Summaries for December 1, 2008

IRMCO, IN 48TH EDITION, WILL FOCUS ON TRANSITION
Think back to 1950, and what government service was like then. The General Services Administration, then a new agency, was concerned with data and records preservation, just as computers were beginning to enter government service. It started a program for itself called IRMCO. Entering its 48th year, IRMCO will concentrate on the transitional phase from the Bush to the Obama Administration. -> Read More

OBAMA'S OMB WILL FACE SERIOUS PERFORMANCE ISSUES
Back in 1988, upon his nomination to run for president against George H. W. Bush, then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis famously said that the election was not about ideology, but rather about competence. National elections are about the economy and ideology, of course, so Dukakis came across as a sort of technocrat. Justifiably or not, though, the administration of Bush 43 has been tarred for being incompetent in both foreign and domestic affairs.  As the Obama team takes over the executive branch there are several government entities that need managerial attention. -> Read More

LET'S EXAMINE THE HYPE OF COMING CYBER NIRVANA
One of the reasons you could tell Jack Kennedy was a modern day president was that he dispensed with the 40s-era fedora. . You can tell Barack Obama is a 21st century president because he is the first to be widely seen using a cell phone and personal digital assistant, and the first to use electronic messaging to reach would-be voters for information and fundraising.  Will Obama's cyber coolness bring cyber nirvana to his administration? -> Read More

UPDATE: TWO NEW ADVANCES IN CYBER SECURITY
While Americans celebrated Thanksgiving Day last week, authorities in Mumbai, India were fighting to beat back a highly sophisticated terrorist attack that left some 175 people dead. Whatever euphoria the incoming Obama administration might have felt as it assembles itself would have been blown away by this reminder that civilized nations really are in a war against terrorism.  That reminder should reinforce the idea that cyber security is no abstraction, but rather a crucial link in the nation's, any nation's, security. -> Read More

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Early bird registration for IRMCO 2009 is now open!

Plan now to attend IRMCO 2009 on April 19-22, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. Federal Travel Regulation; Conference Planning-Prepayment of Registration Fee, FTR Amendment 2006-02 allows for the reimbursement of the prepayment of early bird discounted registration fees to attend a conference, so take advantage of the IRMCO 2009 early bird rates. 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. To register call 202-237-0300.

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Holiday AFFIRM Industry Partner Awareness Networking Program & Reception

You're invited to the Association For Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) Holiday Industry Partner Awareness Networking Program and Reception, sponsored by The Sustaining Partner Committee & Microsoft Corporation, on Wednesday, December 10 at the Microsoft Reston Offices from 5:30 to 8:00 PM. Come celebrate the holidays and meet the AFFIRM Board Government and Industry Members to learn how AFFIRM can support your business and key technology initiatives to better serve Government Agencies. To register visit www.AFFIRM.org.

• IRMCO, In 48th Edition, Will Focus On Transition

  Michele Heffner

  Think back to 1950, and what government service was like then. The General Services Administration, then a new agency, was concerned with data and records preservation, just as computers were beginning to enter government service. It started a program for itself, the Information Resources Management Conference.

  Unlike many other conferences, IRMCO is still going strong, and next year's edition is scheduled for April 19-22 in Cambridge, Md. The theme will be "Transformational Leadership: Steering a New Course." Topics and speakers will concentrate on what will then still be a transitional phase from the Bush to the Obama Administration.

  That currency is what has kept IRMCO both relevant and popular for nearly 50 years, according to Michele Heffner, Director of the Interagency Policy and Management Division of GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy. Heffner serves as coordinator of the IRMCO program, seeking programming ideas from all across government and industry.

  About 10 years ago, IRMCO updated its name to Interagency Resources Management Conference.

  "The conference expanded the management areas we wanted to focus on beyond information technology," Heffner said. IRMCO now focuses on finance, human resources and acquisition in addition to IT, what Heffner called "the foundational management issues of all agencies."

  The program is still in development, in part because of transition itself. The whole federal government is waiting to see who will be coming into the policy jobs at agencies. Heffner hopes that many of them will speak at IRMCO. (If you have an idea for a speaker, panel or other presentation at IRMCO, Heffner welcomes suggestions; just e-mail her at IRMCO@gsa.gov.)

  What won't change is that IRMCO is a conference first and foremost for government managers from all agencies. That is, attendees won't be overwhelmed by 3:1 or 4:1 ratios favoring industry attendees. So IRMCO is a particularly good place to network with colleagues.

  "It's a way to share lessons learned, get to know people from other agencies, and collaborate on shared initiatives," Heffner said.

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• Obama's OMB Will Face Serious Performance Issues

  Back in 1988, upon his nomination to run for president against George H. W. Bush, then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis famously said that the election was not about ideology, but rather about competence.

  National elections are about the economy and ideology, of course, so Dukakis came across as a sort of technocrat.

  Justifiably or not though, the administration of Bush 43 has been tarred for being incompetent in both foreign and domestic affairs. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina was, for many, seen as worsening the disaster.

  As the Obama team takes over the executive branch, it faces some down-in-the-sticks issues that don't come up in campaigns. But they are big enough issues that their outcome will reflect on the administration.

  I see a military branch and three agencies in particular that need managerial attention.

  Air Force is already on a short leash held by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who earlier this year replaced the secretary and the chief of staff of the service. He did so after the Air Force, on more than one occasion, mishandled nuclear weapons or components in such a way as to indicate the service wasn't totally in control of its nuclear arsenal. In one celebrated incident, a B-52 was loaded with nuclear bombs and flown across the country. Gates was also peeved at the way in which the Air Force blew its acquisition of new aerial refueling tankers, not just once, but twice. After the most recent attempt, in which the award went to Northrop Grumman, the Air Force lost in a protest by Boeing. Gates specifically put off the acquisition until the next administration could tackle it.

  Food and Drug Administration has been habitually underfunded and understaffed, even as it has acquired more and more duties. Just last month, the agency dispatched its first inspector to China, a leading worldwide source of contaminated foods and drugs. At home, FDA's labs are said to need refurbishing.

  And although this Washington Post story only touched on it, the FDA is behind in its IT capabilities, and that hinders its mission. Contractors who can offer creative solutions to the IT shortfall will find a receptive audience at the FDA. For example, new application development that is hosted on a remote, or "cloud", platform might offer an efficient way for the agency to modernize.

  Federal Aviation Administration is in the very early stages of modernizing in such a way as to replace its ground weather radars with satellite systems. This will take until 2013 to complete, the agency predicts, although the FAA has always been optimistic in its estimates of technology deployment. The all-encompassing NextGen air traffic control system is something the agency views as a 15-year project. As management deals with modernization, it also will be facing unions with more of a friend in the Obama administration. A changed work environment would affect how technology and training are deployed and what if any business processes would be outsourced.

  Despite the budgetary pressures, expect the incoming administration to look for ways to speed this up, because the public increasingly sees air travel as an ordeal in good conditions and a total nightmare in less-than-ideal ones.

  Small Business Administration: SBA's most recent Government Accountability Office report http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0916.pdf chides the agency for having too few resources to ensure that contracting goals for the 8(a) and other preference programs are met. Given that the Obama administration wants to cut back on contracting in general, we can presume it will be more of a stickler about small, minority and other disadvantaged businesses getting the fair share, so look for investment in this area.

  These are just a few of the agency management issues I foresee. Many others exist. For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency has been in a state of civil war between Bush appointees and its civil service scientists over a variety of issues - carbon dioxide, lead and mercury. The Office of Management and Budget in mid-November ordered agencies to submit their hot lists of issues to be looked at by the incoming administration, and Obama's transition team is combing through them now.

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• Let's Examine the Hype of Coming Cyber Nirvana

  One of the reasons you could tell Jack Kennedy was a modern day president was that he dispensed with the 40s-era fedora. You can tell Barack Obama is a 21st century president because he is the first to be widely seen using a cell phone and personal digital assistant. More telling was his campaign's use of electronic messaging to reach would-be voters for information and fund raising.

  That apparatus is not suitable for use as a White House medium of communication, but the savvy with which Obama used these tools has lots of people and groups expecting astonishing feats of cyber coolness in the next government. The expectations, hopes and recommendations flowing around - e-government? i-government? - have formed a continuous loop of excited conversation.

  For example, take this recommendation, from the Government Performance Coalition, which is an affiliation of good-government groups:

  "Mandate the use of innovation and technology to revolutionize government business models in order to achieve citizen satisfaction.

  • Expand the use of e-government to facilitate improved 24/7 access to departments and agencies.

  • Empower agency leadership to engender a collaborative, transparent, and accountable learning culture.

  • Promote the strategic use of technology to re-engineer work processes and eliminate inefficiencies with a goal of improved service delivery and trust in government." (Read the rest of the Coalition's priorities here.)

  This could have been said in 1998 or 1988, and there is a lot of similar material circulating right now. Many of the current administration's President's Management Agenda ideas - the use of shared services under the Lines of Business initiative - have been only reluctantly embraced by agencies. Moreover, it is likely that an Office of Management and Budget under newly nominated Peter Orszag, will be intensely focused on wringing cost out of every detail of government operation. That's because the government is facing a deficit north of $1 trillion in fiscal 2009 alone.

  Therefore look for more initiatives such as a small, recent innovation requiring neither a presidential mandate nor a major investment. But it is one that I think indicates about how things will go: agencies finding their own, low-cost solutions to improve access and transparency. Check out the National Resource Directory, a portal for veterans and injured service members. It is the result of collaboration between components in the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments, other agencies, state and local governments and veterans groups - anyone with a service or product to offer service members and their families.

  You could add the information-sharing project going on in the intelligence community to the list of organic, multi-agency initiatives (see the last issue of FedInsider).

  Also, the Cyber-Obama movement has upped the level of talk about whether there will be a federal CIO or chief technology officer. Would-be nominees have ranged from captains of industry to retired career feds.

  But think about it a minute: What, realistically, could such a person do? Karen Evans, who will depart shortly as OMB administrator of e-government and IT, has in effect been doing this job for years. The title could change, but her office has taken on responsibility for big, governmentwide IT initiatives such as the Lines of Business, HSPD-12 identification cards and the Federal Desktop Core Configuration, a security project. The reason this worked reasonably well is that Evans herself is smart, tough and possesses extreme stamina. Plus, she has had the trust of her boss, deputy OMB director Clay Johnson, who has had the trust of President Bush.

  In short, the machinery already exists for governmentwide IT initiatives, while at the same time agencies are already learning to form their own coalitions and partnerships to leverage their IT investments for better mission delivery. If a federal Twitter feed is to spring into existence, it is more likely to bubble up from the mission needs of an agency or group of like-minded agencies than from a push from a tech boss.

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• Update: Two New Advances In Cyber Security

  While Americans celebrated Thanksgiving Day last week, authorities in Mumbai, India were fighting to beat back a highly sophisticated terrorist attack that left some 175 people dead. Whatever euphoria the incoming Obama administration might have felt as it assembles itself would have been blown away by this reminder that civilized nations really are in a war against terrorism.

  That reminder should reinforce the idea that cyber security is no abstraction, but rather a crucial link in the nation's, any nation's, security.

  Concurrent with presidential transition are two new developments in cyber security. One promises to advance management of cyber threat prevention, and the other advances the technology of intrusion response software.

  In the management of security, experts say that too many organizations focus on the wrong flaws in their systems. But a collaboration of former Air Force CIO John Gilligan, the SANS Institute of Bethesda, Md., and government and industry experts, aims to help cyber security professionals better focus their efforts. The effort is called the Consensus Audit Guidelines (CAG). The goal is to establish a list of the worst known vulnerabilities and promulgate the best response to them. Initially, Gilligan said, the CAG will encompass 20 vulnerabilities.

  The CAG effort is timely. Pending in the 111 th Congress is a rewrite of the Federal Information Security Management Act, or FISMA, which if enacted would take FISMA compliance out of the realm of management reports and into the measurement of whether systems are actually secure. Experts acknowledge that an agency can achieve high scores for FISMA compliance and have insufficiently secure systems, and vice versa. The new FISMA would change that. So, having guidelines based on the consensus of the best minds arriving at a time when agency mandates would shift focus to real security potentially will produce a climate of improvement.

  On the technology side, pay attention to BotHunter. It sounds like a movie title, but BotHunter is free software developed under an Army grant by the non-profit Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

  SRI's program manager for BotHunter is Phil Porras. He said the biggest difference between BotHunter and other anti-intrusion or anti-virus software is that BotHunter analyzes how a machine is responding to malicious code, not merely analyzing the profile of incoming code. The idea is that bots, or automated attacks that implant software, cause a machine to react with outgoing message activities that have identifiable characteristics.

  Porras said that government and industry users are encouraged to react to the software, make suggestions and otherwise help improve it over time. It is downloadable at www.bothunter.net for Windows XP and Unix machines including Mac OS X up to 10.5 (Leopard).

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