4.1: Product and Service Delivery

Improve Efficiency and Effectiveness in Performing GAO’s Mission and Delivering Quality Products and Services to the Congress and the American People

Other Information:

To continue to provide timely, high-quality products and services to the Congress, GAO must enhance its support for planning and managing engagements. While the processes GAO uses to support its core values of accountability, integrity, and reliability have been refined over the years, the basic way in which engagements are planned and managed remains unchanged. With the availability of advanced technology tools and the pressure to continually do more with less, GAO must undertake more than incremental improvements in its processes and support systems. GAO needs to better utilize integrated technology support and collaborative tools, and re-evaluate and refine processes in its quality assurance framework. Knowledge and expertise: To enhance audit quality, GAO must better identify and capitalize on its own knowledge and expertise in a range of agency operations and management areas. It must also bring together interdisciplinary teams more efficiently to evaluate the many crosscutting issues facing the nation. Agency relationships: Collaborative working relationships with audited agencies are essential to accomplishing GAO’s work efficiently and effectively. While GAO generally receives all of the data it needs from federal agencies, there are certain occasions when ready access to agency data is not always consistent across or even within agencies. Therefore, GAO needs to focus on improving relationships and, if necessary, re-evaluate and revise its protocols for working with audited agencies, and seek additional legislative authorities as necessary. Product delivery: Rapid technological innovations and trends during the last several years have substantially changed the way individuals receive information. As a service agency whose primary product is information, GAO must modernize and adjust how it delivers that information, both in terms of the physical construct, level of detail, and appearance of its products and in the venues through which it delivers them. GAO has recently expanded the audience for its products and information through selected social media outlets and must continue to explore other forums and formats for sharing information, especially as they expand knowledge and awareness of the critical issues facing the country. (See fig. 41.) Resources: In light of the increasing complexity of the challenges facing the government, GAO must ensure that it devotes its resources to the highest priority issues. Specifically, GAO must expand internal processes for assigning priorities to requested and mandated work and for identifying emerging issues to which resources should be devoted. Working closely with congressional clients will be essential to ensuring GAO continues to meet their needs. In addition, monitoring changing events and emerging issues is essential to inform updates to strategic, workforce, and budgeting plans, as well as to ensure the agency maintains the agility to quickly reprioritize work, shift resources across goals and teams, and hire staff with needed expertise. To improve GAO’s efficiency and effectiveness in performing the agency’s mission and delivering quality products and services to the Congress and the American people, GAO has established the following performance goals and key efforts:

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