THREE ELEMENTS TO PROJECT SUCCESS: REQUIREMENTS, REQUIREMENTS, REQUIREMENTS
Lesson for agencies is simple: take it in small bites. -> Read More

FEWER CONTRACTOR WORKERS? NOPE. THINGS ARE MOVING THE OTHER WAY
The simple fact is, government and industry are wholly dependent upon one another. And it’s not as if the government’s workload is going down. -> Read More

SCOREBOARD STORY: HOW MORE CAN SOMETIMES END UP AS LESS
Federal IT people and contractors could look to the new structure in southeast Washington D.C. and learn some technology things to avoid. -> Read More

• USDA Program Vet Takes Skills to PTO

  Chris Niedermayer

  The Patent and Trademark Office is concerned with all things new, and sometimes it tries something new itself. The latest new thing at PTO is a job in the office of its CIO: director of the program management group.

  And the person holding that new job, while not new to federal service, is brand new to PTO. That would be Chris Niedermayer, who recently left the Agriculture Department to move over to PTO.

  Why the new post?

  “David Freedland, the CIO, is bringing more structure to the new projects portfolio,” Niedermayer says.

  PTO has been struggling for several years on a number of technology fronts, in part because the agency is dealing with a record and growing backlog of patent applications. Last year, Freedland established a program management group specifically to bring oversight and better governance to projects. As Niedermayer puts it, how projects get laid out and brought to closure.

  Niedermayer brings solid credentials to the PTO position. At Agriculture, he guided the IT governance structure, which involved enterprise architecture and data standards work. At PTO, he reports to deputy CIO Debra Diaz.

  For PTO, getting projects over the line takes attention to the same things it does at every agency, Niedermayer says: cost, schedule and performance of staff and contractors. That in turn means paying close attention to requirements, systems design and analysis, coding, testing and the telecom infrastructure on which modern applications ride. And, of course, budgeting.

  “There are lots of pieces wanting structure to consistently employ a standard process,” Niedermayer says. He says the organization at PTO is receptive to the idea of structure and communication to help avoid unpleasant surprises.

  One of the first projects Niedermayer will be tackling is the Patent File Wrapper. It will modernize how patents are requested, reviewed and decided upon. It will let petitioners submit their applications in native and modifiable formats. This will let examiners more easily perform search-and-retrievals on applications that can number in the hundreds of pages.

  “Granting patents requires research, and you can't to it with pdfs,” Niedermayer says, referring to the Portable Document Format. The wrapper “will retire several systems, so it's a big deal.” He expects the first phase of the multi-year, but late, project, now in the coding phase, to be released as early as May.

  Niedermayer is also tackling a project to let patent examiners collaborate, even though many of them work strictly from home. The goal is to enable a structured process to work via the internet from anywhere, using video and audio tools and access to internal agency data. He describes is as “an enterprise collaboration project that will be integrated into telepresence,” sort of video conferencing on steroids.

  If you are attending IRMCO —and there's still time to sign up—you'll get to hear Neidermayer share his project and program management experience during a special panel session scheduled for Tuesday, April 15 at 1:45 p.m.
  
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• Three Elements to Project Success: Requirements, Requirements, Requirements

  Sometimes federal IT program managers forget the basics. Three current projects illustrate what I mean.

  First, there is the Future Combat Systems program in the Army. This program launched back in 2003, has burned through a lot of money, and yet the Army has little to show for it. Two new Government Accountability Office reports have warned that the complexity of FCS might be its very downfall. As Federal Insider was in final edit before posting, NextGov.com reported that Census would cancel the whole program. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was to tell Congress the bureau would give its enumerators paper and pencil.

  Second is the Census Bureau's wobbly program to give wireless handheld devices to the estimated half million enumerators who will be required to go out and get census data from people personally who don't send in their census forms for the 2010 count.

  Third is a new contract just awarded to Harris Corp.—which is also the Census contractor—for building a data exchange system for electronic health records at Health and Human Services.

  In the first case you see the problems with Grand Design, a discredited idea that nonetheless seems to be impossible to kill. In the second you see a relatively discrete idea bungled with weak requirements setting and poor communications with the contractor—again, findings courtesy of GAO. And in the third, there is far more promise of success because the HHS contract builds on proven technology the contractor has already deployed with the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments.

  Grand Design? You be the judge. A recently reported in Defense Technology and elsewhere, FCS, pursuant to a netcentric warfare model, is supposed to connect 14 weapons systems with countless sensors, via a complex network that gives an integrated battle space picture to warfighters. It is already up to millions of lines of code, with no end in sight. As the GAO said in one report on FCS: “Almost 5 years into the program, it is not yet clear if or when the information network that is at the heart of the FCS concept can be developed, built, and demonstrated...” A big “if.” And that's just the network, never mind the rest of FCS. A companion GAO report points out that FCS is supposed to hook up with other technology undertakings that are similarly troubled, namely the Joint Tactical Radio System and the earlier-mentioned Warfighter Information Network-Tactical.

  I have a similar feeling about the more-nascent next-generation air traffic control system that the FAA is undertaking, for billions and over the length of a program manager's career.

  Lesson for agencies is simple: take it in small bites. Instead of trying to integrate 14 weapons systems all at once, and this is down from an original goal of 18, why not try a proof of concept with one, then scale up?

  That appears to be what HHS is doing in its award to Harris, as reported in GovExec. How unusual to see technology developed for one agency reused for another, but that is apparently what is happening. Harris Healthcare Solutions, which developed the BiDirectional Health Information Exchange, will recycle effort for HHS and the agencies with which it hopes to exchange medical data.

  Should the original piece of technology prove scalable, it could very quickly become the standard for health data exchange, and give a big boost to Harris as in integrator.

  The company will need the boost, because it and the Census Bureau, to whom it was to supply the handheld devices, will have a lot of explaining to do for the 2010 count. Details haven't come out, but it looks as if there has been poor communication between Census and Harris. As late as January, according to the NextGov report, some 400 new or modified requirements were delivered to the contractor. Bad, bad, bad.

  Except for outright malfeasance, you almost never see a contractor totally to blame for a system that goes off the rails in terms of schedule or cost. It takes two—customer agency and contractor—to make that tango happen.

  The lessons for contractors: Before leading with your chin, read carefully what the government is asking for. Determine if it has a reasonable scope and whether the requirements translate into predictable, tangible work.
  
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• Fewer Contractor Workers? Nope. Things are Moving The Other Way

  A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of outsourcing and whether the government has gone too far, and whether the so-called competitive sourcing initiative of the Bush administration will be rolled back. Sen. Hillary Clinton has said that if she is elected, she'll end a half a million contractor jobs and replace them with...what, government employees? Another 500,000 FTEs on the federal payroll? Fat chance.

  The simple fact is, government and industry are wholly dependent upon one another. And it's not as if the government's workload is going down.

  If anything, the interdependency of government and the private sector will only get deeper. A case in point is a new plan to link various federal electronic health record efforts with those of Google and Microsoft. Both companies have initiatives to store people's health and medical records, much like they and other online companies store photos, documents and e-mail. Various news reports have noted Google is testing a program with a couple of thousand patients at the Cleveland Clinic. Microsoft's Health Vault initiative is also underway. If you consider the popularity of everything from YouTube to Flickr to Gmail, then health information repositories should prove popular.

  In the tax realm, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration recently gave a clean bill of health to the data protections given by contractors to whom IRS has outsourced collections. So if anything, this program—much maligned by some members of Congress—might expand.

  To be sure, the government-industry interface will continue to be a stressful one. At the end of March, IBM, of all companies, was suspended from all new government sales, not quite in the same category as a shady outfit in Miami that procured decayed, ancient ammunition from China and delivered it to the Army for use by the Afghan army. GSA is trying to dig its way out of the hole into which protestors and a federal judge pushed its multi-billion dollar Alliant IT services omnibus contract program.

  But any sort serious rollback of outsourced work? Not in this century.

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• Scoreboard Story: How More Can Sometimes End Up As Less

  Federal IT people and contractors could look to the new structure in southeast Washington D.C. and learn some technology things to avoid. No, I don't mean the new Transportation Department building, but rather the nearby new baseball stadium the city built for the Washington Nationals.

  The scoreboard, by various accounts between 4,500 and 4,800, square feet, looks about as big as the lot on which my house stands. It casts a stupendously brilliant image of the game and the attendant statistics in high-definition glory. I mean, on a nice day the Nationals could conceivably sell tickets for people to sit there and watch football .

  But the layout of the scoreboard is hard to follow. There is no part of the display showing simple time of day—no counterpart to the classic Longines clocks in the stadiums of yesteryear. If you sit where you can't see the scoreboard—and there are plenty of otherwise good seats where you can't—the ribbon display running around the perimeter of the field fails to show items of interest to those there to watch the game in detail, as opposed to drink beer. For example, when a batter comes up, his results from earlier at-bats in that game aren't there. Only momentarily is a batter's name visible from the alternate display at low field level.

  And so on.

  The point is that the awesome sign, no doubt visible from the windows of planes flying overhead, is a good example of technology for technology's sake. It needs more thought to what is being shown.

  No doubt the very first game was like a shakedown cruise, and the team will improve the display over time. But dazzling color and definition is no substitute for solid information, simply laid out. And for “users” there will be a break-in period as they learn to read its quirky information layouts.

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