A Strategic Governance Review for Multi-organizational Systems of Education, Training, and Professional Development

To maintain the high quality of its civilian workforce, the Department of Defense (DoD) offers its employees opportunities for education, training, and professional development (ET&D), both within and outside the DoD. The providers and users of these ET&D programs constitute a multi-organizational, multistakeholder system that is loosely coordinated and incompletely understood. In 1998, the DoD Office of the Chancellor for Education and Professional Development was established and tasked with acting as the principal advocate for the academic quality and cost-effectiveness of these ET&D activities. This report develops tools that may be used by the Chancellor’s office and by the sponsors of ET&D activities in overseeing academic quality and cost-effectiveness. Specifically, it outlines an approach for describing and evaluating external governance in such a multi-organizational system of ET&D. The approach consists of two main tasks: a structural analysis by which governance arrangements are mapped, and an implementation audit by which effectiveness is assessed, based on operational evidence. While developed for the Chancellor’s office, this approach has applications in higher education and corporate ET&D systems.