NEW EXECUTIVE ORDER MAKES PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT A WAY OF LIFE
A new EO envisions a new job: performance improvement manager. That role is to go to career managers—precisely so the focus on results and continual improvement carrier over to the new administration, independently of how politically-driven policies governing programs will change. -> Read More

FEDERAL FINANCE SKILLS MUST CATCH UP ON TRANSFORMATION
When pundits predict a retirement-driven government brain drain, it’s folks like Mary Mitchell they have in mind. -> Read More

• IRMCO is Both Old and New

  Think back 47 years. In the autumn of 1960, managers in government were thinking of the same thing you’re thinking of now: transition. After eight years of a Republican administration, folks were wondering, what will the new administration bring?

  Like now, there were big fields of candidates, at least on the Democratic side. Remember Pat Brown, Stuart Symington, George Smathers or Michael DiSalle? They were battling it out with the more familiar Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Stevenson. Over on the GOP, Nixon had to contend with Goldwater and Rockefeller.

  IRMCO—the Interagency Resources Management Conference—also got started in 1960. Unfortunately, we don’t know precisely what occupied the agenda and mind-space of that initial conference. But even though the IBM 360 was still four years into the future, we can surmise that the emerging field of automatic data processing might have been discussed. We can be a bit more certain that those attendees, some of whom probably came into government during the Roosevelt administration or earlier, discussed the coming transition.

  Well, computer circuits are no longer printed on glass plates, but the challenges of maintaining program continuity amid the uncertainty of political change is still relevant.

  Transition, though, is only one of the management topics that you and your colleagues will explore at IRMCO, scheduled for April 13-16, 2008, when the conference returns to the Hyatt Regency on the Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Md.

  IRMCO will also cover the big issues such as dealing with an evolving workforce and interactive Government 2.0. And it will include the latest thinking on the nuts and bolts of government, such as internal financial controls best practices and dealing with rising levels of contractor support.

  It is the one peer-to-peer conference federal program and IT managers really can’t afford to miss.
  
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• New Executive Order Makes Performance Improvement a Way of Life

  There is no field manual to transition planning. But he Bush administration wants certain of its initiatives to have legs that carry them over the bridge to the next administration.

  Earlier this month, a new executive order came from President Bush. It calls on agencies to appoint performance improvement officers responsible for fulfillment of Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) and Government Performance and Results Act activities.

  The EO envisions the new job to go to career managers—precisely so the focus on results and continual improvement carrier over to the new administration, independently of how politically-driven policies governing programs will change.

  Congress has been reluctant to enact legislation to cement the PART into law as a follow-on to the GPRA, which dates to 1993 and was signed by President Clinton. Asked whether the new EO was conceived to substitute for law, Clay Johnson, the deputy director of OMB for management answered, “You betcha.”

  Johnson’s OMB wants agencies to set “real, clear and reasonably aggressive” performance goals. And, for those goals to focus on mission delivery, not arcane statistics merely for OMB’s (and the agencies’ scorecards) benefit.

  By having performance measures in place coupled with continuous improvement programs, performance should keep getting better even if a new administration changes program policies, as it certainly will. In other words, the new executive order separates the focus on results from the adherence to policy.

  One requirement of the EO some agencies won’t like: It forces agencies to put on their home pages a link to their performance data.
  
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• Federal Finance Skills Must Catch up on Transformation

  When pundits predict a retirement-driven government brain drain, it’s folks like Mary Mitchell they have in mind.

  Mitchell, a 32-year veteran of federal service, will retire Jan. 3, 2008 from the General Services Administration. The FCW account of her plans made the magazine’s most-viewed story list, beating out a You-Tube video of GSA Administrator Lurita Doan on Halloween, dressed as a witch, riding the agency’s hallways aboard a Sedgeway.

  Currently GSA’s deputy associate Administrator for the Office of Technology Strategy, Mitchell has been focusing on the financial services line of business and, in a larger sense, the changing skills requirements of the federal financial function. That topic will be explored at IRMCO, which Mitchell says she hopes to attend as a session provocateur. She says IRMCO is unique among the popular conferences in that its attendance is nearly all government. Vendor-sponsors have a background role.

  In comparing IRMCO to other conferences, which have a very low percentage of government, "There is no struggle at IRMCO to get 20% government attendance," Mitchell says. IRMCO is nearly 100% government attendance.

  Financial types “have not been there in program decisions until now. The main focus has been on transaction processing and reporting,” she says.

  But that’s changing.

  As the mechanical functions of financial management go towards shared service providers, those in the CFO community “must be a party at the table making good business decisions.” Mitchell says she believes the integration of finance with agency budget and program goals requires transformation of the financial skills set. That transformation that has already occurred in IT as data processing was outsourced and CIOs became strategists.
  
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