Summaries for February 1, 2010

LISA SCHLOSSER: CIO, CYBER SOLDIER, DATA SHARING MAVEN
Soon after returning from a year of active duty as an Army reserve officer, Lisa Schlosser left her job as CIO of the Housing and Urban Affairs Department to join EPA. Now, as Director of the Office of Information Collection, she finds herself at the center of the signature data-use initiative of the Obama administration.  -> Read More

2011 BUDGET SHOWS EVOLUTION OF IT MANAGEMENT THINKING
By any measure, the 2011 budget request from the Obama administration is big. But when it comes to federal spending on IT in the next fiscal, it's clear that the days of high single-digit or double-digit growth are over. Spending will be approximately $80 billion, a slight increase over enacted 2010 spending. But the numbers don't tell the whole story.  -> Read More

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2010 IRMCO AWARDS NOMINATIONS
Don’t miss the opportunity to applaud agency leadership by nominating government colleagues for the annual IRMCO Award.

The IRMCO Award is a prestigious honor given to those who have demonstrated exceptional ability to operate across organizational boundaries to improve the Government's services to its citizens. Winners will be celebrated at GSA's IRMCO conference, April 11-14, at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. IRMCO Award winners receive a monetary prize of $5,000 for the team award and $2,000 for the individual award.

To submit a nomination for the IRMCO Award, go to www.irmco.gov or the IRMCO Awards page at http://www.irmco.gov/news/2010_awards.htm. The submission deadline is February 23.

For questions about IRMCO Award nominations contact Veronica Tolliver at 202-501-2825 or veronica.tolliver@gsa.gov. To register for IRMCO visit www.irmco.gov. For further information, email Peg Hosky at peg@hosky.com.

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Smart Budgeting: Decision Making in a Challenging Budget Climate
No agency in the US government operates alone and neither do you. Attend Smart Budgeting: Decision Making in a Challenging Budget Climate on Wednesday, March 3 at 7:30 AM at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. where a panel of government officials and industry experts will share ideas for tackling the management of the government budget formulation and execution process.

The expert panel includes Chuck Christopherson, Senior Vice President of Industry Solutions, SAP, and former Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer, Department of Agriculture (USDA), Dennis Taitano, Director, Office of Financial Operations, Assistant Secretary of the Navy , Daniel Fletcher, Deputy Chief Financial Officer, Department of Interior, Thad Juszczak, Director in the Grant Thornton LLP Global Public, and moderator Chris Dorobek, Federal News Radio Co-Anchor, The Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris

To register visit http://www.FedInsider.com/smart-budgeting-2. Smart Budgeting is open to government employees only.

JOHNSON TO LEAD A GSA WITH A LONG AGENDA
It's not easy having your life on hold for nearly a year, especially when the goal requires you to not say a word publicly (or privately if you are smart about Washington). But Martha Johnson stuck out a long Senate hold on her nomination to be Administrator of the General Services Administration. Finally last week, following a successful cloture vote on the debate, the hold by Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) ended and Johnson is reporting for duty.  -> Read More

INSOURCING OR OUTSOURCING? BOTH OF THE ABOVE
Remember the 1970s TV drama, Upstairs, Downstairs? Today a White House series might be titled, Insource, Outsource: The Lives of Federal Managers and the Contractors They Hire. Much speculation has surrounded the Obama administration's call for a return to more federal employees performing inherently governmental work.  -> Read More

• Lisa Schlosser: CIO, Cyber Soldier, Data Sharing Maven

  Lisa Schlosser

  Soon after returning from a year of active duty as an Army reserve officer, Lisa Schlosser left her job as CIO of the Housing and Urban Affairs Department to join EPA. Now, as Director of the Office of Information Collection, she finds herself at the center of the signature data-use initiative of the Obama administration.

  In December EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the agency had decided that EPA would go ahead and regulate production of carbon dioxide by large industrial sources, having determined that CO2 is dangerous to human health. This was a politically controversial move. Congress may overrule EPA or change its plan; some lawmakers have said that EPA is overstepping its authority.

  But in the meantime, a key step in the regulatory process is the collection of emissions information from facilities that produce 25,000 tons of CO2 annually. And so the agency has moved ahead on taking in the information from utilities and certain large manufacturers. (Here's an abstract of Corporate Parent and NAICS Code in the Greenhouse Gas Mandatory Reporting Rule Requirements.)

  "We work with the Office of Air at EPA to define the best way to collect this information and disseminate it," Schlosser said. "We're working on the data schema and its multiple elements now." Data collection was to start last month, and the EPA expects the first reports to be due in March 2011. Most other pollutant reporting, much of which the EPA has been conducting for decades, actually consists of industry reports to the states, which in turn roll up their information to EPA. For CO2, the reporting will go directly to EPA. This promises to be a complex data collection program, in part because the agency is asking for corporate parent names of companies and sites that fall under the reporting rule.

  Beyond the new CO2 data stream, Schlosser said, her office is looking for ways to "more effectively engage the agency on enterprise data management," in response to the Open Government Directive from the Office of Management and Budget. Like other agencies, EPA is adding its data sets to the Data.gov site. And, Schlosser said, it is looking at ways to separate legacy data from applications, with an eye towards making data reusable for applications built by anyone. "So there's more emphasis on the data itself," she said, including how it is architected and tagged. Numerous publications already use EPA data to create rankings of, for example, the 10 most polluted cities. There's an iPhone application that combines geographic position data with EPA information to let people find the nearest stimulus-funded cleanup project.

  She pointed out that EPA has worked under right-to-know laws since 1986, so applications such as MyEnvironment, available on the agency's home page, already make data easily available to the public. The agency's National Environmental Information Exchange Network, used by the federal government, states, tribes and territories, provided the architecture for FederalReporting.gov. Schlosser worked with Earl Devaney, the chairman of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board, and Danny Werfel, the Controller at OMB, to devise the back end of FedReporting, which was built by Smartronix, the contractor for Recovery.gov.

  While overseas, Schlosser was assigned to the Army's computer emergency response team, or CERT. She monitored LandWarNet, the Army's segment of the Global Information Grid, for possible cyber security breaches, traveling to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

  "It was interesting to see the caliber of our warfighters today," she said. “I was inspired by the next generation -- their brains and how professionalized our military has become."

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• 2011 Budget Shows Evolution of IT Management Thinking

  By any measure, the 2011 budget request from the Obama administration is big. But when it comes to federal spending on IT in the next fiscal, it's clear that the days of high single-digit or double-digit growth are over. Spending will be approximately $80 billion, a slight increase over enacted 2010 spending.

  But the numbers don't tell the whole story. The administration has a deep commitment to using IT to supporting its goals of transparency, collaboration and participation, data-driven decision-making, and better citizen service.

  For the IT community, the most important thing to keep in mind is that opportunities for contractors are by no means disappearing, but the mix of acquisitions is changing. There will be fewer big-dollar, grand-design systems integration projects but more lower cost projects. Budget documents specifically call out data.gov, the IT dashboard, Apps.gov, and CyberScope (for cyber security reporting) as examples of its "commitment to changing the way government works." What these projects have in common is a high degree of leveraging of data for small investments. And it is the kind of project you'll be seeing throughout government. This is a logical development, given that the human input -- requirements planning, system design, testing and implementation -- are the most costly parts of IT now, with hardware not only ever cheaper but being replaced by infrastructure/software-as-a-service.

  The administration, in the Analytical Perspectives/Special Topics section of the budget, spells out its priorities clearly. Interestingly, it doesn't toss out all of the Bush-era President's Management Agenda items and in fact references some of them even as it tries to improve on them. So the efforts of previous years are not wasted. Nor is the investment roster changing all that radically. Agencies' 807 major IT investment in 2009 will drop slightly to 781 this year, and rise back to 809 in 2011. In fact, requested (not enacted) spending for IT in 2009, the last purely Bush administration budget, was $71 billion, so the requested $79.3 billion for 2011 shows, if anything, a refreshed commitment to better government through technology.

  With respect to how management approaches are evolving, the most notable case in point is the Program Assessment Rating Tool, or PART, of the Bush Office of Management and Budget. The Obama administration officials feel PART was not granular nor frequent enough in its application. It has been superseded by the High-Priority Performance Goal Initiative, in which each agency has been asked to identify performance goals that are measurable and have an impact visible to their constituencies. IT investment strategies are aimed at supporting the performance goals. Some ongoing initiatives are simply continuing, such as the Trusted Internet Connection and Core Desktop Configuration.

  Thus the key IT management priorities for 2011 include these:

  • Less infrastructure spending agency-to-agency. In the administration's words, "This new approach will redesign IT in key business areas from the ground up, based on the concept of central Federal platforms designed to streamline processes and modernize information technology services." Translation: More shared functions, more consolidation of data centers, and more use of cloud computing. In many ways this is a restating of the earlier Lines of Business initiative, but with the added emphasis on cloud.

  (And speaking of cloud, agency managers are going to have to come to grips with their security concerns, learn to write service level agreements that specify and verify security, and get on with it. A project between the Air Force and IBM to engineer security in cloud computing settings should help this effort along.)

  • Renewed emphasis on aggregate federal buying power. Here again, the new team references the General Services Administration's Smart Buy software acquisition program, adding that it's "limited in scope and much more can be done." Apps.gov falls into the much more category.
  • Larger and more skilled Federal IT workforce. The Analytical Perspectives says that this year, the CIO Council will conduct a survey of the IT workforce (GS-2210 designations) to help CIOs gage their future needs. And it promises streamlined hiring processes to get new people in to replace the anticipated 2,500 retirees out of a workforce of 70,000. Perhaps more significantly to CIOs, the administration wants to keep pushing use of online, Web 2.0 collaboration tools to enable IT staff to work across agency boundaries.
  • Customer service. Simplification of the online student loan application process is the reference project here. The administration cites its goals of streamlining veterans benefits processing and status-checking of citizenship applications as examples of the types of projects it will be pushing agencies to do. Here again, you can see evolution in approaches pioneered by the e-government projects of the early Bush years. Also on the agenda is what OMB is calling a citizen services dashboard to highlight "the top services delivery touch points for each major federal department and agency." Think on-time airline reporting.
  • Cyber security. Evolution once again, as the administration asks agencies to zero in on the metrics that most directly affect security. Reporting under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) is enhanced by the online collection site CyberScope, launched in October. (The naming is a bit unfortunate, as an online search of the term will show.) CyberScope is an important step in getting around the major weakness in FISMA. Namely, that an agency can have great FISMA scores while having under-secured networks.
  • Greater willingness to cancel or time-out projects significantly over budget or late. Kundra said this week that a portion of a $50 million part of the IT budget will devoted to conducting Tech-Stat Accountability sessions, reviews of such projects by the agency CIO and other interested parties such as program managers and finance people. It's a bit of old wine in a new bottle; think DOD's Major Automated Information Systems Acquisition Review Councils of yesteryear. But Kundra said the sessions have already started, and that he personally will be attending many of them.

  Washington is embroiled in bitter partisan arguments these days. Like last weekend's snowstorm that thumped the region, the debates seem worse than anyone can remember. But at least in the IT and good-government realm, the 2011 budget and the management imperatives it outlines show that the administration, as it enters its second year, is building on 20 years of e-government efforts.

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• Johnson To Lead a GSA With a Long Agenda

  It's not easy having your life on hold for nearly a year, especially when the goal requires you to not say a word publicly, or even privately if you are smart about Washington. But Martha Johnson stuck out a long Senate hold on her nomination to be Administrator of the General Services Administration. Finally last week, following a successful cloture vote on the debate, the hold by Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) ended and Johnson is reporting for duty. Perhaps return is a more accurate word: Johnson was GSA chief of staff under Clinton-era Administrator David Barram.

  While it is true that Johnson missed some important GSA initiatives occurring under the Obama administration, such as the launch of Apps.gov and the handoff of the cloud computing football by Office of Management and Budget CIO Vivek Kundra, Johnson joins with plenty to do.

  Apps.gov itself still has a ways to go before it is fully built out. The OMB says it wants to establish another online storefront for collaboration tools, and that is likely to be tasked to GSA. Following that will be an online store from which the public can obtain government-related applications for mobile devices like the iPhone. The agency is in the midst of trying to upgrade its governmentwide E-Gov Travel Service. Johnson will have to oversee the "crowdsourcing" approach GSA is employing. The agency is about to acquire 65,000 new vehicles. This is ordinarily a routine matter of jellybean Chevys and Fords, but now hybrids and electric vehicles are entering the market in greater numbers and GSA has committed to helping "green" the federal auto fleet. Also on the green front, GSA is in the midst of overseeing a massive, nationwide effort to improve the energy and water-use efficiency of public buildings with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars.

  Moreover, the timeline for agency uptake of GSA's Networx program is at the critical stage. There are questions about the price-effectiveness of some of the agency's contract programs, which face stiff competition from governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) of other agencies. Even the gigantic eventual construction of a new Homeland Security Department and of a new, stimulus-sponsored data center for the Social Security Administration will be newsworthy -- hopefully good news.

  Numerous stories in recent weeks have talked about less quantifiable, and also less verifiable, morale problems at GSA stemming from the departure of some senior staff and the lack of a confirmed administrator since the departure of Lurita Doan in 2008. Because of its clearly-defined mission areas, my feeling is that on a day-to-day basis, GSA functions just fine. What a Senate-confirmed, permanent administrator will bring is the clout on Capitol Hill to get budget and mission priorities listened to and a needed imprimatur to strategic planning efforts. Johnson also brings some of the good feelings of the Barram years, when GSA was at a high point thanks to its role in the Reinventing Government initiatives of Vice President Al Gore. In those years, even exotic subjects like futuristic cubicle design and furnishings concerned people at GSA. It was a time of stellar growth in federal credit cards and Multiple Award Schedule sales. All things seemed possible.

  GSA is not off the rails or in any way at a standstill. But it is ripe for new and confirmed leadership with experience. With Johnson, it will get that plus someone who knows the agency from the inside out and, consequently, just what it is capable of.

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• Insourcing or Outsourcing? Both of the Above

  Remember the 1970s TV drama, Upstairs, Downstairs? Today a White House series might be titled, Insource, Outsource: The Lives of Federal Managers and the Contractors They Hire.

  Much speculation has surrounded the Obama administration's call for a return to more federal employees performing inherently governmental work. Indeed, early on in the administration, the Office of Management and Budget specifically asked agencies to reduce contracting dollars. In May, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn called on DOD to cut contracted services by making insourcing "a metric in the Department's Performance Budget submission." In July, OMB released its memo on managing the multisector workforce.

  Congress has helped by banning A-76 public-private competitions.

  In reality, the approach has not been as draconian as contractors originally feared. One often-discounted sentence in the OMB memo states, "Contractors provide vital expertise to the government and agencies must continue to strengthen their acquisition practices so they can take efficient and effective advantage of the marketplace to meet taxpayer needs." To be sure, the memo ordered agencies to rethink their contracting strategies. But it hardly ended contracting.

  That's why one provision in the president's 2011 budget request, released last week, is so fascinating. In calling for the end of the multi-billion dollar, moon-bound Constellation program at NASA, the administration would greatly increase the space agency's dependence on contractors for what seems a clear case of inherently governmental. Namely, ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station, which gets a new lease on life in the Obama proposal. The budget calls for outsourcing to commercial entities the space "taxi" requirement unfilled after the end of the Space Shuttle program.

  Constellation has been a bane to NASA--over budget and behind schedule. More importantly, this administration is less interested in another moon landing, at least in the next decade, than it is in expanding science in space. And, if truth be told, unmanned telescopes, sensor-laden satellites and Mars Rover-like instruments crawling over heavenly bodies yield exponentially more scientific information at a tenth the cost of manned missions. 

  The merits of this or that NASA future plan aside, what this proposal shows is that there is less doctrinal opposition to contracting than perhaps many in the contracting community feared.

  The cloud computing push is also in good measure a contracted activity. Case in point: A Labor Department decision in 2008 to move its financial system to facilities operated by Global Computer Enterprises in a seven-year deal. It recently went live. It may not be a classic cloud setup, but it is an infrastructure that isn't the government's hosting a crucial back-office application.

  Another area in which contractor support is likely to increase is in federal statistics. The administration is committed to improving the output of the bureaus whose primary product is statistical data. This is in keeping with the overall themes of data-decision decision making and making more data available to the public. Those agencies include:

  • Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)
  • Bureau of Justice Statistics
  • Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
  • Bureau of Transportation Statistics
  • Census Bureau
  • Economic Research Service (ERS)
  • Energy Information Administration (EIA)
  • National Agricultural Statistics Service
  • National Center for Education Statistics
  • National Center for Health Statistics
  • Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics at Social Security
  • Sciences Resources Statistics Division of the National Science Foundation
  • Stations of Income Division at the IRS

  The BEA will be tasked with creating an Economic Dashboard; BLS must expand its Occupational Employment Statistics program. The ERS gets the job of mashing up federal spatial data from a long list of statistical programs to pinpoint communities and health related to food. The EIA will expand the detail it gets in surveys of household energy use. And so it goes through the list. New data sets, new web sites, new survey and sampling programs. Many of these will require contracted augmentation, as the creation of Recovery.gov and FederalReporting.gov showed. Only the Census bureau's budget, by far the largest of the statistical community, gets reduced in 2011, and that's because the decennial count will be over and 150,000 temporary enumerators dismissed.

  The bottom line is that, while the administration in 2011 remains committed to insourcing and development of the contracting and technical federal workforces, but -- as noted in the second story of this issue -- there will be insourcing and outsourcing.

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