The government reform expert and acclaimed author of The Solution Revolution presents a roadmap for navigating the digital government era. In October 2013, HealthCare.gov went live—and promptly crashed. Poor website design was getting in the way of government operations, and the need for digital excellence in public institutions was suddenly crystal clear. Hundreds of the tech industry’s best and brightest dedicated themselves to redesigning the government’s industrial-era frameworks as fully digital systems. But to take Washington into the 21st century, we have to start by imagining a new kind of government. Imagine prison systems that use digital technology to return nonviolent offenders promptly and securely into society. Imagine a veteran’s health care system built around delivering a personalized customer experience for every Vet. We now have the digital tools—such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and analytics—to stage a real transformation. Delivering on Digital provides the handbook to make it happen. A leading authority on government reform, William D. Eggers knows how we can use tech-savvy teams, strong leadership, and innovative practices to reduce the risks and truly achieve a digitally transformed government.

This book examines how deterrence, coercion and modernization theory has informed U.S. policy, addressing why former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s famous description of the Vietnam War as the “social scientist’s war” is so accurate. By tracing the evolution of ties between social scientists and the government beginning in World War I and continuing through the Second World War and the early Cold War, the narrative highlights the role of institutions like the RAND Corporation, the Social Science Research Council and MIT’s Center for International Studies that facilitate these ties while providing a home for the development of theory. The author compares and contrasts the ideas of Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas Schelling, Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye and Walt Rostow, among others, and offers a cautionary tale concerning the difficulties and problems encountered when applying social science theory to national security policy.

A Documentary History tells the story of the creation and development of the U.S. Social Security program through primary source documents, from its antecendents and founding in 1935, to the controversial issues of the present. This unique reference presents the complex history of Social Security in an accessible volume that highlights the program's major moments and events.

To demonstrate the powerful links between belief systems and political and socioeconomic variables, this book draws on the World Values Surveys, a unique database that looks at the impact of mass publics on political and social life.

Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions. After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.

Most organizations rely on complex enterprise information systems (EISs) to codify their business practices and collect, process, and analyze business data. These EISs are large, heterogeneous, distributed, constantly evolving, dynamic, long-lived, and mission critical. In other words, they are a complicated system of systems. As features are added to an EIS, new technologies and components are selected and integrated. In many ways, these information systems are to an enterprise what a brain is to the higher species--a complex, poorly understood mass upon which the organism relies for its very existence. To optimize business value, these large, complex systems must be modernized--but where does one begin? This book uses an extensive real-world case study (based on the modernization of a thirty year old retail system) to show how modernizing legacy systems can deliver significant business value to any organization.