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GSA HELPS GUIDE GOVERNMENT TO NEW ONLINE ERA
In 15 years, the web has grown from an experimental curiosity agencies let their techies indulge in, to a strategic element in every agency's mission. Now that federal web sites have become the norm instead of the exception, what's new and how are agencies utilizing the power of the worldwide web?
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ALL QUIET ON THE 2009 BUDGET FRONT
If you are trying to get ahead of the game in figuring out where the budget priorities will be in 2009, as they say in New Jersey, fugettaboutit. Two factors have brought progress towards a 2009 budget pretty much to a standstill. What does this mean for contractors and feds?
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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's management conference.
STILL CIRCLING: READ BETWEEN THE LINES ON LATEST TANKER DEVELOPMENT
Not surprisingly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ruled that the Air Force will start over, more or less, in selecting a contractor for its KC-X tanker project. It's not back to the drawing board, but there is certainly much more work to be done before this contract is settled.
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IT SECURITY SHIFTS TO YET A NEW BATTLEGROUND
Buttoning up network perimeters, and searching for and destroying viruses-those security tasks are pretty much mastered by federal agencies. Now there's a new twist. Hacking incidents involving members of Congress have put a spotlight on China.
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COMINGS AND GOINGS
- Robert Burton, the deputy administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, is leaving after 34 years of services.
- Lt. Gen. Charles Croom is about to retire from his post as director of the Defense Information Systems Agency.
- Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson retires as CIO of the Air Force.
- Former Interior CIO Hord Tipton has joined (ISC) 2.
- Linda Springer steps down as Director of the Office of Personnel Management.
- Dr. Peter Alterman will become the new Deputy Associate Administrator for the Office of Technology Strategy.
- Lesley Field has been named Deputy Administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy.
-> Read More
Complete Articles for July 15, 2008
GSA Helps Guide Government to New Online Era
Sheila Campbell
In 15 years, the web has grown from an experimental curiosity agencies let their techies indulge in, to a strategic element in every agency's mission.
What's new in federal web sites? Just about everything.
Sheila Campbell estimates the federal government operates 10,000 web sites. Campbell, Manager of USA.gov Web Best Practices at the General Services Administration, says the job of web manager is still evolving. Campbell's efforts are at the center of a vibrant and enthusiastic federal web community.
One big change these days is "realigning sites around people's tasks. The community has rallied around the top task theme," said Campbell. That is, agencies are re-orienting their online presences around what visitors want to get done. And that varies as much as the agencies themselves do. But regardless of mission, agencies are finding that web-as-brochure just doesn't cut it any more.
That, Campbell adds, can mean simply making things easier to find via the search function or eliminating what she calls ROT - redundant, outdated and trivial material.
Campbell says that as a result of web sites becoming more strategic, federal web governance is also changing.
Typically, sites "started in the CIO's office as a technology project. Now it's moving to management by public affairs." The pitfall with this is that a site risks becoming a PR bulletin board that obscures functions visitors really need or want to access.
"There is no one perfect model" for web governance, Campbell says. At GSA, the Office of Citizen Services and Administration maintains USA.gov and several other public channels, including the National Publications Center in Pueblo, Colo.
"However managed, the web site must be integrated with the business units of the agency," she says. And in that way, improvements are focused on delivering what matters, whether letting people check eligibility via online at Social Security or establishing single points of contact for information during emergencies. Campbell says a good measure of a site's efforts is whether it improves the productivity of visitors by enabling them to complete tasks on their own during the session, instead of having to make phone calls or, worse, traipsing to an agency office.
Today, the web community can find lots of help. The Web Content Manager Forum is one place to look. If you want in-person development, the GSA operates Web Manager University with live classes through which 5,000 feds have already passed. Classes cover how to improve plain language, web governance, and meaningful web site metrics, according to Campbell. Even social media is covered - that so-called Web 2.0 grail everyone is seeking these days. In fact, that is becoming an important focus of training efforts, Campbell says, as more agencies get into blogging, wikis and internal social networks for colleagues and communities of practice.
Campbell points out the case of the Transportation Security Administration. When it put a proposed new airport procedure out for comment, it received 8,000 comments. "They embraced all that constructive feedback. Now they are challenged with how to sustain it."
A few agencies have dabbled in posting videos at YouTube. The GSA, for example, has short films about some of its award winning new buildings under its design excellence program. This raises issues of access for the disabled, security, and various legal issues.
Says Campbell, "We're having these conversations and creating a government-wide video sharing working group."
If you are trying to get ahead of the game in figuring out where the budget priorities will be in 2009, as they say in New Jersey, fugettaboutit. Two factors have brought progress towards a 2009 budget pretty much to a standstill.
First is partisan bickering. Second is the bipartisan feeling that whoever is elected will put his own stamp on the priorities anyhow, so why bother?
On the partisan bickering front, the House Appropriations Committee chair, David Obey (D-Wis.) got so fed up with Republican maneuverings that he declared a moratorium on spending bills until Oct. 1. Why? Because Republican Jerry Lewis (Calif.) tried to insert the entire Interior Department appropriations bill into the Education-Health and Human Service bill as an amendment. The reason: The Interior bill was a way to get offshore drilling voted on.
It gets tangled, but the upshot is simple. The industry is headed toward a continuing resolution environment that is likely to persist until the inauguration.
For contractors, it means less certainty about where to put resources and which acquisitions to target. For feds, the best strategy now is to push hard in ongoing projects.
Still Circling: Read Between The Lines On Latest Tanker Development
Northrop Grumman photo
Not surprisingly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ruled that the Air Force will start over, more or less, in selecting a contractor for its KC-X tanker project.
Parsing out Gate's statement is useful for insights about which he was not explicit. The takeaways:
- Spanking for the Air Force. Gates appointed a new source selection committee headed not by anyone in the Air Force but by John Young, DOD's Undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. Translation: After two blown awards, we're not gonna trust this one to the Air Force. For good measure, Gates said he was replacing the advisory committee to the source selection board.
- Dismissal — politely — of some Hill concerns that have jingoistically politicized the original award to Northrop Grumman because it bid with the European-built Airbus platform. Union-sympathetic think tanks came up with "proof" that the Boeing bid would mean more jobs. Tough, that's not part of the selection criteria. Gates indirectly acknowledged these concerns, but offered no reassurance that he'll buy an apple-pie American airplane.
- More work for the bidders. It's not back to the drawing board, but the contractors nevertheless have "revised" proposals to come up with. Yet Gates took pains to point out that GAO sustained only eight, albeit a crucial eight, of the more than 100 protest points Boeing lodged. Meaning: The proposals were pretty close. It was the Air Force's handling of its own criteria that grounded this, the second attempt, at an award.
My radio colleague, Jane Norris, predicts the Air Force will split the baby, given the size differential between the Boeing 767 (155 feet long) and Airbus A330 (197 feet long) and the sheer diversity of aircraft types the Air Force needs refueled. This is plausible, and gives the Air Force a technical way to assuage the politicians.
Buttoning up network perimeters, and searching for and destroying viruses — those security tasks are pretty much mastered by federal agencies. In a related development, earlier this month, Karen Evans, the e-government and IT Administrator at the Office of Management and Budget, said that the program to reduce the number of federal pipelines to the Internet had reached an interim goal of 100, resulting in fewer points of vulnerability for federal systems.
Now there's a new twist. Widely- reported in June, hacking incidents involving members of Congress have put a new spotlight on China. Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf and New Jersey Rep. Christopher Smith had data sucked out of their computers, apparently by hackers from within China.
And in a rare interview, with WTOP radio's J.J. Green, National Counterintelligence Executive Joel Brenner said the United States needs "a serious national discussion" on, basically, the supply chain involved in the production of computers. Nearly every portable computer — including Macintosh notebooks — is assembled in China or a nearby Asian country. Many of the chips and hard drives used in these computers are fabricated or assembled in those countries as well. At which location in the supply chain the hard drives are imaged with customers' operating systems and application software bundles varies.
But the point is that software is embedded not only on the hard drives, which can be wiped and reprogrammed, but also in the permanent parts of the machine that are out of the direct control of manufacturers, distributors and users. This means the government can't rule out the possibility that spying software is embedded right into the DNA of the machines its workers use.
To some extent, this discussion has been taking place for awhile. During the year 2000 conversion days, it became widely known how much U.S. contractors outsourced COBOL and other coding to countries such as India, Poland, Russia and other countries with varying degrees of antipathy towards the United States.
Comings And Goings: OFPP's Burton, AF's Charlie Croom Et Al
It may not be the long anticipated retirement tsunami, but this summer we note a number of high-level departures, and a couple of arrivals as well.
Robert Burton , the Deputy Administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, is leaving after 34 years of services. A lawyer, Burton has been a stabilizing influence in an OMB bureau marked by turmoil under President Bush. The short-lived and outspoken Angela Styles, followed by David Safavian, who got caught up (but eventually exonerated) in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, followed by the seeming caretaker Paul Dennett well, it s been a rough patch for OFPP.
Lt. Gen. Charles Croom is about to retire from his post as Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency. And Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson retires as CIO of the Air Force, a position for which the White House has nominated Lt. Gen. William Shelton, now at Air Force Space Command.
Former Interior CIO Hord Tipton, who left government in 2007, has joined (ISC)2, a non-profit IT security training and education company, as its Executive Director. He had been CEO of Ironman Technologies.
Linda Springer, after a three-year tenure, is stepping down as Director of the Office of Personnel Management. She will become Executive Director in the Government and Public Sector Advisory Services Practice of Ernst & Young LLP.
Dr. Peter Alterman
Dr. Peter Alterman will become the new Deputy Associate Administrator for the Office of Technology Strategy, within the GSA s Office of Governmentwide Policy. This was first reported by Federal News Radio. Alterman is Assistant CIO at the National Institutes of Health. He replaces Mary Mitchell, who retired earlier this year.
Lesley Field
The station also reported that at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Lesley Field has been named Deputy Administrator, replacing Rob Burton, who retired this month. Field had been detailed from OFPP to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.
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.
