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HIP AND WEB 2.0 SAVVY, COLEMAN ALSO GETS THE BIG GOVERNMENT PICTURE She blogs, she Twitters, she Facebooks, but don’t take Casey Coleman for anything but an experienced and savvy federal manager. Coleman, the CIO of the General Services Administration, is fresh off a flurry of presidential transition activities, including provisioning the newcomers with the clutter of paraphernalia for basic work. But a priority for Coleman in serving the new administration is engineering a way to integrate the notion of transparency and collaboration – what Coleman terms “the governmentwide Obama things” – with the tools required to support a large enterprise.
-> Read More
DOD ACQUISITION FINALLY GETTING ATTENTION ACROSS THE BOARD
When, in his first speech to a joint session of Congress, a president mentions "no-bid contracts" and gets a cheer, you know it is time to batten down the hatches. If you thought there was deep meaning in President Obama's reference, you are right. Acquisition is about to be re-reformed. In this issue we'll focus on defense acquisition reform - an activity Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said is a top priority. -> Read More
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Jim Williams
Jim Williams, John C. Johnson, Sallyanne Harper, and other leaders from GSA and GAO to Speak at IRMCO 2009
The U.S. General Services Administration is pleased to announce that leaders from the General Services Administration and the Government Accountability Office, as well as International CIOs will be sharing their thoughts and experience at IRMCO 2009 on April 19-22.
Attend IRMCO, the annual government-only gathering of agency career and political leaders, and hear from:
Jim Williams, Commissioner, Federal Acquisition Service, U.S. General Services Administration
Gene Dodaro, Acting Comptroller, Government Accountability Office
Kathleen Turco, Chief Financial Officer, U.S. General Services Administration
Sallyanne Harper, Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Government Accountability Office
Barnaby Brasseux, Deputy Administrator, U.S. General Services Administration
John Suffolk, CIO, United Kingdom
John C. Johnson, Assistant Commissioner, U.S. General Services Administration
Laurence Millar, CIO, New Zealand
Peter S. Alterman, Deputy Associate Administrator, U.S. General Services Administration
Peter Bruce, Acting CIO, Canada
Plan now to attend IRMCO on April 19-22, 2009 at the Hyatt
Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland, a quick trip
up Route 50.
TRANSPARENCY DOESN'T JUST HAPPEN. IT TAKES A LOT OF WORK
I have a feeling the federal community will grow weary of the words "transparent" and "transparency" in short order. At the moment, being called non-transparent constitutes an epithet. But transparency is neither negative nor positive. It all depends on the context. -> Read More
OBAMA NAMES DOD ACQUISITION CHIEF: A PERSONNEL ROUNDUP
The Cambridge-Washington and Clinton-Obama chords gained another strand with the appointment of Ashton Carter as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition. Kathleen Merrigan is nominated for Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. If there is any thread to these and other appointments, it is experience and reaching back for tried and true people with prior records in public service. -> Read More
Complete Articles for March 1, 2009
Hip and Web 2.0 Savvy, Coleman Also Gets The Big Government Picture
Casey Coleman
She blogs, she Twitters, she Facebooks, but don’t take Casey Coleman for anything but an experienced and savvy federal manager.
Coleman, the CIO of the General Services Administration, is fresh off a flurry of presidential transition activities, including provisioning the newcomers with the clutter of paraphernalia for basic work – cell phones, notebook PCs, personal digital assistants, software and network support.
But a priority for Coleman in serving the new administration is engineering a way to integrate the notion of transparency and collaboration – what Coleman terms “the governmentwide Obama things” – with the tools required to support a large enterprise.
At GSA, workers use IBM Lotus collaboration tools. This gives people instant messaging; shared, wiki-ish documents, and online meetings. But, said Coleman, “the tools are not fully integrated with a single interface. Lots of products give a one-workbench interface for all personal productivity tools. You can see who is online, click to call over IP. It’s a powerful paradigm, and there’s interest in piloting.”
Having this level of tools integration, Coleman believes, would make it easier to establish communities of interest within the agency and across agencies.
Also on Coleman’s immediate agenda is taking GSA’s IT infrastructure consolidation effort, which was started in 2006, to the next level. To date, she said, GSA’s Global IT Operations crew has mashed up 39 contracts and 15 help desks into a single program for voice, data, e-mail, BlackBerry, cell phone and PC support.
“But we need to make sure customer satisfaction, our high touch, doesn’t suffer,” Coleman said. “We have cut costs 15 percent with a 90 percent [customer] satisfaction.” Another benefit: “We can push Microsoft patches out in hours, instead of a month.” Nationalizing the help desk has also leveled out the have/have-not differentials between headquarters or the big regional offices, and the more remote field offices.
Some 130 GSA people across the U.S. doing IT support have been consolidated into Coleman’s office. “We can work virtually on the same project,” Coleman said. Plus the scattered people comprise a test case for GSA’s telework initiative started back when Lurita Doan was the administrator in 2007.
Coleman is also pursuing the integration of GSA’s regional offices in terms of identification and access management via the HSPD-12 cards now held by nearly all GSA employees. Most people’s credentials now admit them to buildings, but Coleman wants the HSPD-12 card to become one of the two factors required for access to networks, the second factor being a password. That means deploying card readers.
“We’ve piloted some technology and developed the business case. Now we’re waiting for funding,” Coleman said.
DOD Acquisition Finally Getting Attention Across The Board
When, in his first speech to a joint session of Congress, a president mentions “no-bid contracts” and gets a cheer, you know it is time to batten down the hatches. In such addresses, every word, every phrase is vetted, weighed, calculated for its effect, and prioritized for its importance. That is, if you thought there was deep meaning in President Obama’s reference, you are right. It wasn’t high up in the speech. It occurred in sentence 231 out of 300, but it was there, and it was not a casual reference.
During the last Democratic presidency, Congress and the Clinton administration forged a new approach to procurement, believing that the acquisition process had become hidebound and process-oriented. With the repealing of the Brooks Act came a new era of more open communication between government and industry, and more discretionary leeway for government buyers.
Now acquisition is about to be re-reformed. Pressure for change is coming from several vectors. In this issue we’ll focus on defense acquisition reform – an activity Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said is a top priority.
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) Stuart Bowen is pushing for a rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) in light of contracting failures throughout the war. His recent “Hard Lessons” report, really a textbook, deals with more than procurement, given that contracting mistakes occurred in a context of cloudy policy and poor execution generally. But Bowen is calling for a new section of the FAR to deal with contingency contracting, as well as sufficient – and sufficiently trained – staff to carry out the new rules. There is more investigation ahead, more reports in the next 18 months or so.
I expect that whatever systems for contingency contracting result from the SIGIR work will have broader application. Given the seeming intractability of schedule and cost overruns for complex acquisitions of all types, methodologies for fairness, transparency and predictable results in contingency contracting are likely to benefit all contracting. To make an analogy, few of us can run a 4-minute mile, but the training techniques of the elite can benefit even the most plodding weekend warrior.
Defense contracting is also in the crosshairs now. S-454, the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act, has been introduced by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Much of the bill language seems to codify common sense, to wit: “The Secretary of Defense shall develop and implement mechanisms to ensure that trade-offs between cost, schedule, and performance are considered as part of the process for developing requirements for major weapon systems.”
On the other hand, you’ll find real innovations in the bill. It would establish a Director of Development, Test and Evaluation to be principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. This job is appointed by the Defense Secretary and is mostly advisory.
But the bill would create a new, presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed position, the Director of Independent Cost Assessment. This person would act as a sort of inspector general of cost estimates for both weapon and IT systems. This person would have direct access to the Defense Secretary, be the recipient of reports from the armed services and other DOD components when significant cost overruns occur, and author periodic reports to the president. The budget for the office of this ICA director would be reported separately in annual DOD budget requests. And to underscore the point, the bill adds, “The Secretary of Defense shall ensure that the Director has sufficient professional staff of military and civilian personnel to enable the Director to carry out the duties and responsibilities of the Director...”
In other words, this could be a powerful position, one with oversight of both defense acquisition teams and contractors.
Levin and McCain also provided a carrot in the bill, in the form of cash bonuses for acquisition personnel who, according to a SecDef-appointed panel, perform with excellence.
Transparency Doesn't Just Happen. It Takes A Lot Of Work
I have a feeling the federal community will grow weary of the words “transparent” and “transparency” in short order. At the moment, being called non-transparent constitutes an epithet. But transparency is neither negative nor positive. It all depends on the context.
Moreover, “web site” is not a synonym for “transparent.” Lots of federal agencies are frustratingly opaque despite having tens of thousands of web pages on their sites. Just try to find the name and phone number of a public affairs officer at some of them. Others are extraordinarily helpful (special kudos to EPA).
Responsibility for transparency falls less to the political appointees coming into the government and less to Congress, which buries profound policy changes deep in 1,000-page bills rather than hold them up for debate. It falls more to the career workforce, starting with Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag’s 62-page memo on how to account for and report activities carrying out the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. There is much good and sensible in this memo, but it creates a lot of work to ensure that accurate information ends up on the Recovery web site.
So far there is precious little information at Recovery, although it conforms to what seems to be the Obama White House web site design template, which includes a big blue panel at the top in which videos of the president’s latest speech can be displayed.
Recovery joins USAspending as a place for citizens to see where their federal dollars are going. Will the administration still be committed to the older site – the creation of which was via a law co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama.
Other potentially transparency-enhancing efforts are also underway. Under construction is a database of contractor misconduct for use by contracting officers. This, too, could be information made available to the public. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has called for waivers to the Buy American Act to be posted online.
Congress might be the organization most in need of greater transparency. The Recovery Act bill is a case in point. When it was finally posted to the Thomas.gov site, hours before the first vote, visitors encountered a scanned-in PDF that was unsearchable. On a Macintosh computer you could print to a new PDF that rendered the document searchable. While the whole Thomas site itself might have been state of the art 10 years ago, it is in need of updating. Most frustrating is that because of the way search results are generated, pages expire in a few minutes. If you want to go back through a legislation search, you find that your earlier results have expired and you must start all over.
The bigger issue is the proliferation of web sites for the public. Each might have been started with the best intentions, but eventually they duplicate the same transparency flaw engendered by each agency and department having its own site. Where does one start to look for information? This could be a big chance for a new generation of www.USA.gov.
Obama Names DOD Acquisition Chief: A Personnel Roundup
The Cambridge-Washington and Clinton-Obama chords gained another strand with the appointment of Ashton Carter as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition. The Harvard Kennedy School professor was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1993 to 1996. He has not one but two DOD Distinguished Service Medals and a Defense Intelligence Medal.
A glance at Carter’s resume wouldn’t immediately indicate a background suited to the acquisition job, but there is broad expertise in a number of defense topics, including management of the nuclear arsenal – improvement of which has been a priority of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Kathleen Merrigan is nominated for Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. She is director of the agriculture, food and environment program at Tufts University, and a proponent of natural and organic food, and of “sustainable” farming. She was Administrator of Agricultural Marketing Service from 1999-2001.
A career official got President Obama’s nod for the top job at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Homeland Security. John Morton will be Assistant Secretary for ICE. He has a long career in criminal prosecution of immigration cases.
Also of note is the appointment of Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney as chair of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board. Devaney helped nail former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He was criminal enforcement chief at the EPA and head of the fraud division at the Secret Service. While at Interior, he exposed the sex-laced scandal at the Minerals Management Service in Denver, Colo.
If there is any thread to these appointments, it is experience and reaching back for tried and true people with prior records in public service. This should bode well for career officials who will have to deal with these appointees. No one is likely to walk into a bureau or agency and have to figure out its mission.
MARTHA JOHNSON Administrator, General Services Administration THE HONORABLE JOHN BERRY Director, Office of Personnel Management VIVEK KUNDRA Federal Chief Information Officer and Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget (invited) DANNY WERFEL Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management (invited) DR. SHELLEY METZENBAUM Associate Director for Personnel & Performance Management, Office of Management and Budget (invited) MICHAEL ROBERTSON White House Liaison, Associate Administrator for Governmentwide Policy and Chief Acquisition Officer, U.S. General Services Administration WILLIAM D. EGGERS Co-Author, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon…Getting Big Things Done in Government; Global Director, Deloitte Research-Public Sector JOHN O'LEARY Co-Author, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon…Getting Big Things Done in Government; Executive Editor of Better, Faster, Cheaper; Research Fellow, Ash Institute of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
FedInsider would like to hear from you. If you have been, or are currently involved in a project that is driving change in the government we’d like to share your experiences with our readers. Contact Kristie Clement at kristie@hosky.com with a brief description of how you are helping to institute positive change within your agency.
