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HASTINGS ENGINEERS NARA PARTNERSHIPS TO PRESERVE AMERICANS' PAST
Sometimes it seems as if the government creates new documents faster than it knows what to do with them. But what about old documents woven into the history of the United States and its people? Are they being preserved for future generations? -> Read
More
LESSONS FROM THE TANKER FIASCO
Fiasco is a good word for the Air Force's repeated attempts to replace its 50-year-old aerial refueling tankers. While it's important to keep in mind exactly what the Government Accountability Office actually said in sustaining Boeing's protest of the award to Northrop Grumman, it's also important to keep in mind what was not said. -> Read More
Save the date for GSA's IRMCO 2009!
Plan now to attend IRMCO 2009 on April 19-22, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. The 48th annual government-only gathering of agency career and political leaders is the premier place to network and discuss the government's challenges.
IRMCO, GSA's Interagency Resources Management Conference, has been produced by GSA since 1961 to serve the needs of the government's senior executives. The three-day retreat provides these leaders the opportunity for dialogue with experts in organizational change, peer-to-peer discussion of strategies to transform their agencies, and insightful keynotes from industry and government visionaries.
Bookmark www.irmco.gov to register early for government management conference.
READY OR NOT, DHS FACES FIRST PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION
If you look at a summer sky cloud formation, you can almost see the word "transition", so extensive these days is discussion of the upcoming election. For sure, the upcoming transition will be a big one. What is DHS doing to prepare for its first presidential change? -> Read More
BRIEFLY NOTED
- Williams shows that smart career people can swim with the sharks
- Surprise: IG doesn't dump on IRS
- Army lights a fire under Future Combat Systems
-> Read More
Complete Articles for July 1, 2008
Hastings Engineers NARA Partnerships To Preserve Americans' Past
Sometimes it seems as if the government creates new documents faster than it knows what to do with them. But what about old documents woven into the history of the United States and its people?
Between the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration, you'll find many projects designed to preserve and make accessible documents, films, sound recordings and photographs. Preservation and access are two sides of the same coin. The access side means digitizing records so they can be subject to unlimited access with none of the damage that comes from direct handling.
For Jim Hastings' corner of NARA, access to the past involves partnering with other organizations with rich stores of records. He is director of Access Programs at NARA , and says NARA couldn't fully realize its mission without partners.
"[Partnerships] help us with our goal of having as much material online as possible," says Hastings, a 36-year veteran of NARA. "There are millions and millions of pages we can't do ourselves."
He is referring to records relating to family genealogies and popular history more than scholarly records. Such records are held by three organizations with which NARA is forging partnerships: Ancestry.com, Footnote.com and the Genealogical Society of Utah, a non-profit funded by the Church of the Latter Day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City. The organizations have physical and digital records of all sorts, and visitors can create accounts into which they can load family pictures and other documents.
Ancestry.com has federal records online, mostly Census records up to the 1930 count-the most recent the law allows public access to. For privacy purposes, personally identifiable Census data is unavailable for 72 years after it is collected. It also has ship arrival manifests through 1957, which Ancestry.com is now scanning. And it has death notices of U.S. citizens abroad reported by the State Department back to the eighteenth century, Hastings says.
Such records "have always been available, but you had to know its there. Online with a rich index, you can find out not only that they died overseas but that there's a record of it." Such access, Hastings adds, will create "an incalculable increase in openness."
Under the agreements-which Hastings stresses are not contracts-the owners of documents digitize them, and NARA takes physical possession so that people can view them in one of the agency's 28 reading rooms nationwide. In five years, the documents become NARA property and NARA agrees to provide online access. In the meantime, the record owners charge fees for access for people wishing to do research. An example of how the agreements manifest themselves at NARA's web site can be seen here.
"We don't currently have the infrastructure to put them online, but in five years, who knows?" says Hastings. "Eventually more people will look online than go to a research room."
The agreements let NARA concentrate on the digitizing of documents best suited for the agency to do. Those, says Hastings, include items of high intrinsic value-such as telegrams from President Lincoln or the notes he sent to the telegraph office to be transmitted-items to delicate for automation or untrained hands, and non-text AV materials.
"There is no end date for this effort," Hastings says. "We have infinite material to digitize."
Fiasco is a good word for the Air Force's repeated attempts to replace its 50-year-old aerial refueling tankers.
For federal managers and contractors alike, it's important to keep in mind exactly what the Government Accountability Office actually said in sustaining Boeing's protest of the award to Northrop Grumman. To oversimplify, but just a little, the Air Force didn't evaluate the bids the way it said it would in the solicitation. This failure manifests itself in a number of ways in which evaluators weighted various parts of the companies' bids.
It's also important to keep in mind what GAO did not talk about, and to consider the things that have so preoccupied some members of Congress. How many U.S. jobs would each bid entail? Should military items not be built by foreign companies? Should military procurement fall under a duty to bolster U.S. companies? None of that is part of procurement, and certainly not part of the Air Force's solicitation. GAO wisely ignored such questions.
So now the Air Force is in a pickle. While legally it has several options, in reality it will have to start over, or at least appoint an impeccable source selection commission to re-evaluate the bids. Politically it may have to split the pig, giving each company a share of the 179-plane deal, despite the negative effect such a move would have on unit, lifecycle and complexity costs.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has been urging legislation to make the contract go to Boeing. It's difficult to know where to begin with what a bad precedent this would be. But the possibility of this gambit succeeding is remote.
In the meantime, the Air Force-which botched its earlier tanker deal in 2003, continues with its Boeing 707-derived tankers, whose genealogy dates to 1956.
Ready Or Not, DHS Faces First Presidential Transition
If you look at a summer sky cloud formation, you can almost see the word "transition", so extensive these days is discussion of the upcoming election.
For sure, the upcoming transition will be a big one, coming as it does after a two-term presidency marked by very strong and vigorously-pursued policy objectives.
No department has been the subject of transition readiness more than Homeland Security, which, of course, is a creature of the 9/11 aftermath and thus is facing its first presidential change. The weightiest assessment so far comes from the National Academy of Public Administration, which issued a 118-page report saying, in effect, DHS has both operational and managerial challenges surrounding transition. It warns that terrorists might attack sometime close to the inauguration when DHS's challenges might result in vulnerabilities.
The department has moved senior career people into normally political positions as the politicals depart. It has retained the Council for Excellence in Government to train career people in dealing with transition.
Continuity of IT programs is of most concern to contractors, if not to the technology and program leaders within DHS itself. Recently on Federal News Radio, John Kost, a group vice president at Gartner, talked about the need for career people to try and understand the policy aims of the incoming crew, and not get bogged down in talking about details of particular projects. Or at least don't talk about them as IT but rather as enabling the mission of the agency.
The fact is, IT is a neutral utility. A system can be programmed to support different policies; the IRS reprograms its systems every year as Congress tweaks the tax code, for example. The best things those involved with an IT project can do to ensure not merely its survival but its embracing by new incoming policy makers is to ensure it is on time and within budget, and that it in fact does support the agency mission. Then it can speak for itself.
Williams shows that smart career people can swim with the sharks
The IT community collectively smiled and nodded a knowing head when Jim Williams was tapped to become administrator of the General Services Administration. A long-term career fed, Jim has held many of the tough jobs. Head of IRS acquisition. Program manager for IRS modernization. Program manager of U.S. Visit. Commissioner for Federal Acquisition Service as it was reformulated out of two GSA units. Always upbeat and genial, Jim is the kind of professional who exemplifies the best in public service. We wish him well.
Surprise: IG doesn't dump on IRS
The long-running IRS modernization problem got a pat on the back from Treasury Inspector General's latest annual report on the program. Highlights include progress in adding applications to the Customer Account Data Engine-the core replacement for the original flat file system. It gives credit to the 2005 strategy of dumping a lead systems integrator in favor of the IRS doing its own program management. Troubled programs really can make progress.
Army lights a fire under Future Combat Systems
Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Army has overhauled its Future Combat Systems in favor of deploying it first to the lighter infantry and unmanned aerial platforms, instead of the heavy armored units. As GovExec reported, the plan met with approval from key lawmakers, including Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, and Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
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.
