The word transparency, although overused lately, is a powerful one. True transparency of costs, performance and processes lead to accountability in the public sector. In the absence of transparency, accountability is the most meaningless word you'll find in a vision statement or strategy document.

Don't confuse publishing an annual budget with transparency of cost. I do not know the first thing about accounting or economics, but I do know that budget isn't cost. Budget is what someone higher up says you have to accomplish your mission. Cost is how much it takes to accomplish the mission.

The dissonance between budget and cost can be positive — when budget exceeds costs — or negative. When you do not distinguish between budget and cost, what you get in the budget is what you spend and what you mistakenly believe is what you need to deliver the services. The budget you receive becomes the cost of doing business.

For example, Organization X in an agency adjudicates claims. The type of claim is immaterial. The agency will tell you it takes a certain amount of time to process or adjudicate a claim. Increase the budget by 5 percent and it doesn't follow that you will increase the speed of the process or the quality of the output by 5 percent or any predictable factor. Decrease the budget by 5 percent and the claims-processing time will not necessarily decrease by 5 percent, nor will the output drop by 5 percent.

The manager of Organization X won't be able to tell you what will result if the budget is cut by 5 percent because she does not know the real cost of each unit of output or the cost of the activities that make up the production cycle. Consequently, she cannot crosswalk the increase or decrease in budget to tasks or process steps. All this manager can do is exhort employees to work harder or work smarter, but she won't be able to provide direction on what should be done to absorb the cut without limiting services.

Here is where the manager who understands the full cost of the process and manages accordingly has an advantage over the leader who simply exhorts employees to work harder and smarter. The informed manager knows where the least effort and least disruption to the customer will yield the greatest returns.

An organization where employees take a process view of the service they deliver is the organization that can best adapt to changing budgets and new requirements. Employees must be trained to take a process view of their mission, and the organization's compensation and award system must reinforce this view.

One of the quickest ways to turn an organization around is to tie individual compensation to process capability and process costs. The employee who knows that whether it takes six weeks or six months to adjudicate a claim, there will be little or no difference in his compensation has no incentive to improve the process.

Training alone isn't enough. Employees must be equipped with the tools they need for process improvement.

It is an indication of the degree to which transparency has been lacking that it has become a buzzword. Taxpayers, not stockholders, are the government's investors. Everything we do is on behalf of the taxpayer, so why should the public have to demand transparency? Because of the other side of the equation: accountability.

The public wants to know how its tax dollars are being spent, especially now, when issues like health reform and energy independence require billions of dollars to address.

Where will this money come from if government doesn't become more efficient?

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Joyce M. Short is president of Government Shared Services LLC, based in Louisiana, and is the former deputy director of NASA's Shared Services Center.