Marketplace

Getting Down to Business

November 1, 2002

These projects automate outdated business practices and try to eliminate redundant buying and poor program management. They attempt to link information technology purchases with business needs and to shore up systems that fail to interoperate and lack security. But often there are barriers to such change, including culture, resistance, insufficient resources and the lack of an enterprise-wide blueprint. One frustration, England says, is the time it takes to field new technologies. For example, the Navy's budget planning cycle alone averages 36 months, and procurement time can add months to the process. By the time an IT system is actually in place, it's no longer cutting-edge technology.

The culture shift is like moving from a "Wild, Wild West environment to a planned community."

-Rear Adm. Charles Munns

he president's goal right from the start of his term has been to make the federal government more citizen-centered, results-oriented and market-based. The Office of Management and Budget is leading 24 e-government initiatives that certainly fit the bill.

The initiatives seek "to harness the potential of technology to provide highquality services at reduced cost to the American people," Mark Everson, OMB's deputy director for management, told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology and Procurement Policy at a Sept. 18 hearing. Some initiatives include:

GovBenefits. The Labor Department has created a one-stop shopping site for citizens seeking information on federal benefit programs (www.govbenefits.gov).
Recreation One-Stop. Several agencies have jointly sponsored an online portal for information on parks and recreation facilities (www.recreation.gov).
E-Training. The Office of Personnel Management has launched an online learning center for government employees (www.golearn.gov).

The Navy's reorganization plan is addressing many of the challenges OMB faces with its e-government agenda in the areas of people, skills, technology and business practices. Navy Secretary Gordon England, after a career in the Defense industry, has brought a private sector, metric-based focus to the Navy and Marine Corps. But pushing reforms, he says, is different in government than it is in the private sector. The government system is set up not so much to move things forward quickly, but to react to impending catastrophic failure. You need to know what you want, and articulate it and defend it well, England says. Moreover, people's perspectives can change on a moment's notice. Leaders must adapt to and manage the environment as much as they manage the issues.

A vision must be established right at the start, says England, who sees the warfighter as the driver of the reorganization plan. But it requires the following:

Eliminating unnecessary steps.
Training people more broadly so they can handle a variety of jobs.
Using technology to the best advantage.
Changing business practices to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

To streamline operations, the Navy has set up government-industry teams to get rid of wasted steps in such areas as ship maintenance, installation operations and logistics support. In each of these cases, the goal is to shift money from support to warfighting.The Navy is cutting headquarters staff by 25 percent to eliminate unnecessary layers of management and to redirect resources to its core mission.

The Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) offers good examples of the Navy's changes in business practices. NMCI is an initiative to purchase standard information technology services through a commercial contract. It uses a results-based approach to get industry to develop a single and secure Navy-wide network for e-mail and other computer applications. The approach involves giving contractors the flexibility in meeting the Navy's needs.

It sounds simple, except that there were some 100,000 applications and 1,000 networks throughout the Navy before the program was launched. Now, 70,000 of the applications have been eliminated, and the number eventually will drop to 2,000.

England sees the benefit of weaning people off their legacy systems, but there's a lot of inertia to overcome. Retraining workers to use the new system is a challenge, along with getting them to accept the newer and tighter NMCI security.

The promise is a system that will enable the Navy to carry out all kinds of service-wide initiatives, from providing a portal for common information to streamlining training opportunities. But the cost comes in the hard work to get staff on board. Moreover, there's a cultural price to pay. Rear Adm. Charles Munns, who heads the NMCI program, compares it with moving from "a Wild, Wild West environment to a planned community." Some IT staff may feel cramped in this tighter, more orderly structure. So, the new system must give them the freedom to get the best technologies emerging in the commercial market.

Nevertheless, these are the kinds of innovations that offer the best chance for real change, whether they are across one agency or across the government. Agencies must keep moving this transformation along if they hope to have savvy business operations.

Allan V. Burman, a former Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, is president of Jefferson Solutions in Washington. Contact him at aburman@govexec.com.

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