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Government entities across the country are facing many challenges including the increasing cost of service delivery, which means we need to become more efficient in managing our resources. When resources get lean at home we look for ways to make them go further. Instead of buying ingredients that make one meal, we purchase ingredients that can be used in many meals, and we buy in bulk. This same process of standardization and economy of scale can be used for optimizing business processes across government entities and increasing our purchasing power. We need to start asking ourselves if one government entity needs roast chicken, how many other agencies or civic entrepreneurs can make chicken soup out of the ingredients?

Governments’ challenges begin with the fact that we do not have the proverbial meal planner to govern over our kitchen and ensure we are:

• Taking everyone’s needs into consideration (participatory governance);
• Trained in good home economics practices and are not wasting food (organizational culture);
• Planning meals that extend our resources (unified and participatory strategic planning);
• Budgeting within our limits (asset management, and budgeting for shared and knowledge services);
• Purchasing in bulk to make sure we get the most for our money (economies of scale and procurement processes);
• Continually trying to improve our recipes and shopping techniques (continual process improvement);
• Sharing data, information, and knowledge with family and friends to help them improve their lifestyles (knowledge management and knowledge services); and
• Managing the kitchen to ensure everyone gets the food they need to fuel their day and that the kitchen has the capacity to feed the family (IT service management).

When we come together through participatory governance and address the gaps in our enterprise architecture, we will establish governance entities, and policies and procedures that allow us to manage like a meal planner, and turn our organizational knowledge into cost savings, efficiencies and knowledge services that will create a better lifestyle for constituents nationally and internationally.