Summaries for March 15, 2010

VETERAN OF DHS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RETURNS TO FEDERAL SERVICE
Steve Cooper has settled quickly back into government. Cooper in September joined the FAA as CIO of the Air Traffic Organization. Known for having been the first CIO of the Homeland Security Department, Cooper has taken on technology support for a similarly complex organization, but with a difference.  -> Read More

DATA QUALITY EMERGING AS BIG CHALLENGE
In the last issue of FedInsider, I analyzed the data center consolidation initiative from Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. His timing seemed right because several agencies are already in the process of virtualizing and consolidating servers and data centers. It's a good strategy to have on a continuous basis because data quality is emerging as a big challenge.  -> Read More

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IRMCO 2010 Is Almost Here!
IRMCO 2010 is just 3 short weeks away. The deadline for guaranteeing a room at the conference hotel is March 26 so register now at www.irmco.gov.

IRMCO is government's CXO conference exclusively by and for government executives and program managers.  Please join us for the 49th IRMCO at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, MD from April 11-14, 2010.   IRMCO keynotes include:

• MARTHA JOHNSON, Administrator, General Services Administration
• VIVEK KUNDRA, Federal Chief Information Officer, Office of Management and Budget
• DANNY WERFEL, Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management
• DANIEL GORDON, Administrator, OMB Office of Federal Procurement Policy
• JONATHAN D. BREUL, Executive Director, IBM Center for The Business of Government; Partner, IBM Global Business Services 
• 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
• THE HONORABLE JOHN BERRY, Director, Office of Personnel Management
• And many others government leaders.  Visit www.irmco.gov for a complete agenda.   

At IRMCO you will benefit from thought-provoking interactive dialogue sessions where you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Hear from Greg Kutz, Managing Director, Forensic Audits and Special Investigations, General Accountability Office, about the extent investigators must go to uncover the facts, from superficial to the downright hair raising.
• Explore the impact of high priority performance goals with Dr. Shelley Metzenbaum, Associate Director for Performance and Personnel Management, OMB. 
• Find out why disruptive technologies are changing the way we govern from industry and government experts.
• Join Ron Sims, Deputy Secretary, Department of Housing and Urban Development for a rousing panel discussion of leading across domains.
• Find out about innovative ways to fund programs from Andy Petro, Program Executive, Innovation Incubator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
• Understand How the Net Generation is Changing Your World from Don Tapscott, best-selling author of Wikinomics.
• Leverage Partnership to Fuel Innovation in Acquisition through lessons learned led by Lesley Field, Deputy Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, OMB.

GSA's IRMCO conference will take place from April 11-14 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in historic Cambridge, Maryland, a short 90 minute drive from Washington. The conference fee of $1,295 includes hotel accommodations, conference fee, and meals from Sunday - Wednesday, April 11-14. Register today at www.irmco.gov.

SORTING OUT THE NATIONAL BROADBAND PLAN
Is the FCC's National Broadband Plan, released last week, government intrusion into something that isn't broken, or a bold call to action on an important technology? Probably equal parts of both. If approved by Congress in toto, it would affect many agencies that give grants and create new responsibilities for other agencies. It might also spur a rethinking of how e-government applications are designed and deployed.   -> Read More

BE SURE TO HUG A FED TODAY
The federal workforce has had a busy time over the past 15 months. Attendees at the upcoming IRMCO conference, April 11-14 in Cambridge, Maryland, will have plenty to talk about. In recent weeks, just how busy the career workforce has been came to light in a couple of reports.   -> Read More

• Veteran of DHS Information Technology Returns To Federal Service

  Steve Cooper

  Steve Cooper has settled quickly back into government.

  A true believer in information technology and what it can do for an organization, Cooper in September joined the FAA as CIO of the Air Traffic Organization (ATO). Known for having been the first CIO of the Homeland Security Department, Cooper has taken on technology support for a similarly complex organization, but with a difference. While the ATO is intense, it lacks the frantic quality that characterized the formation of DHS.

  "I'm having all of the fun of the early days of DHS, only without the stress," Cooper said. One reason is that the existing IT operations were functioning and knew their business before Cooper arrived, he said, so coming into the FAA wasn't a matter of inventing a department on the fly.

  Still, it's a big job. If the FAA is 80 percent of the Transportation Department, then ATO is 80% of FAA. Basically, it is responsible for the safe occurrence of 7,000 takeoffs and landings per hour, including commercial, general aviation and the military. The air traffic controllers are part of the ATO's 35,000-member workforce. That includes several operational sections covering control towers, radar facilities, and airport terminals, plus the back office functions such as finance and human resources. IT is part of the latter group, and like them, it supports the other operational activities of ATO.

  In joining FAA -- it's a career appointment, not political -- Cooper said he found it met his professional criteria. "I look for opportunities to have global impact. The FAA does. Everybody has been on a plane," he said. And, the job should have an impact in helping to transform the ATO. Cooper said a previous IT director, now retired, had created a stable, reliable IT infrastructure that everyone views as a utility.

  "When I interviewed for the job in ATO, I heard two consistent messages," Cooper said. "Number one, service comes first. Everything must work. Number two, we don't know what you do," meaning the operations pieces of the organization, while depending on IT services, didn't really pay that much attention to how the job got done. But now, Cooper said, the ATO's chief operating officer, Hank Krakowski, wants a more strategic approach to IT and the CIO's role.

  "Here's where we're going with a true CIO organization," Cooper said. "Today we spend 80 percent of our focus, budget, and effort on infrastructure delivery, and only 20 percent on applications. Where I want to be is, 20 percent of time and attention on infrastructure operation, 40 percent on application delivery, and 40 percent on being a trusted advisor to the senior team and be able to talk about business problems."

  Cooper said there are still manual, paper processes at ATO, such as HR and procurement, that are ripe for automation after a dose of business process re-engineering. Beyond that lies the creative use of new technologies for existing process. For example, field inspectors who oversee aircraft maintenance might use devices such as Blackberries to take photos and enter information, sending back the data wirelessly. He said the FAA has been talking to Apple about possible application of the forthcoming iPad tablet.

  Cooper listed other IT-enabled initiatives -- "I'm still learning them," he said -- that are contemplated or underway.

  • A data center optimization that was launched before this month's order to consolidate data centers that came from the Office of Management and Budget.
  • After virtualizing servers and reducing their physical numbers, ATO is exploring desktop virtualization, a way to enhance security and manageability of client configurations for remote and mobile workers. ATO operates in some 1,000 locations, Cooper said. "We have three people covering Wyoming. Desktop virtualization might be a more effective way" to cover their IT support needs.
  • Some 40,000 people in FAA have HSPD-12 federal ID cards that are used for physical access to facilities. "Now we want to use them for logical access, single sign-on and e-authentication," Cooper said.
  • In the early thinking state is use of social media. For instance, given that the FAA as the originator of flight information knows sooner and more surely than anyone else about impending flight delays, "what if you could go to Twitter and follow FAA on delays?" Cooper said. "We have the data. We have it first. Plug in your flight number and get current status on schedule and equipment status."

  When Cooper left DHS in 2005, he joined the Red Cross as CIO, then was partner at two small consulting firms he helped found. The private sector can be more lucrative, he said, "but people in federal services aren't in it for the money, but for the service."

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• Data Quality Emerging As Big Challenge

  In the last issue of FedInsider, I analyzed the data center consolidation initiative from Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. His timing seemed right because several agencies are already in the process of virtualizing and consolidating servers and data centers. It's a good strategy to have on a continuous basis. Before that, FedInsider discussed getting more value out of data.
  The government also faces the growing issue of data quality. In many ways, trends given fresh impetus by the Obama administration have accelerated the government's move into a data-based age. So more and more data quality problems are likely to emerge. Consider these recent developments:

  • E-Verify, the database against which government contractors must (and all businesses voluntarily) compare their workers to detect ineligibility to work in the U.S., was found to identify legal workers 93 percent of the time. But more than 50 percent of the time, according to one study, it wrongly clears illegal workers. Luckily it wasn't a gotcha report; the study was commissioned by the Immigrations and Customers Enforcement Directorate at the Homeland Security Department.
  • The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board last week re-posted to recovery.gov cleaned-up data, having corrected the initial quarterly reports submitted by stimulus recipients in January. One in eight reports had errors, in part because the rules for reporting have been changed and refined since the stimulus bill was passed. For agencies, reviewing more than 160,000 reports has imposed a major task.
  • The Veterans Affairs Department temporarily suspended the transfer of electronic medical records from the Defense Department's record system when a VA doctor noticed that a female patient had seemingly been prescribed an erectile dysfunction drug. In fact, the wrong patient's record had been transmitted via the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange.

  None of these errors are because of indifference or negligence by federal staff. It's just that maintaining data quality is hard work, and it is a highly specialized discipline. Not many people realize it or remember it, but there is a law on the books that aims at ensuring accurate data. The Data Quality Act took effect back in 2002, and it requires federal agencies operating under the Paperwork Reduction Act (of 1980) to make sure data they disseminate meets standards.

  The urgency of data quality is rising. Data.gov is putting a cascading river of data sets out. Two interesting pieces attest to the concern over the quality of the data. A blog post last week from Sanjeev Bhagowalia of Interior and Linda Travers of the EPA appeals for feedback on data.gov. How to continuously improve data quality would be a good topic for discussion. And in an FCW opinion piece -- now removed from its site -- Mike Daconta, former data maven at Homeland Security and now in industry, listed 10 problems with data.gov. None of them are insurmountable, but they will require concerted effort. Perhaps OMB could encourage CIOs at the departments and agencies to designate a data quality officer to oversee both what is deployed at the home site as well as what is sent to data.gov.

  And now comes the news that GSA is ready to roll out the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS). This project integrates data from several existing systems such as the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS), the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System and the Excluded Parties List System. So data quality is also a matter of concern to contractors, since federal contracting officers will presumably be consulting FAPIIS in making award decisions. 

  Earlier this month the administration said it would enlist bounty hunters to identify and report fraud in federal health care programs and for stimulus spending. According to the Washington Times, some 730 allegations of malfeasance have already been reported to the Recovery Board. That's one way to find problems. Another is a bill introduced by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) that would create a National Institute of Finance to monitor the health of the finance system in the U.S. using data collection and analysis tools. Some powerful tools exist to find trends and anomalies in large data stores. This would be the inverse of the data quality challenge, in that regulators would have to use quality criteria in order to get meaningful information out of data sources that won't all be structured in the same way.

  Either way, though, it is clear that data quality is an important challenge that will take the best thinking from both government and industry.

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• Sorting Out the National Broadband Plan

  Is the FCC's National Broadband Plan, released last week, government intrusion into something that isn't broken, or a bold call to action on an important technology? Probably equal parts of both. If approved by Congress in toto, it would affect many agencies that give grants and create new responsibilities for other agencies. It might also spur a rethinking of how e-government applications are designed and deployed, giving citizens a richer experience if agencies could be confident that the gulf between digital haves and have-nots no longer existed.

  Explicitly stated in the plan is the FCC's -- and the administration's -- belief that more ubiquitous broadband, which it defines as 100 megabits per second download and 50 megabits per second upload speeds, is necessary to enable several national priorities. These include improving education, healthcare, environmental protection, economic opportunity and citizen engagement in government.

  The easiest way to understand the ambitious plan is to make an analogy to the earliest days of telephones. It was federal policy to ensure universal service. The mechanisms used were different, centering around the establishment of a regulated monopoly (Ma Bell) coupled with a universal service tax. Today the underlying aim is the same -- universal deployment -- but with different mechanisms that recognize that multiple carriers already exist with billions of investment dollars already sunk into wire and wireless networks.

  As the FCC itself points out, at least 100 million American homes have access to broadband internet access now. The market is robust. Even Sprint, the weaker number three player in the mobile communications market, is coming out with a fourth generation (4G) network phone, for service on a network it is building in conjunction with Clearwire. Verizon and AT&T likewise spend billions every year in building out their 3G and 4G networks. But the broadband plan has as one of its goals the availability of broadband to the remaining 100 million American homes at "affordable" rates. It does so with a complex and interrelated system of spectrum reallocation from broadcasters, changes to the Universal Service Fund (USF) from taxes on telephone service, and re-regulation of service providers.

  So one thing for sure is that the carriers, device makers, broadcasters, content providers and other interest groups will find lots to disagree on, ensuring a long Congressional debate. The FCC deserves credit for the way it rolled out the plan, with a series of partial unveilings before several groups in advance of the official release. Plus, the plan is available online in both searchable formats and as PDF downloads.

  Many details are still to be worked out, some with implications for federal agencies:

  • How much to tax broadband services to pay for the Connect America Fund, eventual successor to the USF. The term affordability is not defined, nor are the specific ways costs would be lowered.
  • The Defense Department would be provided with "ultra-high-speed broadband connectivity to select....installations to enable the development of next-generation broadband applications for military personnel and their families living on base."  And yet a portion of spectrum now held by the military for military operations is potentially reallocated for commercial use.
  • The plan calls for establishment of an Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC), pursuant to using the 700 MHz spectrum for a national public safety broadband network. The FCC would try again to auction the 700 MHz D-block of spectrum for commercial use but in a way that enables the public safety priority. And it promotes use of Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology -- which might be the death knell for the competing WiMax standard of IP radio communications. (Here is Nortel's explanation of LTE, which was also recently adopted by Cisco Systems, which is stopping its WiMax business.)

  Also of interest to government at all levels is the concept of anchor institutions, which include government buildings, outlined in the plan. Anchor institutions in rural or other high-cost areas would receive gigabit connectivity to support health and other applications and to pave the way for connectivity to homes.

  Homeland Security, DOD, Justice, Health and Human Services and Education are among the departments that are both affected by and will have a role in whatever form of the FCC broadband plan eventually becomes law. The plan is well researched.  Although it is long and complicated, it is definitely worth the effort to search and research.

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• Be Sure To Hug A Fed Today

  The federal workforce has had a busy time over the past 15 months. Attendees at the upcoming IRMCO conference, April 11-14 in Cambridge, Maryland, will have plenty to talk about. In recent weeks, just how busy the career workforce has been came to light in a couple of reports.
  

  At the request of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees reporting of American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) dollars, the Commerce Department's IG, under Todd Zinser, sought to quantify just how much of a work load the stimulus bill imposed on the federal workforce. Not surprisingly, the IG found, it's a lot. At the Defense, Health and Human Services and Interior Departments, the Commerce survey found:

  • 45 percent said staffing was adequate, but only at the expense of oversight of existing, non-Recovery Act work.
  • 41 percent said staffing was simply inadequate for the oversight and transparency demands of ARRA.

  At the other agencies, a larger percentage said staff is adequate, but three fourths nevertheless reported problems.

  Congressional staff haven't had it easy, either. At a House Appropriations committee meeting last week, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, told of 100-hour workweeks as staff tried to respond to multiple requests by members of Congress to "score" this or that health care reform bill amendment. The Government Accountability Office will request another 144 people in fiscal 2011 to keep up with its workload.

  On the ARRA front, the burden has fallen mainly on program managers, grants staff, finance and acquisition.

  And more change is coming for these folks.

  Although it did not get a lot of attention, the Multiple Award Schedule Advisory Panel (MAS) came out with its final set of recommendations for the General Services Administration's signature program. The report acknowledges that a large percentage of dollars and orders to the MAS in recent years have shifted to services, as opposed to the commodity products that have traditionally comprised the bulk of MAS contracts. And the panel, which met 16 times over the last two years, found that GSA policies don't align with a stated goal of MAS, which is to get most-favored-customer pricing, and that insufficient data is collected to enable GSA to leverage the government's buying power. Thus the panel says its 20 recommendations are "meant to fundamentally re-architect the way GSA and the ordering agencies work together to ensure reasonable prices." And it calls on the GSA Administrator to start the ball rolling on the reforms.

  One sacred cow the panel recommends eliminating for services contracts is the Price Reduction Clause. The panel would instead have a clause in Section 803 of the 2002 Defense Authorization Act apply to civilian agencies using the MAS. The clause requires fixed priced quotes from three vendors for services. Later, Section 803 would be phased in for products on all orders.

  By any measure, the Multiple Award Schedule is a major program, with fiscal 2008 sales exceeding $45 billion, or roughly 10 percent of federal procurement dollars. So any adjustments in pricing mechanisms would produce perhaps billions in savings. But how that happens is not easily nailed down, because, the panel points out, different competitive dynamics operate at the contract award level than operate at the task order level. Moreover, the dynamics are different for discrete products than they are for services. The recommendations therefore focus on price reasonableness at the order level, and that GSA develop a reporting structure to better understand its aggregate buying power.

  In the Defense acquisition arena, the House Armed Services Committee's Panel on Defense Acquisition Reform has issued final recommendations. Like the MAS review panel, the Defense panel focuses on the rise of services acquisitions, finding that procurement practices designed for weapons systems have not kept up. It would establish a more elaborate performance management system both for contracting shops and for the program managers who set the requirements.

  In the panel's words: "The Panel’s approach is to expand the mandate of the Office of Performance Assessment and Root Cause Analysis (PARCA) to serve a performance management function for the acquisition system. PARCA would track organizations throughout the defense acquisition system in meeting pre-negotiated goals for acquisition performance."

  Both sets of reforms will take a lot of cooperation among Congress, the agencies and contractors, but the burden of implementation will rest with the professional federal staff. So it looks as if the next 15 months will be as exciting as the last 15.

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