Information can be a powerful tool as long as you understand what it is. Information is data with context and meaning. Let's use an example: 20B. By itself it's merely a combination of numbers and letters—it doesn't mean anything. With the added context of an airline boarding pass, it tells you where your seat [...]
My wife works for a non-profit company so seldom does her work and mine cross paths, but whaling and security management brought us together. “Whale phishing” or “whaling” is a variation of “spear phishing.” A scammer sends fraudulent emails ostensibly from a known or trusted sender in order to get [...]
How do you know if your program is doing what it’s meant to do? The obvious answer is to develop metrics and a means for tracking that data to see that outcomes meet or exceed expectations. But what do you do if you don’t have access to the data you need but do have access [...]
Like death and taxes, change is inevitable. I worked in state government for 23 years and every election cycle brought change. The extent of the change varied in degrees. One Republican (or Democrat) replacing another Republican (or Democrat) as governor usually meant minor organizational adjustments to come (a tweaked organizational chart with new names and [...]
For our 25th anniversary, my wife and I took our family to Paris and Rome to explore, see the sights, and create an adventure full of all “bucket list” activities. Traveling to these wonders and seeing everything the grand cities have to offer, I found myself awed and aghast at what I can only call [...]
I hate buying things. To be more exact, as a state administrator, I hated buying services. My problem wasn’t with the complexities of the state procurement process – I was a bureaucrat after all and figuring out how to do paperwork was half the fun of the job – but I found determining what to [...]
92 counties. 92 different ways to do the same thing. In 1995, I discovered a truth: figuring out how people do their jobs is complicated. The complication comes not from what they do, but from the different approaches each person takes to get the job done. In 1995, I was a young, naïve consultant in [...]
My day job is helping state welfare agencies navigate the fens and bogs of federal law and regulation. My side job is helping netlogx team members understand how state government works the unique struggles our state clients face. Many new netlogx team members have worked in the private sector and have had little interaction with [...]
In honor of National Thesaurus Day today, I’d like to talk about ‘feckless’ and ‘fecklessness’ and how not to be labeled as either while providing services to clients. ‘Feckless’ and ‘fecklessness’ stem from and are antonyms to ‘effect’ and ‘effectiveness’ and have a range of flavors from aimless and shiftless to inept and ineffectual. A [...]
For ten plus years, I was the state of Indiana’s TANF Program manager. As a state administrator, I’d inevitably spend time listening to advice from a private sector consultant who had been an administrator in another state. The conversation would be cordial until the consultant would wax poetic about how his old state did something, [...]
