Jody Zall Kusek

Logged On looks at mobile and smart phone technology through the lens of good government management. How will developing governments deliver goods and services that citizens care about? How will government in these countries leapfrog over traditional public management reforms to help reach out to and collaborate directly with the citizen? This book provides example after example where this has happened and how mobile technology has helped provide solutions to old problems. Our astounding revelation that mobile technology is helping to fight corruption in Pakistan, improve health delivery in Bangladesh, provide access to government by the ordinary citizen in India, and help monitor elections in Afghanistan. If this Is possible in some place in poor South Asian countries considered the most poor in the world, then how can these examples be spread to further in these counties or in other countries?Logged on Government provides a look back on conventional solutions that have mostly not worked and why mobile solutions are taking hold. The book offers a model called Smart Proactive Government based on a Feedback model being used in Punjab, Pakistan. The book also offers five solutions that are present in every successful mobile and smart phone example that the authors reviewed.

Project failures are not confined to the development world. In 2004 Hartman and Ashrafi found that the project failure rate is above 60 percent for construction, engineering, and other technology projects, despite all the advances in project management theory and practice. This book's interest, however, is in the very large percentage of projects not subject to events beyond the control of project managers. In this regard, attention to the possibility of failure is the best guarantee of success. Understandably, public managers may be uncomfortable with such an inherently negative approach to managing public projects, which are, after all, designed and intended to produce a public good or to solve a public problem. The point is not to be pessimistic but realistic in managing public projects. Anticipating and solving problems can avert compounding those problems and the failures that result. And this book delivered five rule to avoid project failure: i) make it about the how; ii) keep your champions close but your critics closer; iii) informal networks matter-work with them; iv) unclog the pipes; and v) build the ship as it sails.

There are constant and growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to demands from internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness and delivery of tangible results. Governments, parliaments, citizens, the private sector, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, international organizations, and donors are all among stakeholders interested in better performance.As demands for greater accountability and results have grown, there is an accompanying need for useful and useable results-based monitoring and evaluation systems to support the management of policies, programs, and projects. Governments and other organizations have many different kinds of tracking systems as part of their management toolkits: good human resource systems, financial systems, and accountability systems. They also need good feedback systems.A results-based monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system is essentially such a feedback system; it is a management tool to measure and evaluate outcomes, providing information for governance and decision making. Many management systems have been missing a feedback component to enable them to track the consequences of actions. Building an M&E system gives decision-makers an additional management tool by providing feedback on performance as a basis for future improvement.