Homework Helper

A former government technology guru goes to the private sector, helping contractors design their pitches.

Jim Flyzik remembers the deluge of phone calls, e-mails, white papers and proposals. The message was usually the same: "Buy my product and you will catch all the bad guys and the world will be safe," he recalls.

A career civil servant, Flyzik had volunteered to leave his position as deputy assistant secretary for information systems at the Treasury Department to join the fledgling White House Office of Homeland Security as a senior adviser to Director Tom Ridge. He helped design a path for the nascent Homeland Security Department to follow in integrating its computer systems.

At the White House, Flyzik, 51, was eager to listen to the pitches of contractors that described how their applications would benefit the agency. He was less enthusiastic about firms that had little knowledge of government systems and merely offered their services without any specifics. "We tried to impress upon companies that there are thousands of them out there," he says. "You are wasting the government official's time unless you do your homework."

The lessons Flyzik learned at the White House laid the groundwork for his new post-government career at a consulting firm he joined in December 2002. Now called Guerra, Kiviat, Flyzik & Associates, the Potomac, Md.-based consultancy helps companies get up to speed on what government agencies want from contractors. It does no work with government agencies directly, because that seems unethical to Flyzik. "I would not want to talk to one of my friends in government and try to sell them something," he says.

Instead, Flyzik and his colleagues advise companies on how to position themselves to compete for government contracts and-almost as important-when they should drop out of the running. "Oftentimes, the best advice is that this is not something you should go after," he says. "You are wasting your time because what you are offering is not what [the government is] looking for."

Flyzik knows a good deal about what the government is looking for. He started his career in technology management at the Secret Service in 1975 as a GS-5 trainee. In the early 1980s, he investigated deficiencies in issuing government checks that resulted in scrambled Social Security payments. Some retirees weren't receiving checks, others were receiving too many. Flyzik also helped identify management problems at the former Bureau of Government Financial Operations and helped correct them.

Other career highlights include his work maintaining communications systems during Pope John Paul II's 1987 visit to the United States, and during President Reagan's visit to Berlin that same year, when he delivered the famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech.

In 1997, Flyzik became chief information officer at Treasury, where he moved to streamline the department's disjointed computer systems; he also led the information technology team of then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review. He supervised Treasury's transition from the Clinton administration to that of George W. Bush in 2001.

Flyzik draws on 27 years' worth of government service to offer the following advice: "The thing I tell people is, 'Volunteer for everything,'" he says. "I raised my hand every chance I got."

During his career, Flyzik watched as government moved from a do-it-yourself model to one of increasing reliance on contractors, many of them former government employees. That has put more pressure on government to hire good program and project managers, and on industry to better serve the government's needs, he says.

Flyzik is working to bridge the gap between contractors and government. "Many companies know very little about the missions of agencies and what they are trying to accomplish," he says. "They don't know what [General Services Administration] contracts are about, what schedules are about. . . . We are able to quickly help companies learn what they need to do."