Summaries for June 30, 2010

MICROSOFT'S FEDERAL CTO HAS WALKED THE WALK
Susie Adams knows both the joys and challenges of technology from the ground up. She's a programmer, having developed Clipper applications on the DOS operating system in the 1980s, before Windows, before people even used mice. Now Adams is the chief technology officer for the civilian segment of Microsoft Federal, and she meets daily with federal agency technologists, talking about everything from virtualization to cloud computing.   -> Read More

BETTER GOVERNMENT'S SOMETIMES A MATTER OF BLOCKING AND TACKLING
Between the deficit crisis, the oil spill, and troubles in Afghanistan, things might seem tough at the national level. But at the day-to-day operational level of government, you can find signs of progress. Sometimes it's a matter of making adjustments here and there.   -> Read More

                                                                            Advertisements



IRMCO 2011 - The Federal Government's Premier Interagency Conference
IRMCO is the annual forum for senior executives and managers that addresses the most significant and timely issues impacting the government management communities. Sponsored by the General Service Administration, IRMCO promotes partnerships, facilitates dialogue, and motivates collaborations across multiple disciplines and communities to better deliver a higher quality of service to the public.

IRMCO 2011 will take place from April 10-13 at the same fabulous location as last year, the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. Plan now to attend the 50th annual IRMCO and hear from those who have been successful and those who are leading the charge in collaborative management efforts within the federal government. For details visit www.irmco.gov. Registration will be available September 1 so register early to receive a discounted rate.

ORSZAG DEPARTURE WON'T CHANGE MANAGEMENT AGENDA
Moving from Congressional Budget Office chief to Office of Management and Budget director covers a distance of less than two miles as the crow flies. But even though both jobs deal with numbers big enough to be abstractions, they exist on different planets. Thus to hold both jobs consecutively, as Orszag did, would wear anybody down. Yet even for OMB directors, the 18-month tenure of Peter Orszag, who will step down in July, is on the short side.  -> Read More

WILL UNION BARGAINING MOVE INTO THE DATA CENTER?
Keep an eye out for (b)(1) bargaining. Haven't seen that term before? A lot of agency managers haven't. But it's a spot on the horizon with the potential to grow into a big cloud down the road. It has the potential to change the control program managers have over their own projects.  -> Read More

• Microsoft's Federal CTO Has Walked the Walk

  Susie Adams

  Susie Adams knows both the joys and challenges of technology from the ground up. She's a programmer, having developed Clipper applications on the DOS operating system in the 1980s. That was before anyone used a mouse. "I hated Windows when it came out. I said, this will never go anywhere."

  Now Adams is the chief technology officer for the civilian segment of Microsoft Federal, and she meets daily with federal agency technologists, talking about everything from virtualization to cloud computing. She's a frequent panelist at conferences and roundtables.

  Adams said she's noticed that many agencies possess most of the software tools they need to accomplish the consolidation and cloud use requirement that the Obama administration has introduced via the Office of Management and Budget. "Many problems arise from how they are deployed, not that they don't have the tools," Adams said. "So I am framing the technical vision of how our products plan into problems from a technical perspective."

  Adams has the technical chops to bring credibility to those discussions. In addition to having programmed in numerous environments, she's written books on topics such as Visual Studio and ASP.net.

  Agencies currently are facing several challenges that Adams described as tactical. For example: "How do they build and host web sites that are more interactive and not static or non-responsive?" That need is driven by the open government directives. Adams also sees agencies struggling with, of all things, e-mail consolidation. "The biggest technical challenge they face is how to take advantage of virtualization." Note that the physical consolidation of servers and other network assets also brings the need to logically consolidate disparate systems that may have taken agencies two decades to assemble.

  It gets even more detailed. Overlayed with the data center consolidation mandate, Adams notes, are requirements for agencies to reduce their carbon footprints. Data centers are seen as one key to reducing electrical consumption. She mentioned one agency that is in the midst of a data center overhaul. "I've met with them several times on best practices on how to monitor and measure power utilization," Adams said. Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, is a key measure of how efficient data centers are at converting the electricity coming into the building into useful work. It all ties together in ways that might be unfamiliar to CIOs reared in the traditional mainframe era. For example, virtualized servers can be arranged in such a way that they form a dense, compact hot aisle inside a data center that requires specific cooling techniques.

  Telework is another topic Adams discusses with agencies, the infrastructure requirements if not the policies. That leads to another emerging technology, desktop virtualization. Just as server consolidation leads to running multiple applications and operating systems on common machines, the security and management needs of telework leads agencies to consider virtualizing their desktop environments. It can result in more effective configuration and patch management. Said Adams, "We have a well-documented process with four stages to a dynamic infrastructure," Adams said. "So a single individual can manage 2,000 desktops, not 200."

  Cloud computing can also be vexing to agencies, Adams said. "It's really utility based computing. The real challenge is efficient provisioning and getting information when and where it is needed." She emphatically added, "It is not going back to the mainframe, because we have all these different devices and have all this information everywhere. Cloud is a different paradigm." Cloud, she said, can give agencies a way to manage the peaks and valleys in computing demand without investing in infrastructure required to handle the peaks. And it gives a way to test applications and development environments, even whole new projects, without the tail of infrastructure cost.

  Microsoft itself offers cloud service types of products in different formats. Consumers can now run Office applications online, and the company sells to enterprises the software that lets them provision Office users from corporate servers, behind the enterprise firewalls. And it offers its own full-blown cloud services, including infrastructure and software as a service for products like Sharepoint and Exchange.

  "Eventually, we'll see total cost of ownership of infrastructure drop to where it frees up money to do cool development," Adams said.

  Return to top

---

• Better Government's Sometimes A Matter of Blocking and Tackling

  Predictably making the rounds on social media last weekend was Michael Gerson's mini-profile of Mitch Daniels, the one-time director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush and now the governor of Indiana. Daniels is not the only person discussing the potential of national failure. I don't remember a time when that possibility, that the U.S. could fail, was part of the national debate. The column came out at the end of a particularly crabby week, with violence up in Iraq, uncertainty about success in Afghanistan expressed in the Senate, and the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill frustrating everyone.

  Down here at ground level, though, the daily business of government goes on. It's where small things can have a positive effect. In government IT, improving performance is sometimes a matter of blocking and tackling on details. And a couple of recent developments show that as the Great Issues rage on, it is possible to make progress.

  In IT there is major blocking and tackling going on. The Techstat sessions -- tribunals with CIOs on the hot seat -- conducted by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra have expanded into a new emphasis on stopping programs that don’t stay on the rails. It was all outlined in this memo from the Office of Management and Budget. Note the signature of Rahm Emanual, the White House Chief of Staff.
  Note the signature of Rahm Emanual, the White House Chief of Staff. This month, Kundra will issue fresh guidance on the review process for at-risk projects. Beyond that, the Office of Management and Budget in the fall will have recommendations for improving the procurement process. In my view, the process is not the problem but rather its application in the absence of strong project management skills.

  In the greater federal buying zone, Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter gathered the multitudes -- DOD acquisition managers at National Defense University at Ft. Leslie McNair, and industry managers at a separate gathering in downtown D.C. In serial meetings, they were told of the seriousness of DOD’s intention to cut $20 billion in spending in each of the next five years. Much of the money, Secretary Robert Gates has been saying, will be reprogrammed to more direct support of warfighters.
  

  Although it didn't get a lot of attention, the Civilian Agency Acquisition Council and the Defense Acquisition Regulations Council came out with some new revisions to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the DFAR. The changes aren't world-changing, but they are not trivial, either. They've been in gestation as interim rules for a year and a half.

  The main change concerns so-called J&A documents, the justification and approval thinking backing up contracts awarded without competition. The documents are to be posted to a web site and, as the Federal Register notice points out, this actually implements a provision in the Defense Authorization bill from 2008.

  One change gives the Government Accountability Office -- and hence Congress -- as well as agency inspectors general access to information about both contractors and subcontractors working under American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. Another changes is the right to interview employees of contractors and subs. How this access will be used is unclear, as is the degree of fatigue factor that may have set in over the stimulus effort. If the administration is serious about continuing with Stimulus, however, there is a long way to go in this project. Recovery.gov is reporting figures through this month, showing $175 billion had been awarded and $54 billion actually received, out of a total pool of more than $500 million. By far the bulk of stimulus money is grants; accumulated federal contracts amount to $24 billion so far.

  Also in the blocking and tackling department, the Inspector General of the General Services Administration came out with a finding that the IT Center, which administers 5,400 Multiple Award Schedule contracts, has weaknesses in controls over contract awards and modifications. That means agencies using the contracts might be paying the wrong prices or getting the wrong terms and conditions. Basically, Audit Manager Michelle Westrup said, if everyone used two online tools GSA offers for contract modifications -- eOffer and eMod -- the potential for errors or unauthorized changes would be reduced. Also (and doesn't this sound like blocking and tackling), "adding to the welcome letters and options packages sent to vendors" that must receive the proper forms and have them signed by a contractor officer before modifying contracts. As the agency works to improve service to its customers, a priority of Administrator Martha Johnson, the report gives detailed recommendations on getting at least one $15 billion program tightened up.

  Last week, one corner of the Army showed what can happen when some basics aren't followed. Although it only involved a tiny number of graves, the Army's Inspector General found mismarked graves in several sections of Arlington National Cemetery. This caused an understandable outrage and the humiliating removal of the two top cemetery managers, all carried in the press. But the bigger picture, as reported in the New York Times, was the cemetery's failure to get a computerized system to handle grave assignments and records despite years of trying and millions of dollars spent. The IG, Lieut. Gen. Steven Witcomb, said remains might have to be dug up or X-rayed to find out who -- if anyone -- is in the graves in question.

  Return to top

---

• Orszag Departure Won't Change Management Agenda

  Moving from Congressional Budget Office chief to Office of Management and Budget director covers a distance of less than two miles as the crow flies. But even though both jobs deal with numbers big enough to be abstractions, they exist on different planets. As CBO director, in theory Peter Orszag was non-partisan, producing cost estimates of proposed Congressional actions. As OMB director, he had to actively promote the stimulus bill, the health care bill, and the president's budget proposals. In the former job, Orszag developed a reputation as a budget hawk. In the latter, he helped push through programs driving the annual deficits into the trillions, while asking agencies to trim fractions of a percent from budgets to offset the deficits. Thus to hold both jobs consecutively, as Orszag did, would wear anybody down. Yet even for OMB directors, the 18-month tenure of Peter Orszag, who will step down in July, is on the short side.

  Political explanations are making the rounds. Such as: Orszag and Economic advisor Larry Summers didn't get along and Orszag was losing turf. Or he made certain Obama aids mad because of provisions he forced into the health care reform bill, ostensibly to limit future grown in costs. (Health care and Social Security are two areas in which Orszag, an economist, has special expertise.) The personal reasons have also been aired: He is getting married to a television reporter. He is father to a child by a former girlfriend. He has young children by his first marriage. He wanted to leave before getting enmeshed in the 2012 budget preparation.

  Working in the White House for a new administration is a grueling experience that none of us who haven't done it can totally comprehend. There is the sheer volume of work as each administration tries to put its imprimatur on the government. And, although in IT we are concerned with the nuts and bolts of government, people at the political level must also deal with the politics and turf battles among presidential advisors. In the end, Orszag reasons for leaving don't really matter. He leaves with a good record.

  Regardless of whether one believes the big initiatives of the first 18 months of the Obama era are good or bad, I think it's fair to say that Orszag will have been a consequential OMB director. Either directly or through aides such as CIO Vivek Kundra, Deputy Director Jeff Zients or procurement policy chief Dan Gordon, Orszag followed up management directives with detailed guidance quickly, and usually followed that up with more detail. Agencies are still digesting guidance on cloud computing, cutting low-priority programs, data center consolidation, dual what-if budgets, Federal Information Security Management Act reporting, government openness and transparency, improper payment reduction, inherently governmental work, and stimulus spending reporting.

  It's difficult to know externally whether Orszag personally threw himself in the management minutiae of these initiatives. A big-idea thinker, he was central to the debates over issues, the resolution of which fundamentally affect the direction of the country. According to some of the bloggers he was more motivated by the intellectual challenge of such issues, like health care, than by the day-to-day management processes. His signature was on many of the managerial memos, but there is pretty good bench strength on the management side of OMB with Gordon, Kundra, Zients and also the deputy chief performance officer, Shelley Metzenbaum, and the controller at the Office of Federal Financial Management, Danny Werfel.

  Given that bench and the momentum it has generated, Orszag's leaving is unlikely to have a big impact on the IT-related managerial agenda items that he set in motion.

  Return to top

---

• Will Union Bargaining Move Into The Data Center?

  Keep an eye out for (b)(1) bargaining. Haven't seen that term before? A lot of agency managers haven't. But it's a spot on the horizon with the potential to grow into a big cloud down the road.

  Here's what's going on: Back in December, the Obama administration created by executive order something called the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations. It is populated by heads of federal employee unions, the presidents of the Senior Executives and Federal Managers Associations, and the head of the Office of Personnel Management, among others. It's purpose is to see if agencies can bargain over permissive subject, or things that are not normally bargained over. Such as: technology used to support a program, the number of employees assigned to a project, the skill levels or qualifications of the people assigned, and even the work methods.

  An earlier draft would have required bargaining over the permissible subjects, but the administration backed off that one. Instead, sometime in early July, agencies participating in the test pilots will submit proposals to the Council for which programs they want to test bargaining over. The actual bargaining is some time off. Beyond that, there will be a measurement apparatus to see if the bargained-over projects improve their performance. My guess is it will somehow tie back to the data-driven program performance evaluations that Shelley Metzenbaum, the associate director for performance and personnel management at the Office of Management and Budget, is urging agencies to undertake.

  Agencies or departments involved initially are Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, OPM, Social Security Administration, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.

  No one knows how far this will go, or whether permissive subject bargaining will significantly erode the discretion of federal managers when it comes to deciding how to get a project done. Should it take hold, though, it would have the potential to complicate decisions such as how much work is done by contractors, whether IT support for a program is able to move to a cloud computing basis or how many people are needed to run and monitor a data center or set of centers that are consolidated physically or via virtualization. It would affect the return on investment for productivity-enhancing deployments of call center automation or data center monitoring software that affects staffing levels.

  It's probably hyperbolic to envision featherbedding IT workers sitting around doing nothing thanks to a bargaining agreement. And we've seen labor-management councils before -- the current executive order resurrects labor-management partnerships that existed during the Clinton administration. And the bargaining has to take place where there already is a union. Plus, the pilots must involve at least 500 bargaining unit employees, or involve a significant agency process. It's possible that the very fact of expansion of bargaining into areas normally considered the discretion of management could make establishing a union more enticing to employees now indifferent to it.

  Many IT projects depend on contracted programmers and other staff, and that flexibility could be hampered in a bargaining situation. There's no immediate widespread bargaining, but it's something for federal managers to keep an eye on.

  Return to top