FedInsider.com brings you fortnightly the voices of those in the government community driving change. Hear about leaders from both government and industry who will lead and manage government through transition to the next Administration. Watch your inbox on the 1st and 15th every month.
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KAREN EVANS PREPARES TO DEPART, CONFIDENT SHE'S MADE A DIFFERENCE
Karen Evans, Administrator for E-Government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget, is driving through a nasty rain on Maryland's I-270, on her way home to West Virginia. She is famous for using her long commute to catch up with people via cell phone. On this day she is talking to FedInsider about her upcoming departure in anticipation of the presidential transition, and the 27 years of federal service that she is about to close the chapter on.
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IN BOOSTING CYBERSECURITY, WHOSE SHOULDERS WILL THE NEW ADMINISTRATION STAND ON?
Like fastballs coming out of a pitching machine, proposals for every imaginable facet of government are flying towards the Obama transition team. Everybody wants to be noticed. Two new initiatives in cybersecurity are likely to have impact on the market in that they will translate into policies and programs of the incoming crowd.
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TEA LEAVES HAVEN'T QUITE REVEALED IT PLANS OF OBAMA
As transition moves closer to inauguration, the IT community gets more anxious about what IT policy and initiatives will look like. It appears that we can expect some traditional, big IT projects to be launched in the next several years. The clues to what these might be are found in the programs the Obama administration is likely to launch, or what the 111 th Congress is likely to push.
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IT'S ALREADY A GOOGLE WORLD, BUT IS A GOOGLE GOVERNMENT NEXT?
By the time Bill Gates pulled back from the world of technology he'd learned a hard lesson. The relatively free markets of the U.S. economy have a heavy-handed big brother in the federal government. Google is determined to avoid tangling with the government, which it sees both as a customer in the ordinary sense, and as something it can influence to its own advantage.
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Don't Miss IRMCO 2009!
Why should you attend GSA's IRMCO 2009 - the annual government-only gathering of agency career and political leaders?
- Explore the most current thinking about policies and strategies of the current Administration, and learn how to help achieve your agency's missions and objectives.
- Hear from and network with keynotes and speakers selected to directly address the needs of a government executive.
- Create a network of peers within the executive realm of government in order to foster interagency knowledge sharing, coordination and collaboration.
- Earn program management continuous learning credits for updating critical skills.
Plan now to attend IRMCO on April 19-22, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland, a quick trip up Route 50.
General Services Administration (GSA) is pleased to solicit your nominations for the IRMCO Award. The IRMCO Award is a prestigious award presented each year to a single individual and team. The IRMCO awards have monetary recognition of $2,000 (individual) and $5,000 (team). These awards are given to those who have demonstrated exceptional ability to operate across organizational boundaries to improve the Government's services to its citizens.
These awards will be presented at the 48th annual IRMCO conference on Monday, April 20, 2009, at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay, in Cambridge, MD. Sponsored by GSA, IRMCO is attended by executives and managers from across the Federal Government. Visit the IRMCO Awards Nomination website to submit a nomination. The IRMCO award is for Government employees only.
Complete Articles for December 15, 2008
Karen Evans Prepares to Depart, Confident She's Made a Difference
Karen Evans
Karen Evans is driving through a nasty rain on Maryland's I-270, on her way to West Virginia, where she lives. She is famous for using her long commute to catch up with people via cell phone, and on this day she is talking to FedInsider.
The press is going to miss Evans, the Administrator for E-Government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget, when she leaves office at the end of the Bush administration. She has always made time to explain an initiative in whatever detail a reporter can handle. She'll call or e-mail if she thinks you got something wrong, too.
Evans is preparing for her departure in anticipation of the presidential transition next month. When she leaves she will have completed 27 years of federal service, 22 as a career civil servant and five as a political appointee at OMB.
"I'm on my sixth budget cycle" at OMB, she said.
"I have the right to go into career service at the Department of Energy," she pointed out. "But right now I'm filling out my retirement papers."
That very morning, she had briefed President Bush. Who would go back to career work after being mother hen to governmentwide initiatives that require reporting, at least occasionally, to the president personally?
To more fully understand what motivates Evans, have her tell you about her work in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center, when she worked for the Office of Justice Programs. OJP operates a program of grants called Public Safety Officers Benefits. It benefits surviving family members of police and firemen who die in the line of duty. In the course of a year, a fairly predictable number of law enforcement officers lose their lives in the line of duty. But hundreds perished at once in New York City that day, including 343 from the fire department.
Working with city fire, police and Port Authority officials, Evans helped develop an electronic form to speed benefits applications, while OMB cleared the decks for one-day approval. The form was loaded on notebook computers and deployed at five fire station houses, in effect bringing the federal government right down to where it was needed.
"I don't know that I can ever forget that," Evans said of the experience, which included a tour of the still-smoldering World Trade Center site two weeks after the towers' destruction. To this day, Evans said, she remains in touch with the New York people she worked with.
More recently, Evans has concentrated on a variety of cross-cutting IT initiatives in which direction has come from OMB, but implementation has been borne by the departments and agencies. If that sounds like herding cats, it is, but Evans has achieved remarkable success in making OMB, and her office in particular, a relevant and forceful participant in those initiatives.
She once asked agency CIOs - and not rhetorically - where they would be proud to be in terms of their implementation of OMB initiatives a year after the asking.
So FedInsider asked Evans of what she was most proud.
Without hesitation, the first thing she mentioned: "IPv6 deployment and implementation. It opens up so many possibilities that the future is endless."
Not a bad choice. IPv6 was an abstraction when it was first introduced as something the government should adopt. The Internet worked fine as it was, didn't it? Presidential orders have a way of echoing around without a lot of effect unless there are people to work them hard. Having Defense Department visionaries glom on early to IPv6 no doubt helped OMB with the civilian agencies, as did its inclusion as embedded firmware by network equipment vendors. But there is no doubt that Evans' doggedness, aided by solid backing from her boss, Deputy Director for Management Clay Johnson, has furthered the government's move to IPv6.
While most federal employees have yet to see a real HSPD-12 card dangling on their neck chains, Evans cited the standards required for implementation of these new, secure ID cards as creating a foundation for many applications.
"We talk about it as HSPD-12 cards, but it really shows that if government is clear about requirements, industry will invent the technology to meet your requirement. [HSPD-12] takes security up to the next level," she said. She is confident future applications in security can be interoperable across agencies thanks to the standards and technology interfaces in HSPD-12.
Evans is also proud that, thanks to work by OMB on Bush's President's Management Agenda, "Government fundamentally thinks of itself differently. It used to be, 'My agency first.' Now the 'enterprise' is considered the federal government and agencies are business units. There's really a new mindset of how the IT community solves problems."
That new-found attitude in turn enabled initiatives such as the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) and Trusted Internet Connection (TIC.) FDCC aims to have every PC configured in a standard, secure way. The TIC is reducing thousands of primary Internet hookups operated by the government to, OMB is hoping, around 100, with each of the remaining connections equipped with state-of-the-art security monitoring [more on this below].
Finally, Evans is proud that the political position of her deputy has been converted to career, thus institutionalizing it. (Mike Howell, a long-time Interior manager, was recently named deputy administrator for E-gov and IT.)
"I think the next administration will re-engage the public so that people have direct input via technology," Evans said. "Transparency and accountability will go to the next level, and technology will make that happen."
In Boosting Cybersecurity, Whose Shoulders Will The New Administration Stand On?
Like fastballs coming out of a pitching machine, proposals for every imaginable facet of government are flying towards the Obama transition team. Everybody wants to be noticed.
Two new initiatives in cybersecurity are likely to have impact on the market in that they will translate into policies and programs of the incoming crowd. In both cases they were developed by people connected to the government or to the Obama team in some way, and not merely released into the din, like beach balls flung into a noisy stadium crowd.
The media jumped all over a recent report from the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. In a sense, there is not much new or shocking in the report. Many of its 96 pages review what agencies already know, such as the fact that federal systems are probed continuously and in high volume. But it makes a compelling argument for a thoroughly revised approach to cybersecurity.
Reps. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) and Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) chaired the commission. Ret. Lt. Gen. Harry Raduegue, formerly director of the Defense Information Systems Agency and now with Deloitte, was a member.
Recommendations include reorganizing the government's cybersecurity apparatus, and consolidating it in the White House. This resembles in many ways the approach to the Year 2000 conversion, except that the earlier effort had a definable end-point.
It also tenders a somewhat heavier federal hand with respect to private sector cyber infrastructure. The authors correctly reiterate that systems controlling the financial, telecommunications, and utility industries are out of government's hands, and the authors feel there should be a bigger government role in cybersecurity for these networks. They state frankly their belief that cybersecurity in the private infrastructure is impossible without regulation.
The other initiative is known as the Consensus Audit Guidelines (CAG.) Read about it at the web site of John Gilligan, the former Air Force CIO who has been coordinating work on the guidelines, working with Alan Paller of the SANS Institute. The main thrust of this effort, which involves both industry and government, is to establish consensus on the 20 most important security controls that will harden systems against attack. The guidelines anticipate a coming rewrite of the Federal Information Security Management Act to require a more practical approach by federal agencies.
Gilligan says the CAG initial report will be released in January, and put out for public comment.
Taken together, these developments point to a shift in how the federal government approaches cybersecurity. And it will mean opportunities for companies who possess deep technical knowledge of cybersecurity as it becomes less a management exercise and more of an operational one. Transference of expertise across domains will also promise big business as the government becomes more involved with the critical elements in the private sector. Many military and security experts believe that if there is another major terrorist attack, the physical part of it will be preceded by a cyber offensive - an attempt to leave Americans in the dark and unable to communicate.
Should the Obama administration generally adopt the principles in the Cybersecurity Commission report, it won't necessarily mean the abandonment of certain Bush administration projects. Specifically the Trusted Internet Connection and Einstein initiatives are well suited to good cybersecurity operations, and the incoming team would be smart to accelerate their completion. TIC is an Office of Management and Budget program, while Einstein lives at Homeland Security. The Obama team may want to consolidate them under its contemplated White House cybersecurity office.
Tea Leaves Haven't Quite Revealed IT Plans of Obama
As transition moves closer to inauguration, the IT community gets more anxious about what IT policy and initiatives will look like. For instance, the Industry Advisory Council (IAC) is putting out position papers. Although much of their boilerplate could have been written 8, 16 or 20 years ago, they nevertheless present a reasonable case for maintaining the government's investment levels in IT. Read the first in the series here.
Others are focusing on Web 2.0 whoop-de-doo seen on the www.change.gov site, which gives the impression that everything will be voted by plebiscite. Note this gem from the site:
" Last week, our Open for Questions feature was particularly well-received:
"More than 20,000 people cast nearly 1,000,000 votes on questions posed by the community. Overall, just over 10,000 questions were voted up or down and ranked by visitors to the site. The result is a snapshot of the issues you're concerned about as the pieces for the next administration move into place."
Such use of IT tools threatens to turn desired outcomes loose in an echo chamber of self-fulfillment.
For all this conversation, I still expect some traditional, big IT projects to be launched in the next several years. The clues to what these might be are found in the programs the Obama administration is likely to launch, or what the 111 th Congress is likely to push.
For example, should the nation embark on a system of energy rationing via so-called " cap and trade," that activity would take place in an online environment that would have to be built or adapted from other market systems. The Food and Drug Administration is likely to get a big funding boost, and it is well known to be behind the curve on IT, so projects could come from that agency. And just imagine the IT requirements of an expansion of federal health care benefits.
What might be slower in coming is outsourcing of federal data centers on a mass scale, given the new distrust of contractors and contracting coupled with security worries. Look for a hybrid approach - government owned and controlled facilities with contractor workers. That is to say, things on the IT front will evolve, but not necessarily revolutionize.
It's Already A Google World, But Is A Google Government Next?
By the time Bill Gates pulled back from the world of technology to concentrate primarily on giving away his billions, he'd learned a hard lesson. The relatively free markets of the U.S. economy have a heavy-handed big brother in the federal government. Antitrust suits in the technology field always look a little silly in hindsight because technology marches on and the issues themselves become meaningless. But while a company is in the Justice Department's cross hairs, life can be difficult and expensive. IBM dealt with this in its 11-year battle (1969-1980) back in the mainframe days. General Motors in the 1950s. How's that for irony?
Google is determined to avoid tangling with the government, which it sees both as a customer in the ordinary sense, and as something it can influence to its own advantage. In this sense, Google represents a rapid maturing of the newest generation of IT high-flyers. Such companies realize the lessons to be learned from the traditional aerospace giants. You have to work the regulatory and oversight part of Washington while you sell to the agencies.
This isn't to say or imply Google is doing anything wrong. The company is a font of innovation and great products. It's earned its success.
Thus Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, last week argued that government information and web sites are not sufficiently searchable. His name kept coming up as a possible federal chief technology officer if, indeed, President-elect Obama chooses to establish such a position. Supposing for a moment Schmidt joined the government as an appointed CTO, we'd have to assume he would not only resign from Google but also divest himself of all his stock before he could sit on a source selection board for, say, www.usa.gov search technology.
Google also argues before the Federal Communications Commission for net neutrality, under which bandwidth hogs don't need to pay network utilities for the bandwidth they use. This is convenient since Google owns YouTube, one of the principal sources of Internet traffic.
When Google sought to enter a deal with Yahoo for online advertising, the threat of an antitrust suit - the company's other federal entreaties notwithstanding - it backed off the deal. Anything can happen in a trial, and if you lose a lawsuit, it's hard to square with the principle, "You can make money without doing evil."
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.
