Transformers

Chief information officers don't just want to make government electronic-they want to electrify it.

Agriculture Chief Information Officer Scott Charbo keeps a large cane-cutting knife in a wooden box displayed prominently in his office. It's a keepsake from his days as an agricultural extension agent serving Florida sugar cane growers. But it's also an apt symbol of Charbo's new role. Today's CIOs are at the forefront of a governmentwide effort to hack away redundant and unnecessary processes and systems. Much of this work involves technology, so it has fallen into CIOs' hands. But chief information officers no longer see themselves just as technology people. They have higher ambitions. Unabashedly, they say they're out to jolt government into changing.

In Charbo's office, a wall is lined with charts and diagrams that he and his associates created to describe what the Agriculture Department does. These business processes include: managing the national food stamp and school lunch programs; overseeing 192 million acres of national forests and rangelands; encouraging efforts to protect soil, water and wildlife; ensuring the safety of meat, poultry and egg products in the United States; researching technologies to grow food using less water and pesticides; ensuring open markets for U.S. agricultural products; and providing food to hungry people overseas. Each of those activities may include others. Charbo has mapped those out, too.

Thirty agencies and staff offices within the department carry out these processes. And in every case, some piece or grouping of technology helps make the work happen. Technology is what CIOs call "the enabler" of business processes, and Charbo has gone to great lengths to illustrate how all the pieces fit together. Historically, the CIO has been responsible for the information technology, making sure systems are kept in working order and doing their required jobs. Given the enormity of the Agriculture Department's information technology portfolio, one would think it consumes most of Charbo's time. But "The IT things aren't really that hard," he says. "I chase the bottlenecks."

What Charbo means is that he's less concerned about the technology than about the business processes it supports. When those 30 agencies and offices decide to start a program, or change an existing one, Charbo tries to find out where the department can cut extraneous technology or business processes and make its work go more smoothly.

Lines of Business

In March 2004, the Office of Management and Budget began an unprecedented analysis to define how the government works, and how it can be improved. Today, interagency task forces have formed and are examining the business processes and enabling technologies of nearly every agency in government. They're focusing on five management areas:

• Financial management, defining an overall strategy to govern financial systems and set standards for financial data models;
• Human resources management, improving the strategic management of human capital and customer service to citizens;
• Grants management, posting all government grant opportunities to a single Web site;
• Health management, creating a federal health architecture to better coordinate agency operations and create disease-monitoring systems;
• Case management, improving how law enforcement agencies and the U.S. attorneys maintain and share case files.

The lines-of-business initiatives, as they're called, will identify common business processes in each area, but also suggest duplicative ones to eliminate. In the process, the task forces hope to get rid of multiple computer systems and find opportunities for agencies to pool resources and share systems. The lines of business are the most prominent examples of how the Bush administration plans to make the government operate more efficiently and with less money. CIOs are the initiatives' biggest evangelists.

The lines-of-business projects also mark a turning point in how the government understands and uses technology. In the mid to late 1990s, at the height of the dot-com craze, agencies became enamored with electronic government. They rushed to provide more services to citizens over the Internet, and they succeeded in short order. Today, citizens have come to expect online government services.

E-government "has evolved from the government pushing information to the citizen to the citizen having the capability of getting personalized information from the government," says Lisa Schlosser, CIO at the Housing and Urban Development Department. Fueled in large part by the ubiquity of Internet use, "It shifted more toward, 'I'm a citizen, I want to do business with the government, but I want to do it my way,' " she says. Today, citizens can set up customized Web pages of government information. They can file their taxes online. They can apply for grants and loans electronically.

E-government has made inroads. The next wave has begun. Now, "E-government means looking at our business processes. . . consolidating like functions, eliminating redundancies, using [IT] dollars wisely," says Rose Parkes, CIO of the Energy Department. And that's where the lines-of-business initiatives come in to play.

The initiatives are at various stages of maturity. For instance, financial management participants have identified common standards and practices, and OMB is planning to approve financial "service centers," organizations that will be run by the government or the private sector and will work for other agencies. The model was tested in 2002 when the government began consolidating its 22 payroll operations into four centers. "We know we can do it," says Karen Evans, the e-government and information technology administrator at OMB. "Now we're asking, 'What makes the most sense?' " in terms of how to proceed.

As part of the fiscal 2006 budget process, interested agencies will make their pitches to become financial services centers. Human resources centers will be next, and many observers believe the competition in both lines could be fierce. The other three lines will follow different courses. The grants management team will consolidate some services, possibly under the auspices of the Grants.gov portal, which now serves as a clearinghouse for all government grant offerings. The health architecture is driven by a longer-term goal for Americans to have electronic health records by 2014. And the case management line is focused primarily on setting up systems to manage litigation and investigation.

'The Hardest Epiphany'

It's sometimes difficult for CIOs to measure the benefit of the business initiatives in quantitative terms. They tend to rely on customer satisfaction: If the people for whom CIOs are providing new processes are happier than they were before obtaining them, then CIOs declare victory. If a new system saves time, that's a win, too. The pinnacle of achievement is eliminating redundancies. The CIOs' favorite term for this is "streamlining."

The Grants.gov portal is a success story. Today, all agencies that offer and administer grants post opportunities through the portal. Grants.gov "has proved that we can consolidate and streamline [grant application] forms and use the same kind of data collection tools" across many agencies, says Charles Havekost, who was the Grants.gov program manager before he became CIO of the Health and Human Services Department.

Getting all agencies to cooperate with the portal, or any common system for that matter, depends on overcoming a misconception, Havekost says. "We all think our business is unique and special. And there are things about it that are," he says. "But we have to recognize that there are things about our business that have a lot in common and are, or should be, exactly the same. . . . That is the hardest epiphany to have."

Rebecca Spitzgo, the current Grants.gov program manager, has had that epiphany. She would like the portal to evolve from processing only grants information to processing many kinds of forms. If agencies can accept the notion that a grants form isn't all that different from any other form-that all forms undergo similar steps when they are received, reviewed and approved-then perhaps the technological systems behind Grants.gov could be used elsewhere, she says. "We don't need to get into these stovepipes and say, 'Oh, it's grants, so therefore it can't do anything but grants,' " Spitzgo says. "It's just different data that you've got to process."

Many CIOs like to think big. But their efforts to make life easier for customers have made their own more complicated. While managing the not inconsiderable day-to-day needs of their agencies, CIOs also must participate in cross-government projects like Grants.gov. "I have to be truthful. It's just very difficult," says Vance Hitch, the Justice Department's CIO. Justice not only leads the case management initiative, but also is working on 15 collaborative e-government projects, tackling nettle- some computer upgrades and trying to establish a nationwide communications network for law enforcement agencies. Heavy workloads are common among today's multitasking CIOs.

They recognize the inherent limitations of the lines-of-business initiatives: There might be plenty of opportunities to organize around common business processes, but some agencies perform specific tasks that others don't. The Internal Revenue Service is the government's principal tax collector, for instance, and the Education Department is solely responsible for administering student loans. "One system is not going to meet all needs," says Education's CIO, William Leidinger.

Some CIOs, particularly those in more geographically distributed agencies, are in a difficult position. For example, the Army cannot boil down everything to the point where the service relies on a single version of any system, says its CIO, Lt. Gen. Steven Boutelle. "The answer is not to make everything the same," he says. It's too risky, particularly in wartime, because a single system can fail. The Army, however, wants to find common ground with others, Boutelle says.

Yet, it's not at all clear that agencies are having the same luck consolidating systems, or that it has been an easy process. The Transportation Department, for instance, while having dramatically added to its CIO's responsibilities in recent years, hasn't done an adequate job of planning for consolidating systems. That was one finding in the Transportation inspector general's March review of how the CIO's office is merging systems in 11 common business areas. "The project management and budget responsibilities for these IT consolidation initiatives were not adequately defined," the report said. The findings didn't refute consolidation's fundamental premise. It "presents cost-saving opportunities and helps eliminate the appearance of duplicative budget requests. However, it will require a more centralized approach and adjustments" in how Transportation manages projects and submits budgets, the report concluded.

New Blood

As if defining the future of government work weren't hard enough, CIOs also are fretting over the future of the government worker. Many wonder where they'll find the next crop of managers to replace them.

For instance, the Homeland Security Department's technology corps is bunched at two ends of the age spectrum. One group has about seven years of on-the-job experience and the other has 25 or more years, says Steve Cooper, who was the department's first CIO. He left the department in April. Simply replacing the senior workers with more junior employees isn't a solution. "You can't take someone who's just out of medical school and make them a brain surgeon," Cooper says.

In general, the promotion system for government employees works against succession planning, he says. In the private sector, companies groom executives by identifying promising employees and rotating them among positions of increasing importance until they've obtained broad exposure to the business. But in the government, an agency can't as easily preselect employees because positions must be open for competition. Cooper says he's not against that system, but it does create a challenge for CIOs trying to field the next generation of senior technology managers.

Energy CIO Parkes doesn't believe the older generation of government technology workers will retire as quickly as some have predicted. Nevertheless, Energy now is assessing where the gaps in its workforce will fall once the more seasoned cadre leaves. Training dollars are being aimed there, she says. But the department likely will rely even more on the private sector for expertise, Parkes says. "We can't grow subject matter experts in specialty areas," such as Web site coding or database administration, she says. "Why wouldn't we contract out for them?"

Cooper would like to see a different kind of interaction with the private sector. The government could establish an exchange program with corporations whereby managers and executives would serve one-year tours in each other's organizations. Lawmakers have made similar proposals, but the concept has yet to take hold.

Of course, the ideal solution would be to recruit a new generation of workers, or hire some away from the private sector. But no CIO thinks the government can match private sector salaries. "It's a competitive world out there for entry-level IT folks," says Todd Grams, the CIO of the Internal Revenue Service. That might leave the government appealing to future employees' patriotism. "We've got to do a good job of selling to them the call to service," he says.

CIO Maturity Curve

The shape of the technology workforce may be in question, but the shape of the CIO position definitely is changing. In the old days, CIOs held dominion over technology systems and gained their power from it. "It used to be if you wanted a report on what we did, you came down to the basement on the third Wednesday of every month at 9:30 a.m., and we gave you 15 copies of whatever it was we wanted to tell you," says Education's Leidinger. Now, CIOs want to do more than just advise agency leaders about technology.

Today's CIOs are in the middle of a "maturity curve," says former Air Force CIO John Gilligan, who left the service in May. Immature CIOs focus mostly on infrastructure-the bits and the bytes-he explains. Those who are more mature are examining business processes. The most mature are intimately involved in the mission-critical activities, Gilligan says. And as CIOs move along the continuum, they become less a technical expert and more a business adviser.

Gilligan doesn't think any federal CIO has reached full maturity. But the day is coming. "The operational aspects of information technology, we've figured some of those out," Havekost says. "The operational stuff isn't CIO business. It's the business that is the CIO's business."

"The idea of cultural change is at the heart of everything a CIO does these days," says David Wennergren, the Navy's CIO. "Culture change" is a common term in CIO-speak. It means convincing agency brass that technology can make their lives easier, or help them realize a vision. "The heart and soul of what CIOs are doing . . . is helping their organizations to transform," Wennergren says.

"From my perspective, it's one thing when they invite you to the table. It's another that once you're at the table, you continue to provide value," says OMB's Evans, who was the CIO at the Energy Department until 2003. If all a CIO can do is tell an agency leader how to get the same outcome from a particular program or organization, then things will stay "business as usual," Evans says. But if CIOs can "make the leap to talk about business value," and explain the technological means for achieving an end, then CIOs will have proved their worth, she believes. "It's all in how you make the presentation. I think you're seeing [CIOs] evolve as we speak."