Summaries for August 1, 2008

WOULD YOU HAVE TAKEN MORE THAN TWO WEEKS OFF?
Ed Meagher goes out for steak dinner every Friday night at top-drawer restaurants. The other night he sprang for dinner for 65 friends.  That is, 65 wounded soldiers.  Formerly with the VA and the Interior, Meagher continues his work with the Wounded Warrior program as he takes on a new role at SRA. -> Read More

DEFENSE OF PROCUREMENT HINDERED BY SCANDALS
As the old joke goes, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you. To that you can add another hoary cliché, that the enemy is us.  These old sayings paint the picture quite well when looking at the track record of some government programs and contracts. -> Read More

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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.

NEXT ADMINISTRATION MAY COINCIDE WITH "YEAR OF DATA"
The name Ken Olsen might seem as remote nowadays as that of Henry Ford. But the founder of the old Digital Equipment Company, or DEC, had ideas that still resonate. Once he pointed out that the reason the Soviet Union would steal DEC minicomputers is so they have something on which to run the software.  As the “Year of Data” dawns, agencies are concerned about how to keep critical data out of the wrong hands. -> Read More

SHE'S BAAAAAAAACK!
Lurita Doan has by no means disappeared from the federal IT market. Doan will be airing her views in a weekly, 15-minute program called Leadership Matters on FederalNewsRadio AM 1050 in Washington. To listen to her first show read on. -> Read More

• Would You Have Taken More Than Two Weeks Off?

  Ed Meagher

  Ed Meagher goes out for steak dinner every Friday night at top-drawer restaurants. He always has company. In fact, just the other night Meagher sprang for dinner for 65 friends.

  That is, 65 wounded soldiers back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and fresh out of local military hospitals.

  Thanks to a four-year fundraising effort by Meagher and two colleagues, also veterans, these wounded warriors not only get a prime beef dinner with all the trimmings, they get an empathetic ear, and access to cash if needed for a car or rent payment. They might even have gotten the suit they wore to dinner.

  That is, from Meagher they get a heartfelt welcome home. It's all part of the Wounded Warrior program that Meagher has been working at for several years. He partners with the Aleethia Foundation and the Leadership VA Alumni Association to serve the soldiers.

  “The dinners are an opportunity to find out what their needs are,” Meagher says of the soldiers. “We're the gap-fillers.”

  Sometimes the returnees need special equipment, such as computers with voice input software. Meagher's Wounded Warrior program provides notebooks loaded with Nuance Communication's Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

  “There are no forms, no paperwork. We just take care of it,” Meagher says.

  Meagher is a 30-plus year public servant, Vietnam veteran, family man, baseball fan and now an operative on the contractor side of the community. He recently joined SRA International as its Director of Strategy for Health Affairs in the company's Global Health Sector. He retired as Deputy CIO of the Interior Department, which followed several years as Deputy CIO at Veterans Affairs.

  At VA, Meagher says, “I went for the job and was captivated by the mission.”

  If anything best illustrates this big bear of a man, it is his continuous effort on behalf of the returning soldiers. He raises the funds via individuals and organizations concerned with federal IT, such as ACT/IAC, the Information Technology Association of America and the Association for Federal IRM. And, he says, he has the backing of SRA to continue the work.

  Meagher has also had an impact in the agencies he's worked for. At both VA and Interior, he took on computing and communications infrastructures that were too outmoded to support the new applications the departments wanted to field.

  “We naively thought in 2000 and 2001 we'd get new systems, but we kept coming up against the infrastructure,” Meagher says about his VA days. “The infrastructure wouldn't support the hoped-for applications.” So Meagher went to work painstakingly marshalling the consensus and resources for consolidating WANs, upgrading LANs and securing the whole place.

  “Even when the laptop was stolen, it wasn't someone hacking into the network,” Meagher says, referring to the loss of a data-laden PC from a VA manager's home. He adds, “We explained to the business community,” meaning the program managers at VA, “why security is important. We asked, what is the cost of lost confidence in the mission if hospital records ended up on the Internet?”

  At Interior, Meagher faced the same job. “I was brought in with that in mind. It's a hard job; it's plumbing.”

  Many who know Meagher know that, while at Interior, in some ways his heart was still at VA because of his abiding interest in veterans' issues. Still, he says, the decision to leave federal service was more difficult than he anticipated it would be.

  “There were so many good people at Interior who had signed onto change, battling the resistance. So there's that feeling of abandoning them,” he says. “Getting off that train is hard.”

  He also takes his departure to shoot down what he called the myth of the lazy bureaucrat. “I've never known one. I'd get to Interior at 7 a.m., and there were always a few people already there.”

  Meagher retired from government on July 14, and two weeks later he started at SRA. Already used to 12-hour work days, he says that while the pace at SRA hasn't yet caught up to his pace in the government, “I see it coming” as he settles in.

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• Defense Of Procurement Hindered By Scandals

  As the old joke goes, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you. To that you can add another hoary cliché, that the enemy is us.

  The IT community laments the crushing burden of oversight pouring out of the committees on the Hill. During his confirmation hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Jim Williams, nominated to be Administrator of the General Services Administration, was even asked about a two-year-old dispute between GSA and Sun Microsystems. Some of this stuff never seems to die.

  No sooner had the ink dried on a Transportation Security Administration contract with Lockheed for the agency's Integrated Hiring Operations Personnel System, when Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) was all over it like a cheap suit. Thompson is asking all sorts of questions about the $1.2 billion deal, prefacing them with this gem: “I fail to understand how this contract will benefit the ... workforce.”

  And yet, and yet.

  Consider that case of KBR in Iraq. The New York Times in July broke open how widespread the shoddiness of electrical contracting work done by KBR really was. At its worst, the wiring of facilities was so poor that 13 U.S. soldiers died by electrocution. The Army documented 283 fires, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of shockings that became almost routine.

  I happen to know that even some Government Accountability Office investigators in Iraq on other business had to be reassigned quarters when the trailers they were lodged in seemed to be alive with electricity.

  How do the officers of such contractors sleep at night?

  Then there is a GAO report asserting that a Small Business Administration program for businesses in poor areas has such weak controls that it is ripe for fraud. Posing as crooks applying for certification for doing business in a so-called HUBzone, GAO investigators used the address of a Starbucks as the principal address on the application — and got the certification to operate in the zone.

  “If SBA had performed a simple Internet search on the address, it would have been alerted to this fact,” audits note dryly.

  It all adds up to $100 million in contracts going to companies falsely claiming to be residents in the HUBzones the program is designed to benefit.

  So, waste, fraud and abuse runs from one or no-person companies to some of the giants.

  The lesson here has been repeated often, and that is the government simply needs to develop more will, resources and skill to oversee the programs and contracts in which it engages. In a perfect world, the first person to touch a hot doorknob would touch off an investigation as to how the wiring was connected so badly. In the real world, an overwhelming amount of electrical work had to be done quickly and with not enough qualified contractor personnel. Still, the invasion of Iraq started in 2003, and the electrocution that touched off the publicity surrounding this scandal took place in February of this year.

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• Next Administration May Coincide With "Year Of Data"

  The name Ken Olsen might seem as remote nowadays as that of Henry Ford. But the founder of the old Digital Equipment Company, or DEC, had ideas that still resonate. Once he pointed out that the reason the Soviet Union would steal DEC minicomputers is so they have something on which to run the software.

  While investments in hardware continue for the federal government, most of it is for consolidation—reducing and simplifying agencies' hardware infrastructure.

  One exception is supercomputing, which is like the NASCAR racing of computing. Activities there are all aimed at faster and faster hardware. Another exception is the flotsam of devices government workers, and all workers, carry around now.

  Data will occupy agencies for a greater degree in the coming two years. How to secure it, preserve it, access it, and share it.

  As the Year of Data dawns, tension builds around the data issues.

  For example, in recent weeks Dale Meyerrose, the CIO of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has been talking about how the initial vision of improving sharing data in the intelligence community will spread to include other agencies. And yet, other reports show that congressional unanimity behind any and all data sharing projects isn't necessarily in the bag. In a recent hearing, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) noted that some members might try and strip funding for the Information Sharing Environment in 2009, even though the environment itself has not been established.

  Meanwhile, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to withhold some $400 million from the State Department's border security program because it is worried about the security of data contained in passport files. This measure stems from an incident in which employees of State and a contractor improperly viewed the passport files of Sens. Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama.

  Then there was the widely publicized intergovernmental debate, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, about whether to warn officials and anyone else attending the Olympics in Beijing against taking computers and other data-rich devices. Given the Chinese hackings into Rep. Frank Wolf's (R-Va.) office, a growing number of feds are thinking about taking blank machines and short term rental cell phones since — justifiably or not — they believe that one way or another, data in China will be purloined.

  Data worries go on and on. But as the number of government projects grows, from data mining and sharing among communities of interest to adding data to smart ID cards and passports, so will programs to ensure privacy and security.

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• She’s Baaaaaaaack!

  Lurita Doan

  Lurita Doan, the colorful and embattled General Services Administration Chief that the Bush administration fired in April, has by no means disappeared from the federal IT market.

  As a matter of fact, Doan has a forum for her views. She's joined FederalNewsRadio AM 1050 in Washington as a weekly commentator on leadership. While co-hosts of FNR's The Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Jane Norris were simultaneously on assignment, Doan co-hosted the show July 29 with producer Francis Rose.

  Doan will be airing her views in a weekly, 15-minute program called Leadership Matters.

  To be sure, Doan was controversial during her tenure at GSA, which lasted about two years. But she has qualities that make her ideal for radio. She's a forceful, articulate speaker, and she holds strong views. There is more to Doan than what went on at GSA. Check out her Wikipedia bio.

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