencies and lower levels of government. Donors play a central role in spending outcome in the three African countries. Donors provided incentives for short-term fiscal discipline, but the imposed spending cuts impeded the prioritizing of expenditures and multiple donor projects fragmented budgets. Donor conditionality on the composition of expenditures and donor-driven attempts to improve technical efficiency, were ineffective. Lack of transparency and accountability meant rules were not enforced and budgets were often remade in an ad hoc, centralized way, so that the flow of resources to line agencies was unpredictable.Business Environment,Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,National Governance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies

Supporting strategy : a survey of UK OR/MS practitioners

This paper reports the results of an on-line survey conducted with practitioner members of the UK Operational Research (OR) Society. The purpose of the survey was to explore the current practice of supporting strategy in terms of activities supported and tools used. The results of the survey are compared to those of previous surveys to explore developments in, inter-alia, the use of management/strategy tools and „soft‟ Operational Research / Management Science (OR/MS) tools. The survey results demonstrate that OR practitioners actively support strategy within their organisations. Whilst a wide variety of tools, drawn from the OR/MS and management / strategy fields are used to support strategy within organisations, the findings suggest that soft OR/MS tools are not regularly used. The findings also demonstrate that tools are combined to support strategy from both within and across the OR/MS and management / strategy fields. The paper ends by identifying a number of areas for further research

Managing Up in Down Times

Examines issues confronting foundation senior management during both up and down economic cycles. Focuses on the concepts of resource stewardship, change management, and achieving successful results

Leading With Intent: A National Index of Nonprofit Board Practices

A comprehensive scan of nonprofit board practices, policies, and performance. Building on data that BoardSource has collected and analyzed dating back to 1994, this report is a powerful window into current board leadership and trends

Analyzing Differences between Public and Private Sector Information Resource Management: Chief Information Officer Challenges and Critical Technologies

The office of the Chief Information Officer is still new within public sector organizations. Further, the office of the CIO was hastily created by Federal laws that provide only broad direction for its implementation and practice while at the same time limiting each office\u27s power and reach within Federal agencies. Presently, because of broadly defined scope and the newness of the office in the public sector, Federal CIOs now face many challenges and critical technologies in managing their agency\u27s information resources. Private sector organizations have a valuable knowledge base from their CIO office implementation efforts and subsequent operations. This private sector knowledge could offer public sector CIOs invaluable insight into successful information resource management practices. However, public and private managers must take great care in deciphering which IRM prescriptions are relevant to their organizational situation. The goal of this research is to discover if public and private sector CIOs are faced with the same challenges and view the same technologies as critical for their organization\u27s operations .The results of an annual survey of public sector CIOs and senior IRM managers are compared with data collected from FORTUNE 1000 CIOs using the same instrument. Findings from this study provide evidence that public and private sector CIOs do perceive to be faced with many of the same challenges and also view many of the same technologies as critical to their organization\u27s operations

National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme in English Local Government: Evaluation of the National Programmes: Annex 2: Evaluation of the National Programmes

The report is one of a series of outputs from the national evaluation of the CBP, being undertaken by a team of researchers at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Cities Research Unit at the University of West of England. The Capacity Building Programme for local government was launched in 2003 as a joint Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) / Local Government Association (LGA) initiative to support capacity building and improvement activities within local authorities in England. The evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme has been underway since late 2004. A scoping phase was conducted until May 2005, including a short evaluation of the Pilot Programmes. The main phase of the evaluation commenced in September 2005 and encompassed four main phases (see Section 1.3: p10)

Analyzing Differences between Public and Private Sector Information Resource Management: Chief Information Officer Challenges and Critical Technologies

The United States Air Force (AF) has experienced a downward trend in retention of information systems (IS) workers over the past five years. This research draws on the employee turnover model proposed by Mobley et al. (1979) and the work of Schein (1987) to measure the career anchors, job satisfaction, and turnover intention of AF IS workers to determine if those whose job type and career anchor match report higher satisfaction and lower turnover intention than those with a mismatch. A portion of the AF IS workforce (AFSCs 3C0X1, 3C0X2, and 3C2X1; N = 10,133) was surveyed through an online instrument that returned 2,724 responses. Job security, service, and life-style anchors emerged as dominant. Partial support was found showing that job satisfaction is positively influenced by compatibility between job type and career anchor. Partial support was also found for the proposed link between turnover intention and compatibility. The most significant finding was that managerial and technical anchors did not dominate this population. This suggests that AF IS workers do not possess the same career anchors as civilian IS workers and may require different incentives to reduce turnover. Further research should be expanded throughout the AF and should explore other factors in addition to job type/career anchor compatibility as contributing factors

Built to Change: Catalytic Capacity-Building in Nonprofit Organizations

Summarizes the results of a broad survey of programs, and business and nonprofit experts, in the field of organizational effectiveness