Summaries for March 15, 2009

AT LEAST THIS CORNER OF THE BANKING WORLD IS WORKING PROPERLY
The world of the banking titans might be in shambles, but Bajinder Paul is making tidy progress at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an agency of the Treasury Department. His mantra is “transformational results” for the OCC unit heads, the business owners. And achieving these results, Paul said, using a business-driven IT architecture will give the agency’s IT the flexibility and agility required for functions needed in the economic and banking crises now absorbing so much government effort . -> Read More

ADMINISTRATION NEEDS TO ANSWER: IS ANYBODY IN CHARGE HERE?
At first glance, you might not see much in common between the sagas of Rod Beckstrom and the Air Force’s aerial refueling tanker replacement. But they have a lot in common. Beckstrom was director of the National Cyber Security Center at Homeland Security before resigning last week in a huff. The tanker story is even more tortured. Both are examples of simmering turf wars that the administration must make some decisions about. -> Read More

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Beth Noveck

CXO's and OMB Dialogue at IRMCO 2009

U.S. General Services Administration Welcomes OMB Leadership as they Unveil New Administration Policy at IRMCO 2009 on April 19-22.

Other speakers include:

• Beth Noveck, Deputy Director for Open Government, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
• Gene Dodaro, Acting Comptroller, Government Accountability Office
• Barnaby Brasseux, Deputy Administrator, GSA
• Robert "Moose" Cobb, Inspector General, NASA
• Sallyanne Harper, CIO and CFO, Government Accountability Office
• Kathleen Turco, CFO, GSA
• John Suffolk, CIO, United Kingdom
• Laurence Millar, CIO, New Zealand
• Peter Bruce, Deputy 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, and capture discounted rates of $1170 including meals and accommodations. Register now at www.irmco.gov.

TECHNOLOGY INTENSITY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS GROWING
As last week drew to a close, fear, uncertainty and doubt dominated the federal IT scene. Even as Vivek Kundra, the new Federal CIO and Director, E-Government and Information Technology, was giving a speech at FOSE, FBI agents were arresting one of his former deputies and a contractor back at the District of Columbia government. Whether Kundra will survive this scandal – even though he was reportedly not under investigation himself – is still an open question, and an important one. -> Read More

2010 BUDGET WILL GIVE BETTER VIEW OF OUTSOURCING FUTURE
The spending levels by the federal government would be alarming if they weren’t so darn good for IT. By itself, the omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2009 signed last week by President Obama doesn’t add a lot to IT budgets – that will wait until details of the 2010 bill come out next month. Except for the Defense Department, there will be double digit budget increases almost across the board. -> Read More

• At Least This Corner of the Banking World is Working Properly

  Bajinder Paul

  The world of the banking titans might be in shambles, but Bajinder Paul is making tidy progress at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an agency of the Treasury Department. Its 3,200 employees handle the chartering, regulation and supervision of national banks, and it dates to 1863.

  Paul is OCC’s CIO. He reports to the Comptroller – the head of the agency – as things are supposed to be set up. His mantra is “transformational results” for the OCC unit heads, the business owners. And achieving these results, Paul said, using a business-driven IT architecture will give the agency’s IT the flexibility and  agility required for functions needed in the economic and banking crises now absorbing so much government effort, namely analytics, information sharing, scaling and collaboration.

  “We’re implementing a business-driven architecture. It goes to leveraging IT as a business enabler and driving the highest levels of customer service,” said Paul.

  For Paul, his project to modernize IT at the OCC has what he called five legs.

  First is what he termed “infrastructure optimization” aimed at increasing productivity of OCC’s 2,000 bank examiners who work in the field. For these mobile users Paul wants to be able to “provide secure access from any place, any time, on any platform.”

  Second is sharing and collaboration. Examiners don’t work isolated from one another. They exchange information and findings, including documents, as teams.

  Third is “enterprise systems modernization.” Paul describes this effort as “solutions that meet needs across lines of business in OCC” such as resource or personnel planning. An important line of business is the fielding of 70,000 yearly inquiries, including those from unhappy customers of banks, who contact the Comptroller’s office. A government-owned and staffed call center in Houston handles the incoming complaints (which arrive by phone or e-mail.)

  Fourth is data-driven management. Various data sources that occur in bulk, such as loan or mortgage information, are subject to business intelligence or analytics applications.

  Fifth is what Paul called “optimization of service delivery capability.” That is, can the IT shop use service level agreements with contractors to get timely and predictable deliverables?

  Is it working?

  Paul pointed to an example of where the enterprise systems modernization helped out the OCC’s largest bank supervision business unit, the one overseeing the Bank of America and Wells Fargo-sized institutions. With a large team of examiners looking over these banks, “the challenge was to have the right skill sets and other resources on demand. The agency needed an automated solution to do that,” Paul said. “In six months, we used commercial products to create STARS” – the Strategies and Resources System for resource planning.

  The shop is also using Microsoft SharePoint so OCC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program staff can share information and collaborate.

  Paul is also proud of the help in Houston. Nearly half of the 70,000 inbound queries each year are from disgruntled retail bank customers. Visitors can submit their queries online now, and, Paul said, a close rate of 20 percent within 60 days has shot up to 60 percent.

  Paul’s operation has 180 government employees aided by about 200 contractors.

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• Administration Needs to Answer: Is Anybody in Charge Here?

  At first glance, you might not see much in common between the sagas of Rod Beckstrom and the Air Force’s aerial refueling tanker replacement. But they have a lot in common.

  Beckstrom was director of the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) at Homeland Security before resigning last week in a huff. But he had reason to get snippy about it. The NCSC was being dragged to Ft. Meade, Md., to operate under the auspices of the National Security Agency (NSA.) In an interview with Forbes, Beckstrom said the NCSC was starved for money by the Bush administration and that the NSA’s culture is inimical to the “collaboration” he thinks is needed, especially with the private sector.

  The tanker story is even more tortured, but here’s the Cliffs Notes edition: It was back in 2002 that the lease deal with Boeing for new tankers was shot down by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Last year, a new award to Northrop Grumman was successfully protested to the Government Accountability Office by Boeing. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for whom the tanker deal – the Air Force itself – has been a bane, was preparing to run at it once again. But last week, as it opened its salvo against the defense budget, the Obama administration said it would like to delay the tankers again, for another five years!

  But that’s not all, folks. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Air and Land forces, is promising to force the Pentagon to split the tanker program between the two prime contractors. He has the backing of House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee chair John Murtha (D-Penna.)

  So here you have two instances of major policy vacuums. The administration has retained Michelle Hathaway to undertake a 60-day review of federal cyber security. And President Obama has expressed the idea of having the coordination point be in the White House and not at Homeland Security. He has made no move to implement that policy, other than sticking Hathaway into the National Security Council staff. In the meantime, NSA and DHS seem to be duking it out while the Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative, started under President Bush, languishes.

  The tanker affair has taken on an aura of unreality, now that the administration has questioned whether the existing fleet, the newest of which was delivered to the Air Force in 1965, even needs replacing at all. And with members of Congress essentially directing the acquisition, if it takes place, what use is a source selection board? Perhaps the tanker is merely the administration’s bargaining chip for, say, the F-22 Raptor or some other expensive program. But one wonders what message we are sending to the rest of the world.

  The larger issue is that the administration must make some decisions and settle these kinds of simmering turf wars. Let’s hope this pattern doesn’t take hold across the government.

  These questions, or at least the president’s expression of policy, are likely to be answered when the detailed version of the 2010 budget is released in April. It specified $355 million for DHS cyber security, up from $294 million in the 2009 budget.

  The hackers are moving fast. Just this month, a security monitoring company found that a server in Iran held detailed blueprints of the president’s helicopter.

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• Technology Intensity of the Federal Government is Growing

  As last week drew to a close, fear, uncertainty and doubt dominated the federal IT scene. Even as Vivek Kundra, the new CIO and administrator for e-government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was giving a speech at FOSE, FBI agents were arresting one of his former deputies and a contractor back at the District of Columbia government. Both were arrested and charged with financial conflict of interest, money laundering and conspiracy. According to the Washington Post, the investigation had been going on for a year, so presumably the Obama team knew about it when it was vetting Kundra. Or did it? More telling is, as the AP reported last Thursday, Kundra had already gone on leave for the job he’d held for barely a week.

  Whether Kundra will survive this scandal – even though he was reportedly not under investigation himself – is still an open question, and an important one. Under OMB rules for spending stimulus funds, March 15 was the day agencies were to designate and certify the systems they will use to track the money, and identify the systems to Kundra.

  This is too bad because Kundra (or at least his office) and the government are entering a new era of fresh technology investment. OMB needs a smart strategist and Kundra was at least saying the right, if not particularly original, things. It’s nice that he asked people at FOSE to send him e-mails with ideas, just as it is a feel-good to have discussions about “citizen engagement” (notwithstanding that millions of Americans have their own lives to pursue and perhaps don’t wish for the government to keep doing things that require their engagement).

  Beyond all that, think of the non-trivial technology challenges just out of the past couple of weeks’ news.

  For example:

  • With work on the Secure Border Initiative resuming, Homeland Security will be using $100 million of its stimulus dollars to buy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) FCW reported. DHS will have to figure out how the data UAVs gather as they patrol the border, and the systems required to control them, will be integrated into the SBInet.
  • Modernization of the electrical grid to accommodate new generating sources will be compute-intensive, and likely have federal, state/local and private components. The grid is already among the most complex infrastructures in the world.
  • Even before Congress has even started to debate a carbon dioxide rationing system, the Environmental Protection Agency is laying the groundwork with a proposal to begin to collect nationwide data on so-called green house gas sources such as electrical utilities and factories.
  • The boost in public awareness of electronic medical records thanks to the multi-billion boost it received via the stimulus bill has exposed how much work there is yet to do on standards, privacy, security and the infrastructure to move the hoped-for records around.

  In other words, beyond the YouTube, Twitter and social networking fascination by and about the administration, lie critical and technically challenging problems that need sophisticated IT leadership.
  

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• 2010 Budget Will Give Better View Of Outsourcing Future

  The spending levels by the federal government would be alarming if they weren’t so darn good for IT. Today, in fact, is the day that agencies were supposed to submit their IT plans for tracking the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spending to OMB. But the recipient of those plans, Vivek Kundra, as noted above, is on leave.

  By itself, the omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2009 signed last week by President Obama doesn’t add a lot to IT budgets – that will wait until details of the 2010 bill come out next month. Except for the Defense Department, there will be double digit budget increases almost across the board.

  But there is a barb buried in the 2009 spending bill, and it portends greater fights to come. Democratic lawmakers inserted a provision that ends A-76 outsourcing competitions for the remainder of the fiscal year. This comes on the heels of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s arbitrary cancellation of use of contractors for certain tax collection jobs at the IRS. An IRS study had claimed that the contractor costs per dollar collected were more than three times the costs of using government workers.

  If you think this is all a sop to public employee unions, you would be mostly right, but not entirely. Other issues with respect to outsourcing are unresolved. Chief among these is defining what is inherently governmental. If you think this is all a sop to public employee unions, you are mostly right, but not entirely.

  Given the expansion of programs envisioned for 2010 and beyond, estimates for how many more federal employees will be needed range from 100,000 to 250,000. So the thing to look for in the 2010 budget, when the long form proposals comes out, is whether agencies are budgeted to hire people on a scale that could seriously impact outsourcing.

  Has the government been starved, as Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service has put it, or is it just growing more bloated under liberal spending policies? That will be the debate. But it will need more manpower for what it is budgeted to do.

  Still, I think it is fundamentally safe to say that government and industry will continue to rely on one another, including for professional and transactional processing services. The core shortfalls in federal employment are in acquisition, auditing, program management and finance, areas that should not be outsourced.

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