Summaries for February 1, 2009

HOW GPO IS TRANSFORMING ITS VENERABLE ONLINE DOCUMENT SYSTEM
The very sight of the Government Printing Office, on Washington's North Capitol St., seems to call out, "19th century bureaucracy." It hearkens back to an era of men in aprons setting type and running printing presses.  The GPO still prints and binds, but what it mostly does is electronic. According to GPO Chief Information Officer Mike Wash, this week a new system called FDsys - for Federal Digital System - will start to replace the mid-1990s era GPOAccess system for storing and locating government documents.    -> Read More

WITH SO MANY IN POWER MAD AT THE PRIVATE SECTOR, WATCH OUT
"I'm mad." Thus spoke Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), sounding for all the world like a wronged sorority sister. "We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street kicking sand into the face of American taxpayers," she continued on the Senate floor.  To combat the "shameless" "arrogance and greed" on Wall Street McCaskill introduced a new piece of legislation called the Chief Executive Office Pay Act of 2009. -> Read More

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AS IT MORPHS, CYBER SECURITY CHALLENGE IS ALSO GETTING BIGGER
Developments on the federal cyber security front show that government and industry are going to have to work more closely to ensure software systems that have a modicum of security. Just last week, the Office of Personnel Management was vexed by a breach of www.USAJobs.gov. The event proves the need for carefully drafted service level agreements on security and a delineation of responsibilities. -> Read More

THIS JUST IN: PERSONNEL CHANGES PICK UP STEAM
As fast-moving as the new Obama administration might have wanted to appear, it is finding what all its recent predecessors have also found: It's not so easy to fill several thousand patronage jobs. Some agencies have their new appointees in place while others struggle to find the right person for the job. -> Read More

• How GPO Is Transforming Its Venerable Online Document System

  Mike Wash

  The very sight of the Government Printing Office, on Washington's North Capitol St., seems to call out, "19th century bureaucracy." A pair of enormous Gothic, brick piles, the main buildings hearken back to an era of men in aprons setting type and running printing presses.

  The GPO still prints and binds. In fact it employs some of the last living craftsman who can hand bind a book in leather for the ages. But what GPO mostly does, and has for a decade, is electronic. And just as typesetting using cast lead gave way to digital composition, electronic documentation of government activities has itself moved through several technological generations since the early days before Extensible Markup Language, or XML.

  According to GPO Chief Information Officer Mike Wash, this week a new system called FDsys - for Federal Digital System - will start to replace the mid-1990s era GPOAccess system for storing and locating government documents. You can see a public beta site here.

  GPO Access is a web site, all right, but it lacks contemporary search functionality. "The tool is dated and difficult to use" for the librarians and researchers looking for Federal Register and other government publications, Wash said. "It dates back to 1994, before structured data came of age. So it's just a storage repository."

  What's new with FDsys? In a word, searchability. That's because all of the 50 libraries of material now published and stored by GPO are being converted one-by-one to XML. Wash said the eight largest and most used are the first to go through the XML mill the GPO has set up. They include the Congressional Record, Hearings and Bills, Federal Register and Presidential Documents.

  "We developed a document management protocol, then developed a parser that populates an XML database," Wash said. It takes a couple of days to run a collection through the parser, he said. He estimated all of the collections will be converted to XML by mid-year.

  The project, which has cost GPO about $20 million, is a combination of custom developed and commercial software. The document management system is Documentum from EMC Corp; GPO has used contractors with expertise in Documentum, such as Beach Street Consulting of Washington, D.C., as well as web page usability consultants.

  Once rendered into XML, the documents are loaded into an Oracle Corp. database management system, to which GPO has applied search technology from FAST Search & Transfer, the Norwegian company that was acquired by Microsoft last year.

  Much more than technology has changed, Wash said. The Documentum system "helps with our production process. Now it is print-centric. Just before press, a [Portable Document Format] was made and stored in GPOAccess." As more documents arrive electronically, that will reverse the print-first orientation.

  FDsys will eventually affect the way Congress and executive branch agencies prepare and send their documents. Wash said GPO's own internal documents will be the first to be submitted electronically. The parser can handle such electronic formats as Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and QuarkExpress pages. And the system will enable not just input, but also output in a variety of formats.

  By contrast, the Congressional Record is prepared with a tool called MicroComp, the roots of which date to Wang word processors of the 1970s. The vendors and developers are long gone, Wash said, although miraculously the program runs on Microsoft Vista, so Hill staff can at least use new PCs. Modernizing that will be the next project, with an RFP some time this year.

  "We'll start with Bills, and that's one of the easier ones. Later we'll tackle the Code of Federal Regulations. We hope to be on the street with a procurement in the next couple of months," Wash said.

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• With So Many in Power Mad At the Private Sector, Watch Out

  "I'm mad." Thus spoke Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), sounding for all the world like a wronged sorority sister.

  "We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street kicking sand into the face of American taxpayers," she continued on the Senate floor.

  She went on to list a litany of acts, principally the granting of large bonuses and the acquisition of a new corporate jet (since canceled) at Merrill Lynch just days before its shotgun wedding with Bank of America.

  "They don't get it. These people are idiots," said the senator.

  "So here's what this bill is going to do," she went on, by way of introducing a new piece of legislation.

  "This is called the Chief Executive Officer Pay Act of 2009. And it's very simple. You want taxpayers to help you survive? You want the people at your financial institution to have a job tomorrow? Then you're gonna have to limit everyone's pay in the company to the same salary the president of the United States makes. Is that so unreasonable...$400,000 a year? I don't think that sounds like such a bad deal."

  "These guys...should not be making more than the president of the United States," Sen. McCaskill added.

  Dripping with sarcasm, she dared them to say out loud that it's a hardship to make less than $400,000 a year while "they are on the hook to us."

  And on it went like that. Pillorying corporate executives on the floor of the Senate may have precedent, but not so the level of handouts to corporate America flowing from Washington these days.

  President Obama, in his Saturday radio address presaging a revamped Troubled Asset Relief Program, echoed McCaskill's sentiments, referring to "shameless" "arrogance and greed" on Wall Street.

  I relate all this just to give you an idea of how corporate America is regarded by the power in Washington these days. I see two problems.

  One, Sen. McCaskill and others haven't stopped to question the wisdom of spending trillions on various bailouts in the first place.

  Second, and closer to home, it is a short step from pillorying and the imposition of controls on one set of corporations "on the hook" to the federal government to doing the same to another set of corporations -those selling to the federal government. Aren't contractors also "on the hook" to the government at some level as well? Keep in mind, Sen. McCaskill - a former state auditor - has been appointed to chair a special subcommittee of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee being organized to look into Iraq contracting.

  There will be plenty of fodder to shoot at contractors, should the crusade on the economic royalists (to borrow Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase) start gathering steam. Consider:

  • The Federal Acquisition Regulation Council is considering new rules under FAR Case 2008-019 that could create vast liabilities for delivery of counterfeit or faulty IT products. It would require manufacturers and resellers to certify the authenticity of the components in what they sell. As the Information Technology Association of America/American Electronics Association has vociferously pointed out, the proposed rule making is too open-ended with respect to liability.
  • At the request of Congress, the Government Accountability Office looked at the corporate practice of setting up offshore subsidiaries for the purposes of tax avoidance. This is perfectly legal, but we are entering an age of class warfare in which politics leads the list of considerations by CEOs. The report found that 63 of the 100 largest federal contractors in fact have tax-avoiding subsidiaries. GAO made no judgment on such subsidiaries, leaving that to Congress.
  • Another GAO report detailed the growth in spending by the federal government on contractors. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) called contractor spending at $532 billion in 2008 a "black hole for taxpayer dollars." It didn't help that a Washington Post columnist, Joe Davidson, wrote, "As a group, federal contractors are quickly getting obese at taxpayers' expense." In fact, more than the dollars will put federal contracting in the spotlight. That's because, as the $532 billion figure came out, so did GAO's annual troubled programs update. Many of the problems cited are purely managerial, but a lot of them involve contractors. These include the 2010 Census (added to the list this year), Defense Department Business Transformation and the IRS Modernization program.

  There is not a lot contractors can do to change the general atmosphere. But a wise policy is to do what they should do anyway, which is work closely with the federal customer to reach a mutually agreed-on set of requirements for each contract and service level agreements - then stick to them.

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• As It Morphs, Cyber Security Challenge Is Also Getting Bigger

  Developments on the federal cyber security front show that government and industry are going to have to work more closely to ensure software systems that have a modicum of security.

  Just last week, the Office of Personnel Management was vexed by a breach of www.USAJobs.gov, which is posting this notice. But, of course, the site technology is really that of Monster.com. OPM said that contact and account information was taken, including " user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data. " No resumes or Social Security Numbers were taken. Apparently the way in was via a phishing e-mail that must have been pretty convincing. Still, ITWire.com and others pointed out that the data taken is sufficient to become the basis of even more convincing phishing attacks.

  The event proves the need for carefully drafted service level agreements on security and a delineation of responsibilities.

  At another level, security breaches within purely governmental or private sector domains can cause damage to both. As retired Lt. Gen. Harry Raduegue, now with Deloitte, pointed out in a recent interview, "truckloads" of data are regularly purloined from technology and aerospace companies. Such data losses have national security implications, as would someone successfully monkeying around with a water, electrical or telecommunications chunk of infrastructure. This is why the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44 th Presidency recommends more federal regulation of the security standards used by industry.

  As a major purchaser of custom and packaged software, the federal government is in a powerful position to drive improvement of software practices. To some extent it has been for decades. Federal managers, whether in acquisition, program management or IT, should check the latest list of 25 common software programming errors that result in security breaches, or at least the potential for them. The consensus list was developed by the SANS Institute and Mitre Corp., working with 28 other federal and private organizations.

  The obvious question in reading the report is why, in 2009, a half century since the world started tilting towards software dependence, a quarter century since the PC started to become ubiquitous and nearly 15 years since the multitudes started going online, programming is still so much more art than science.

  And the large organizations are still not past the garden variety - pun intended - worm threat. Just last week, Microsoft was working to get its arms around the Conficker botnet worm, which had triggered an alert from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. As of the end of last week, CNET reported nine million computers had been infected. Also lacking a comprehensive solution is the class of dumb user security breaches, such as the used MP3 player that ended up at an Oklahoma thrift store and purchased by a New Zealander for $9. It contained 2005 U.S. military information from Iraq.

  So the low level attacks keep occurring even as the sophistication of the high level ones increases. As FedInsider has reported, what will shape up as policy during, if not because of, the Obama administration is a more practical approach to security oversight, one that emphasizes the real state of preparation against known threats, as opposed to management processes.

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• This Just In: Personnel Changes Pick Up Steam

  As fast-moving as the new Obama administration might have wanted to appear, it is finding what all its recent predecessors have also found: It's not so easy to fill several thousand patronage jobs. At this writing, Health and Human Services secretary nominee Tom Daschle's bid was turning into a slog as evidence of possible tax evasion came to light. That means policy positions throughout HHS will have to wait.

  On the other hand, Secretary Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security wasted no time in getting down to business. The department issued a newsy press release describing how Napolitano was requesting oral reports on the status of projects in critical infrastructure protection, risk analysis, state and local intelligence sharing, and transportation security - all due at the end of last week. And she called for a written report from state, local and tribal integration, due later this month. By last week she had issued 11 so-called action directives.

  Of course, much of it will be like pushing string uphill, but at least the secretary is making some personnel decisions. Her first appointments were in legal and public affairs. But she is, for the time being, keeping Deputy Secretary Paul A. Schneider as deputy secretary and Ralph Basham as commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

  President Obama has gone with new, but acting, heads of a couple of agencies, notably replacing Jim Williams with Paul Prouty at the General Services Administration. Prouty comes from the buildings side, not the IT side of GSA. That may signal the president's desire to see all federal buildings retrofitted with energy-saving lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Prouty is the third acting administrator since the departure of Lurita Doan last April.

  Also in an acting capacity at the top of an agency is Richard Besser at the Centers for Disease Control. A physician, he replaced another acting head who was briefly in place for the departing Dr. Julie Gerberding.

  At the Office of Management and Budget - where the web site has been scrubbed down to the bones - several new appointees have joined since inauguration, including:

  • Jeffrey Liebman, executive associate director, out of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government
  • Xavier de Souza Briggs, associate director for general government programs, out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Urban Studies and Planning department
  • Steve Kosiak, associate director for defense and international affairs
  • Kenneth Baer, associate director for communications and strategic planning.

  Still no word on the president's choice for chief technology officer, but there is a web site devoted to this topic.

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The word cloud below was created at www.wordle.net. It has processed the text of President Obama's Jan. 31 radio address. The cloud displays the 75 most-used words in the address, with the size being proportional to the frequency a word occurs.