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Tags: Project Management
I don’t get it, all this fuss about Federal agencies “poaching” employees from the private sector. The rumors were discussed at the luncheon tables for a couple of months, before FCW gamely published a story. That story only quoted two people, Stan Soloway of the Professional Services Council and Anne Reed of Acquisition Solutions Inc. Both have had distinguished Federal and private-sector service. Although neither would name specific instances, they made some good points. Soloway noted that agencies might be in danger of violating Merit Systems Protection Board policies. Reed, whose company employs many former Federal managers, said that some of her staff had been approached by agencies, in one instance upon threat of a contract cancellation. Disturbing as certain instances of recruitment might be, I think the general idea of the government recruiting people from contractors doesn’t rank up there as a hand-wringer. It wasn’t so many years ago that the complaints ran the other way. During the height of the dot-com boom, government managers regularly complained about their inability to compete with the private sector for the excitement and pay levels of the contractor jobs. Now the table is turned, if in fact the “poaching” is as widespread as people are saying. But is it really “poaching”? That’s a loaded word. It implies grabbing the innocent or the unaware, or using unfair tactics. Where to work and the offering of jobs are really personal choices by intelligent individuals. In a competitive market it can seem like poaching. But in the long run, each side, government and industry, has periods of holding the upper hand. As long as government plays by the rules, why should the fast track to the other side run in only one direction?
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Tags: Web 2.0
Started with great fanfare, the Washington Post announced a couple of weeks ago that it was abandoning its experiment in so-called hyperlocal news. This must have been a bitter decision for a company that tries to make its profits by doing good. Hyperlocal is a term popularized by the early newspaper online work by a guy named Rob Curley. He’d made a reputation with small newspapers, like the Naples [Fla.] Daily News, saving their backsides by creating Web sites with exhaustive detail about their local communities. He’s the type of guy who enthralled publications like Fast Company. At a meeting with him I attended when I was at the Washington Post Company, he said his staff brought coverage to the local little league as it was the New York Yankees. Anyhow, the Post, which presciently understood the implications of the Web for its own, then still-profitable business, was constantly tweaking its online strategy. Around 2006 the company convinced Curley to join and help it get into the hyperlocal business. The strategy was initially – and terminally – applied to coverage of Loudoun County, Va. (Curley ultimately did not stay long at the Washington Post Company, but he’s still hyperlocalizing newspapers. See this presentation.) I remember the murmurs from the Post newspaper staff members who attended the meeting, as well people from my old staffs at Government Computer News and Washington Technology, when Curley mentioned that he’d convinced owners of the tiny newspapers to hire 35 staff members to create Web content for properties with circulations of less than 30,000. In the days before there even was a World Wide Web, I worked at a 30,000 circulation suburban daily that covered four towns new Boston. The entire newsroom had about 25 staff members. This was in the days when newspapers practically printed money. Not that hyperlocal is a bad idea. In fact, it is centuries old. I worked for a tiny weekly newspaper in New Hampshire. It, like so many rural weeklies, had correspondents, some working for free or for nominal sums. They’d send in reports of whose aunt was visiting from Kansas, or where Chester and Martha would be spending Christmas, or whose son was promoted to second lieutenant in a faraway posting. I could miss a big story on some state capital and nobody cared. But, man, would that phone ring fast if I forgot to put the Jaffrey Women’s Bowling League box scores, all two inches of it, on the sports page! To this day, when I am in a remote area, I love finding old fashioned newspapers that still print this type of material. Funny, bloggers think they invented citizen journalism, when in fact all journalism was citizen at one time. Somewhere along the time reporters came to prefer the more high falutin’-sounding “journalist.” So clearly the economics for hyperlocal just don’t work for major newspapers if it requires doubling the editorial staff and adding dedicated sales people for ads that fetch a tenth the revenue of increasingly scarce print ads. And there’s another reason for the diceyness of hyperlocal in an area as big and diverse as Greater Washington: In the age of social media, people with an intense interest in something, whether the local little league or news of their extended families, have the means to be connected and share information on their own. These means just don’t include the local or regional newspapers . How can the Washington Post, or any mass medium, hope to compete with a Facebook group?
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Tags: Project Management
Heard much about the aerial refueling tanker lately? The Washington Times recently ran a piece by Sara Carter in which Times’ staff members interviewed Ralph D. Crosby Jr., the Chairman and CEO of European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., or EADS, the parent company of Airbus. Right now Northrop Grumman, which bid an Airbus airliner derivative, and Boeing are awaiting a new solicitation from the Pentagon to – presumably – replace the current fleet of very old refueling tankers. Airbus had won the contract to supply the tankers last year, but amid politics and protests Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates canceled the whole thing so the Pentagon could regroup. The new RFP, originally expected last month, is still possibly a month away. In the meantime, the F-22 fighter has been killed off, the F-35 (still years from deployment) boosted, and the mix of remaining new planes altered. So the requirements might be slightly different than before. The new RFP will be a test for the Obama administration’s ability to launch a large-scale procurement with requirements, costs, and schedule under control. And it will be a test of whether Gates – or potentially his successor by the time a contract is awarded – will stand up to members of Congress who advocated splitting the deal between Airbus and Boeing. You can’t really state unequivocally that a single award will have lower lifecycle costs than a dual award. The real question is whether the Air Force can maintain continuous competition as the mechanism to keep costs down, or control its requirements and know it costs such that it can ride herd on a single supplier. Both companies have proven solutions that are already deployed by other air forces. The issue for the U.S. Air Force is more contractual and political than technical. So much news has crowded out discussion of a new tanker that it’s been off the radar, so to speak. But not for long.
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Tags: Collaboration
The White House was wise to shut down its tip line for people to send in “fishy” rumors or allegations they’d heard about health care reform, so presumably the White House could refute the rumors. Remember Richard Nixon’s enemies list? This flag@whitehouse.gov gambit smelled like the cyber version of that, or at least the beginnings of an enemies compilation. And it was demeaning to the Obama administration to have started such an effort. Maybe this how people like David “The Spammer” Axelrod think, but if they want to do well by their boss they should avoid personalizing the health care debate. It was outrage from some congressional quarters, such as California Republican Darryl Issa, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. To be sure, the health care debate, or health insurance debate, depending on how you choose to view it, has gotten a bit hyperbolic. About as over the top as, say, Senator Ted Kennedy’s infamous remarks about Supreme Court nominee Robert M. Bork. Not to take sides here, but people really need to read the bill(s) because there is a gap between what the bills state and what the president is saying in his own town hall meetings. Speaking of town hall meetings – the current use of the term referring to where Members of Congress meet with constituents or the president gins up a publicity event is a perversion of “town meeting” both technically and in spirit. Having grown up in a Massachusetts town that operated under town meeting laws common in New England, and having been a rural reporter in New Hampshire at the outset of my career, I’ve attended and paid careful attention to town meetings. At a town meeting, the entire voting population of a town, if it is a small one, or elected town meeting representatives meet along with the selectmen, budget committee, and hired officials to conduct the town’s yearly business. Town meetings vote on budgets and other items on a warrant issued by the selectmen. Debates and votes typically take place according to Roberts Rules of Order under the watchful eye of a skilled moderator. For many reasons, it is the purest and most honest form of self-government possible for civilized people when conducted properly. Moderators don’t allow ad hominem attacks or shouting. People tend to behave themselves because in a small town, you’ll probably run into that fellow town meeting member tomorrow morning in the coffee shop. Postscript – this set of town meeting guidelines from the Vermont Secretary of State office cites a 1932 vote in the town of Whitingham to hire one doctor Walsh, for the annual sum of $2,000, to care for the town’s residents. An early example of the public option?
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Tags: Collaboration, Web 2.0
Twitter can be creepy. Federal agencies, and there are lots of them now, dallying in tweets need to assign someone to comb through the followers. I tend to ignore the e-mail messages on who is following me. To be truthful, I’m only an occasional twitterer, and I try to spend only a few minutes each week updating my LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. So I was taken aback one evening this week when I logged onto my Twitter account. Several new followers were purveyors or porno, some even including disgusting photographs for their thumbnail portraits. This forced me to spend 15 minutes combing through my puny roster of followers to block these creeps. There must be some automated way they have of adding themselves to people’s followers. I haven’t figured out the motivation, unless whatever links their tweets or Web sites contain launch malware delivery. For individuals, this is merely annoying. But what about organizations such as government agencies who collect large numbers of followers? Unless there is an administrator checking the followers, they put themselves in danger of being encrusted by nasty followers, like barnacles clinging to the bottom of a boat. Legal liabilities might arise as well, if, in communicating with these people – inadvertently and without specific knowledge of who they are – the agency or company somehow could be construed as an accessory to pornography trafficking. Plain old commercial followers will attach themselves to your account as well. I’ve sliced off hotels, jewelry sellers, and travel agencies from my account. To their credit, the Twitter operators try to stay on top of fraudulent or inappropriate accounts, but obviously they can’t be on top of everything.
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Tags: Project Management, Security
Ahh, the good old days of when PC technology was new. The once-mighty Comdex show got two or three years of solid attendance and exhibitor growth just from the advent of Microsoft Windows 3.1, the first mass- deployed (but not the first) windowing system. Dealing with PCs and computing in that era was like driving in the 1920s. Sure, a Model T could go 50 miles per hour, but you spent as much time fiddling with the machine as you did driving. The advent of Windows 7 might be taking PC users back to those halcyon days. The blogosphere is humming with back-and-forth over a chart Microsoft supplied to the Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg. Mossberg has been warning that upgrading an existing machine from Windows XP to Windows 7 (skipping Vista) will be perhaps not a nightmare, but certainly a non-trivial chore. That is, unless you consider saving all your important files to a target disk, wiping your boot disk clean, installing Windows 7, restoring all your settings including bookmarks, then re-importing all of your files more fun than an afternoon in the park. The chart shows all of the upgrade combinations, very few of which can be accomplished the normal way, the way people have come to expect. And that is by just inserting the CDs, overwriting the OS, and leaving everything else alone. The irony is that upgrading will be generally easier for those who bravely took the Vista plunge. Mossberg writes for individuals, not organizational network administrators. But short of some miracle, it might be less expensive for large organizations to buy new hardware with Windows 7 pre-installed than to spend the hours required to wipe disks to do a clean install. Perhaps government agencies could get by simply buying new hard disks. The upgrade is complicated by the fact that Windows 7, like its predecessors, comes in several versions, some 32-bit, some 64-bit. No smugness from Mac people, please. Let’s be fair. If Microsoft could control the hardware like it controls the OS, perhaps upgrades would be more Mac-like. The real world is more complicated, and for a step-function increase in power, sometimes you have to make a clean break. I still use a Motorola PowerPC Mac notebook, and it has come to the end of the line for OS upgrades. The forthcoming Apple Snow Leopard (Apple uses cat names for its OSes) only runs on Intel Macs.
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Tags: Project Management, Security
Ahh, the good old days of when PC technology was new. The once-mighty Comdex show got two or three years of solid attendance and exhibitor growth just from the advent of Microsoft Windows 3.1, the first mass- deployed (but not the first) windowing system. Dealing with PCs and computing in that era was like driving in the 1920s. Sure, a Model T could go 50 miles per hour, but you spent as much time fiddling with the machine as you did driving. The advent of Windows 7 might be taking PC users back to those halcyon days. The blogosphere is humming with back-and-forth over a chart Microsoft supplied to the Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg. Mossberg has been warning that upgrading an existing machine from Windows XP to Windows 7 (skipping Vista) will be perhaps not a nightmare, but certainly a non-trivial chore. That is, unless you consider saving all your important files to a target disk, wiping your boot disk clean, installing Windows 7, restoring all your settings including bookmarks, then re-importing all of your files more fun than an afternoon in the park. The chart shows all of the upgrade combinations, very few of which can be accomplished the normal way, the way people have come to expect. And that is by just inserting the CDs, overwriting the OS, and leaving everything else alone. The irony is that upgrading will be generally easier for those who bravely took the Vista plunge. Mossberg writes for individuals, not organizational network administrators. But short of some miracle, it might be less expensive for large organizations to buy new hardware with Windows 7 pre-installed than to spend the hours required to wipe disks to do a clean install. Perhaps government agencies could get by simply buying new hard disks. The upgrade is complicated by the fact that Windows 7, like its predecessors, comes in several versions, some 32-bit, some 64-bit. No smugness from Mac people, please. Let’s be fair. If Microsoft could control the hardware like it controls the OS, perhaps upgrades would be more Mac-like. The real world is more complicated, and for a step-function increase in power, sometimes you have to make a clean break. I still use a Motorola PowerPC Mac notebook, and it has come to the end of the line for OS upgrades. The forthcoming Apple Snow Leopard (Apple uses cat names for its OSes) only runs on Intel Macs.
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Tags: Project Management, Web 2.0
Oh, boy, one of the deans of computer journalism, John C. Dvorak, is in fine form. Dvorak has been an authoritative technology commentator since the mid-1980s, just about since the PC started to become a major technological and cultural force. He’s got a Wikipedia entry. His writing has always been clear, sharp, and tinged with acid. And today he has posted, at the Dvorak Uncensored blog, his belief that Vivek Kundra, the administration’s CIO and administrator for e-government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget, is a phony. In part, Dvorak cites Kundra’s claim of a master’s degree in IT from the University of Maryland (UMD). Turns out, according to a counter blog from NextGov’s Gautham Nagesh, the degree is from UMD’s University College, the online part of Maryland – less prestigious but not a fake degree. I ain’t wading out into this one except to say that perhaps Kundra has exaggerated his “knowledge, skills, and abilities,” as they say in government-employment speak. Whatever, the traffic and twitters sparked by the Dvorak post were burning up the wires Wednesday afternoon. But I will take issue with two items in the Dvorak post, a common misconception among people unfamiliar with the Federal market. He states in part, “...the kicker for me was that even if [Kundra] was squeaky clean he has no business being the USA CIO controlling billions and billions of dollars in government contracts.” Kundra controls no such thing. Dvorak also attributes to Kundra the $18 million contract to Smartronix for the Recovery.gov site. But that was not Kundra’s activity either. The Web development contract was awarded competitively by the General Services Administration on behalf of the Recovery Board. Still, this Kundra development will be another itch for the Obama administration to scratch at.
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Predictably, the love-in for President Obama and his administration is over. At least people are starting to push back on a number of fronts. Witness the local meetings on health care. People are shouting down the plan, and by extension, the president who campaigned on it. Unfortunately, administration officials and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are shouting back, and it isn’t pretty. According to a widely quoted report in nextgov and elsewhere, health IT officials, notably David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information, received an earful from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft research chief Craig Mundie. They don’t like the approach the administration is taking on nationally standardized electronic medical records. Both companies have competing versions of online personal health records. The argument seemed to center on whether patients should be able to control or merely access their own records. In some ways they were talking at cross-purposes. A medical record may not, in fact, be the individual patient’s to modify. What if I wanted a prescription to Oxycontin I have no medical use for? What if I want to apply for a job to watch a nuclear power plant control panel but take out a narcolepsy diagnosis from my record? If, on the other hand, I can read my own record, including diagnoses and lab results, then I can save a lot of time for both me and my doctor. In the lingo, this is the difference between an electronic health record (HER) and a personal health record. One informs the other, but the EHR is subject to stringent privacy laws and regulations. Here’s an imperfect analogy: airline self-booking systems. When booking a flight on an airline, travelers can view many pieces of information and perform various functions such as seat assignment and printing boarding passes – all within limits. They aren’t directly accessing an airline’s mainframe system, and they can’t change basic parameters of the flight, or even of their own personal record. For instance, you can’t change the name once a reservation is made. The aims of reservation and medical systems are different, but in the mainframe-to-Web services model there is something useful in planning medical records architecture. Google’s Health and Microsoft’s Health Vault embody this understanding. They are more than simple forms you fill out and store online, because both are capable of importing prescription and other clinical information from medical information sources the individual uses. But ultimately they are PHRs.
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Tags: Collaboration, Document Management, Networking, Open Source, Open Source SOA, Project Management, Web 2.0
Concepts and phenomena for which there is no precise definition end up in that “I’ll know it when I see it” category. Like pornography, transparency is in the eye of who’s lookin’. When the GSA issued that $9 million contract, on behalf of the Recovery Board, to Smartonix for the purpose of rebuilding Recovery.gov, a moment of irony occurred when the contract documents weren’t immediately posted online. This horrified the transparency crowd. When the documents were posted, there were few revelations in the Statement of Work from the Recovery Board. It wanted a good, searchable Web site. In fact, so detailed are the requirements that they remind me of the famous ash tray specs set up as an example of government silliness back in the Al Gore Reinvention of Government Days. I supposed if you don’t ask for a search engine on a Web site tracking a half a trillion dollars being spent in practically every county in the U.S., you won’t get one. But the SOW does read like a long list of ingredients for which the final dish is unknown (thrown in lots of spices, and be sure all food groups are included, it should appeal to the finicky and the pie hole stuffers...). But look, the Board is only trying to be comprehensive. And the SOW should be online. When it comes to the other documents, such as pricing descriptions and the winning bid from Smartronix, what you’ll find online is so thoroughly redacted that there’s not a heck of a lot to learn. That, plus the fact that the documents are big, fat, memory-hogging PDFs, might make you think the Board and General Services Administration said to themselves, “You want documents? I’ll give you documents.” I don’t think so. Government contracting, or any commercial contracting, is not like leaving a suit for dry cleaning, where everything can fit on a pocket-sized slip of paper. You need more than a handshake and faith. Transparency can go too far. Companies are starting to worry about having documents and their performance data being put online willy-nilly in the service of transparency. Some proprietary data could give away competitive advantages. On the other hand, the names of the project managers and various functionaries are also redacted. What’s the big secret there? Did they hire Mrs. Madoff? The point is, neither absolute opacity nor complete transparency are desirable. Overall, I think the Recovery Board and GSA met the test of transparency while balancing the legitimate concerns of the contractor and its proprietary information. Maybe they didn’t achieve pure transparency according to the orthodoxy of the “open government” proponents, but perhaps more a translucency, which lets light in.
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Tags: Collaboration, Web 2.0
“Facts are stubborn things,” Ronald Reagan famously said. This week, I’ve enjoyed witnessing the lava flow of progressive politics, with its infinite plasticity, slowed down by solid rocks of facts – arithmetic facts. Neil Barofsky, with the intense eyes of a prosecutor and big ears that add a sort of earnestness to his visage, bored into the “transparency” myth of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), of which he is the inspector general. Maybe the $700 billion of TARP money that went out did save the finance industry, or maybe not. This unanswerable swims in the political ooze. Barofsky’s report to the Senate Banking Committee can be summarized thus: the Treasury department has, to put it charitably, only the vaguest notion of how the banks spent their funds. And, by the way, the full liability of the taxpayers for the assets warranted by the TARP program is, gulp, $23.7 trillion. Too bad Vivek Kundra wasn’t in place as CIO at the Office of Management and Budget when the TARP program got started. He could have started a feed-to-the-Web site like the IT dashboard, only for TARP. Congress might have instituted a rule: no data feed, no TARP money. Too late. Another fact derived from simple math came from the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Doug Elmendorf. He took on the purely political claim that the health care “reform” plan, as expressed in the House version (H.R. 3200 – but don’t download it, it’s a thousand pages) would be “deficit netural.” Actually it would add a quarter of a trillion dollars to the deficit over the next 10 years, by CBO’s calculations. When Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker suspended 45 IT projects based on what turned up thanks to the dasboard, it made me wish the administration and Congress were equally fastidious about the big things. |
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Tags: Project Management, Security
“An inexcusable waste of money” is how President Obama described continued spending on the F-22 Raptor, given the deficits the nation is running. And he prevailed in the 58-40 vote to strip the 2010 Defense Authorization bill of $1.75 billion that would have funded seven more of the F-22s, to add to the 187 already ordered. So this is what passes for fiscal discipline from a president using all of his political capital to force feed the nation a trillion dollar health care “reform” bill, and presiding over a $767 billion stimulus bill under which most of the money hasn’t left the Federal Reserve, where it is parked. He is pushing across the board budget increases for nearly every Federal agency in fiscal 2010, while the deficit this year has already reached the trillion dollar mark. From a financial standpoint, the F-22’s program costs are mostly sunk with the 187 already built. That means the next 100 (or 200 proponents say would be the minimum needed) would start to yield the volume economies that accrue to complex tasks when they come down the learning curve. To a less exaggerated degree, it is the same phenomenon that causes the first of a new generation of microprocessors to cost $1 billion, whereas a few months later the chips are found in $1,000 computers selling profitably. “Complete nonsense” is how Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates described the notion that not getting more F-22s would imperil the nation’s security. At least Gates gets to address what should be the heart of the matter: is a greater quantity of the F-22 needed for national defense? And here is where the military brass who favor the F-22 and other experts failed to make a case. Some analysts think that as the U.S. air superiority yielded for 30 years by the F-15 has passed, and that the F-22 can take over for the next several decades. The F-15 in its heyday was capable enough that no nation would challenge it. Yet F-22 proponents, notably Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), talked about the plane as if it were as much a jobs program as a strategic necessity. Notwithstanding that the F-22 is probably a more efficient stimulus program than anything actually in the stimulus bill, weapons-as-pork is a poor sales strategy. Gates is correct that the F-22 has never been needed in Iraq or Afghanistan, wars in which improvised explosive devices buried in dirt have been the most legal weapon fielded by the enemy. But he might be mistaken in thinking that the U.S. will never face an enemy in the next 30 years with air strike capabilities approximately equal to its own. It is possible that lack of the F-22’s abilities will invite a challenge. In any case, the battle is not over, because the Defense appropriations bill will give supporters another chance to test Obama’s veto threat.
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Sometimes you have to shock ‘em into believing. Now approaching my “double nickels” stage of life, I still vividly remember my first day of first grade. Let’s see, that would have been September, 1961. The teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, paddled a boy named Billy L----. I’ll leave the name out. Who knows, he may work for the Federal government. That did it. We saucer-eyed first graders had mucho respect for Mrs. Jenkins from that morning forward. I remember asking my big sister why the paddle had three rows of holes in it. “I guess so she could swing it faster,” was the answer. Barely a month ago, Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker gave his initial interviews after settling into the job. He outlined a new process to review all IT projects in the department. Shortly thereafter, the Office of Management and Budget launched its IT dashboard, using data supplied by agencies. Then late last week week, Baker – with the explicit and highly visible backing of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who actually made the announcement – put a hold on 45 IT projects he said were severely late or over budget, and were costing the department upwards of $200 million a year. No doubt the 45 VA projects deserved a time out, but the theatricality of the timing looked, well, stage managed. Baker said the projects came to light while his staff prepared to populate the dashboard. And, at the dashboard site, OMB CIO Vivek Kundra blogged about the potential VA cancellations, managing to praise both Baker and the dashboard in the same posting. Pretty neat. One could argue that VA should have management practices in place already to catch projects that are off. In one case a project was a year late and 100 percent over budget – surely that must have been known to someone before the dashboard got underway. Even Kundra said on his blog, “the dashboard is not a substitute for good management.” I suspect someone was aware. That’s not criticism. Dramatic gestures, arranged for effect, are useful in making the case that things have changed. Whether the dashboard fueled the decision-making at VA or the other way around, credit goes to Kundra and Baker for creating a teaching moment.
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Tags: Collaboration, Security
No sooner had Federal agencies finished mopping up from the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack launched July 4, then the requests for information about protective software started coming out. First to launch was the Defense Information Systems Agency. Other agencies followed. Which raises the obvious questions: Can it be there are Federal agencies that don’t have software that can alert them to and deter DDoS attacks? And how did the Einstein boxes perform at those agencies that have them? I spoke to one civil agency chief information security officer yesterday who shrugged knowingly that his department was aware of the attack as it was happening, but that it didn’t succeed in overwhelming his Web sites. Another question, which I’ve heard repeatedly around town with an increasingly loud drumbeat, is when will President Obama get around to appointing the cyber security coordinator? He made the promise back in May, the 29th to be exact. Melissa Hathaway, the acting cyber advisor, appears to have stopped giving speeches, or at least no one reporting on them any more. With the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination essentially in the bag, and the energy and health care debates reaching their fortissimo climax, perhaps the president can dig one layer down in his in-box and get the cyber coordinator in place. The DDoS incident ought to nudge this appointment off center.
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Hillary Clinton’s State Department is embarking on a Pentagon-style self-examination called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). Clinton announced the QDDR last week to employees. Jack Lew, deputy secretary for management and resources (and former OMB director under President Clinton), held a Q&A with USAID employees to talk further about it. Lew got some pointed questions from the staff members gathered, including some about the fact that State Department systems make it hard to correlate spending outlays with diplomatic activities. For example, the questioner said, “...when we ask, as we did, for example, recently about Honduras, well, how much money does the U.S. government give Honduras, then it took 48 hours to get that question answered.” Lew acknowledged “the systems are far from perfect. I mean, it’s not like we inherited a system where the numbers tie together easily, you push a button and you get a report.” He said the QDDR would try to look at the State “holistically” with the caveat not to “expect that in 12 months we will have it down perfect, and that we’ll be able to, after decades of all of those things being separate, have them seamlessly integrated so that you can sit at a computer and get the answer to your Honduras question in five minutes.” The point of the QDDR will not be to examine information systems. Far from it. It’s partly a response to the administration’s desire to step up its efforts in war areas where the military would rather stick to fighting the wars while have a stronger partner in State. (In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed this desire during the Bush administration.) And I believe it’s partly a gambit by Clinton to increase visibility and relevance relative to other Obama aides. But the online document describing the components of the QDDR states that the end product will include a recommended set of tools and resources needed to implement whatever strategy the examiners arrive at.
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Tags: Collaboration, Project Management
All I can say is, it better be good. In awarding a whopping $9.5 million contract for the new recovery.gov Web site on behalf of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the General Services Administration (GSA) has decidedly not taken the low-price route. “No public facing Web site has ever attempted to provide the type of functionality that Recovery.gov has been tasked to offer to the American public.” This is what a GSA spokesperson stated, explaining why the improvements and enhancement contract line items were not awarded on a fixed priced basis. Most of the work is for a fixed price, though. The contract, to Smartronix, a contractor in Hollywood, Md. under GSA’s Alliant vehicle, requires an August 27 launch of the site, according to reporting by Federal News Radio, which broke the story Thursday morning. Only SRA and Accenture competed for the contract, presumably because of the short time frame and the mostly fixed price. Interestingly, the RAT Board had by Thursday evening not announced the award on its own Web site. Given that at least two other sites have been up and running with detailed recovery data, www.stimuluswatch.org and www.recovery.org, what in heck will the RAT board get for 9 mil? Last year, when the Bush Office of Management and Budget (OMB) set up www.usaspending.gov, it spent $600,000 and used technology from OMB Watch, which had built the functionality at its own expense. OMB managed to get www.data.gov up quickly and at low cost, which may be a less technically complex project since it just accepts data sources the government was already publishing. Recovery, in contrast, requires new sources and new ways of combining information – including from non-Federal sources, namely state and local governments receiving stimulus money. Nine million bucks, with a total contract potential value of $17 million, is a large amount for a Web site. This one should do the hula.
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Tags: Networking
While the rest of the world was wallowing in existential angst over the death of Michael Jackson, here in Washington the tintinnabulation of the week concerned the Washington Post. The self-important Politco reported that the Post was having sponsored dinners for lobbyists and trade association honchos at which they could meet Obama administration officials and editorial staff members of the Post. Reaction ran along several lines. One was satisfaction at having confirmation Post editorial, already liberal, was for sale to the administration. Another was worry that the so-called revelation would affect the dinners we others in the media do. The latter reaction came from the smaller media outfits such as 1105 (Federal Computer Week, Washington Technology) and Atlantic Media (Government Executive). Seemingly outed by Politico, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth canceled the dinners, and editor Marcus Brauchli also denounced the arrangement. Having worked at the Washington Post Company for 10 years – although not at the Post itself – I can say with certainty that few companies maintain ethical standards – in journalism and in other endeavors – as high as those of the Post and its parent company. True, the sponsorship invitation flier was extravagantly written and unworthy of the company. But the program was killed before it got off the ground. I believe Brauchli (formerly managing editor of the Wall Street Journal) and Weymouth (granddaughter of the late Katharine Graham) who basically said the business office went off on this program without properly vetting it within the company. End of story. A long-flourishing cottage industry in Washington, Washington Post watching/bashing seems always to have preoccupied letter media lights. Perhaps out of jealousy of the Post’s power and prestige. Even in its recent circulation decline and financial stress, the Post – while by no means flawless – maintains its institutional influence. The recent snafu might be a sign of that stress, or simply evidence of a relatively young publisher learning on the job. But it doesn’t signal that editorial access at the Post is for sale.
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Tags: Collaboration, Workforce
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) didn’t reveal the names of the 652 companies agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be visiting. But last week’s report that a crackdown on employers via audits of their workers’ I-9 forms showed that the Obama administration wants to establish its chops on illegal immigration. But it will be taking a different tack than the Bush administration, which arrested large numbers of the workers themselves. If you want to make sure companies verify the eligibility of their workers, fine. But that means tools must be available for employers to do so at a minimum of effort and cost. It means the databases the government maintains for the specific purpose of eligibility verification must be accurate, and that is a tall order. The checkered and much-argued-over e-Verify system is DHS’s system of choice for employers to check eligibility against. It uses information from the Social Security Information. Its use is voluntary except for Federal contractors, who will be obligated to use it starting Sept. 8. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has postulated that every employer should be compelled to check the eligibility of every worker in the U.S. A couple of years ago, e-Verify exhibited accuracy rates too low to make it a practical system. Now DHS claims accuracy rates of above 99 percent. A 99.9 percent accurate rate would produce 1,000 errors per million queries. When you compare that to the estimated five percent of jobs in the U.S. held by illegal immigrants, e-Verify doesn’t look so bad.
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Tags: Collaboration, Web 2.0
Joe Biden – Vice President Joe Biden, that is – is known for utterances that are not well thought out, to put it charitably. He uttered his latest doozy, as reported by the Associated Press, in Pennsylvania the other day at the rollout of the administration’s broadband grants program. “We believe we are in the process of transforming rural America...so it’s integrated with the country, without losing its character.” Biden used two words that have become cheap commodities, nearly bereft of meaning: “transform” and “integrate.” Here are my questions for Biden: 1. Why does the administration presume to “transform” rural America in the first place? 2. What precisely do you mean by transform? To make it less rural? Isn’t transformation essentially changing the character of the transformed? 3. How is rural America not “integrated with the country?” Is it somehow separated from urban America? The last I checked, you could drive all the way from the Naval Observatory off Massachusetts Ave. in Washington, D.C. to Wattsburg, Pa., where you spoke. And you would pass neither a checkpoint nor a change in language or currency along the way Biden also said: “The bottom line is, you can’t function – a nation can’t compete in the 21st century – without an immediate, high-quality access for everything from streaming video to information online.” Setting aside the sloppy syntax, my questions are: 1. If it is true that 95 percent of households can already access broadband, as the National Cable and Telecommunications Association claims, why is the government spending $7 billion on this program? 2. How is the United States non-competitive because of a perceived lack of broadband access? One rural industry in which the nation leads innovation and productivity is agriculture. Farming is among the most technologically advanced of industries, with farmers regularly employing satellite-supplied geographical position data. 3. For those Americans who choose not to use computers or subscribe to broadband, will you compel them to sign up? 4. How will you measure how many jobs will be created after broadband is installed everywhere? 5. To qualify for a grant, according to Commerce Department standards, installers must promise a minimum download speed of 768 kilobits per second. That’s pretty slim for the online video you said is necessary for competitiveness in the 21st century. How do you reconcile those two notions? The vice president’s words were both vague and far-fetched only in part because of his particular thought process. They also reflect the dubiousness of the notion that the Federal government must force broadband to where it may not be needed or wanted.
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Tags: Collaboration
I’m going to spend the 4th of July weekend trying to skim the 1,428 pages of HR 2454, the energy legislation which narrowly passed in the House last week. But I have to say right now, I find the ambitions of this bill to be awe-inspiring. Most offensive is the loudly shouted notion – there on the home page of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) chairs – that it will create “millions” of jobs. This is so absurd that you wonder if anyone in the Congress ever took a basic course in economics, or even business. We even potentially threaten other countries with this bill. Way up in the first few pages, the EPA administrator is required to report to Congress, which then releases the information to “the media,” whether China and India, specifically, have adopted energy standards as strict as those in the bill. I feel like taking the PDF file to Kinkos and having a few dozen copies printed, single sided. How green is that? But I’m too much of a cheapskate to really undertake such a futile protest. Every American should be appalled at the way this thing was written, the numbing, inscrutable detail of which no member of the House, I’ll bet, can claim to know even 10 percent. What is amazing to contemplate are the staff hours that must have been required to create the document. Should it become law, this gambit would create such a complex of boards, commissions and non-productive corporations that will take lawyers months or years to figure out. There are carbon credits, taxes, rebates, grants, assessments, exceptions – and all the mechanisms that go with them. Just open it up and tell me what you think.
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