Thursday, January 26, 2006

Arlington, Virginia

Mr. Morales: Good morning and welcome to The Business of Government Hour. I'm Albert Morales, your host and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government. We created the center in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about the Center by visiting us at the web at businessofgovernment.org.

Mr. Enger: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation, also from IBM, is Don Shaw. Good morning, Don.

Mr. Enger: OPM was created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. It has a number of different responsibilities, one of which is to build a high-quality and diverse federal workforce based on merit-system principles. Essentially, it's the guardian of the integrity of the federal merit system. The director of OPM is the HR consultant for the executive branch. She's the President's principal advisor on matters that relate to the civilian workforce.

In addition to this responsibility, the OPM also has responsibility, for example, for the employee benefits systems, and in effect operates and administers the Civil Service Retirement Systems, the Federal Employee Retirement System, and the Civil Service Retirement System, which is servicing millions of retired federal employees. It also administers the Federal Employee Health Benefit System, which, again, services millions of both employed and retired civilian employees.

In addition, a very large responsibility that OPM now has is the processing of personnel background investigations. OPM now performs 90 percent of all the federal government's personnel background investigations, which covers both the civilian workforce, DoD, and also includes contractor personnel.

Mr. Morales: You've been with the Office of Personnel Management now for, I believe, about four years, Norm. Is that correct?

Mr. Enger: That's correct, yes.

Mr. Morales: And you came on board to lead the implementation of the e-government initiatives. Could you describe the various roles at OPM that you've had in these past four years?

Mr. Enger: My background has been private sector. I spent my life in the private sector and what happened, I then was asked by the federal government to help out the federal government. I met with the director of OPM and the chief of staff back in 2000. They asked me would I consider doing some public service. Essentially, at that time, the OPM had five of the original 24 e-government initiatives. These were initiatives that really had three primary mandates, if you will. First one was to make transformational change -- really change a business process in the federal government. Number two, do it in a relatively short space of time -- say, two to three or four years. And also the third mandate was to prove you've been successful. Show us by numbers, metrics, or whatever that you really have achieved that goal. The five that we had really framed the employee life cycle from recruitment to retirement. Essentially, the five we had were what I call point solutions.

For example, one of them dealt with the website where someone goes to find a federal job. That's called usajobs.gov, and we, in effect, transformed that website. What happened is in last three to four years, we've moved those five to a point where they're ready to graduate into the regular business of OPM. They've been successful and met all of their milestones. However, what you're looking at is fixing a piece of the overall HR business process. Namely, you fix the website, but you don't fix the entire hiring process.

What happened is that OMB recognized that perhaps it was wise to expand upon the original concept of improving federal HR systems, and what they did in March of 2004, they announced something called Lines of Business. They announced at that time five lines of business, and one of those five was the Human Resources Line of Business. Essentially, the difference between the original five e-gov I had and the new Line of Business is that this is much broader in scope. They're looking at everything you do in terms of the business process from hiring a person to retiring a person and saying, let's look at the entire scope of this, the entire business process and all the sub-functions and really try and change as much as possible, and where possible use technology.

Mr. Shaw: Norm, you are now the director of the Human Resources Line of Business. Could you tell us about the mission of your office? You've spoken briefly about it, but could you provide some more detail?

Mr. Enger: The mission of my office is really to implement the vision of, now, the Human Resources Line of Business and also to complete the final graduation, if you will, of the original e-gov initiatives. Essentially, we are following the President's Management Agenda, the PMA, which sets forth as one of the five major components, e-government. We're following the goals and desires specified in the PMA -- the part, of course that deals with e-government. We also are following the E-Gov Act of 2002, which, again, has visions to improve federal IT systems. And finally, there's also something now called the Federal Enterprise Architecture, which is a big picture of the government from a business point of view, whereby it's looking at the government as one organization, saying, what does this one organization, this one government do? So we're responsible for, in effect, giving detail and giving the structure to the Human Resources part of the Federal Enterprise Architecture.

In terms of my mission, I have a staff of approximately 37 people working for me. With contractors, we have approximately 60 people working to implement both the HR Line of Business, but also to finish off or complete the earlier 5 e-gov initiatives.

Mr. Shaw: Norm, some of our listeners may have difficulty understanding what the federal government means by "human resources." Could you share your understanding of this term?

Mr. Enger: Human resources really means the 1.8 million people in the civilian workforce. What we are trying to do is we're trying to, in effect, improve how we recruit, how we motivate, how we reward the people in the federal workforce. So human resources means people. Another term that's come into popularity is "human capital." Essentially, this is also the people, but it wants to give the flavor, if you will, of the people in terms of a real asset to the organization. So when you say "human capital," you mean: Think about these people you have and think of them as an asset, like any other asset you have in a large corporation.

Now, the goal of the HR Line of Business is essentially to implement modern and cost-effective HR solutions to support the strategic management of human capital. A goal here is to, in effect, free up the HR professionals in the government from routine back-office type of work and move a lot of that work to federal processing centers -- I should say federal and also private processing centers. So in effect, you free them up to focus on the mission of recruiting, motivating, training, rewarding the people in the federal workforce, the move to a more strategic use of our HR professionals to build a better work force. And of course, a secondary consideration here is the fact that by doing this you also achieve many, many operational efficiencies, you save a lot of money, and you become much more efficient.

Mr. Shaw: As you mentioned earlier, you came to OPM after working in the private sector, including a successful launch of your own technology company. How have you translated your private sector experiences to your work now at OPM?

Mr. Enger: Well, I spent most of my professional life running my own company. It was a consulting, professional services, IT system integration type of company, and then what happened is the company was bought in 2000 by a large multibillion-dollar company called Computer Associates. I spent two years with that company as a vice president. So I really had the experience of both working at my own company and also working for a very successful large corporation.

Now, to answer your question specifically, what has happened is the federal government has moved toward trying to follow the best practices in the private sector. I was surprised when I joined the government in 2002 that I was seeing the government actually turning more and more to the private sector for help, answers, and solutions. Essentially, if you look at how the federal government rates their senior executives, they have several criteria that you have to really try and meet. One is leading change. A second one is leading people. A third one is being results-driven -- give us some results or some tangible evidence you're successful. A fourth one is having business acumen -- namely, you can intelligently operate a business-type function. And the fifth one is building coalitions and communications.

Well, all of these elements, these five, are very, very critical in the private sector. When I ran my own company and when I worked for Computer Associates, these were the criteria by which you judged the successful executives. And now, what I see is that that structure has now moved over into the federal sector, and we find the federal government trying to follow the same model, if you will, that we have in the private sector.

I might also add that a very key element here is results-driven. You see now a very, very keen desire in the federal government to tie performance to results, and that is very much a private sector orientation.

Mr. Morales: What role did OPM play in changing government recruiting? We will ask HR Line of Business director Norm Enger to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with OPM director Norm Enger. Also joining us in our conversation is Don Shaw.

Mr. Enger: Well, this is one of the original five e-gov initiatives. It was called Recruitment One Stop; it's really focused on usajobs, our website. What happened is, when I joined the government, there was an old legacy system, which was definitely in need of replacement, renovation, or whatever. So what happened is in August of 2003, we actually brought up a brand new replacement site. Now, let me mention that this is the primary site where a person goes to locate, search for, and apply for a federal job. All competitive federal jobs must be posted by law on this website.

What happened is that in August of 2003, we shut down the old website on a Friday evening, and we were averaging 20,000 visits a day to that old website. We came live on a Monday morning, and fortunately, there were no glitches with the operation, but what did surprise me is on day one, we had 200,000 people on the site. We increased tenfold when people knew there was a new site. The new site is complete -- it's a modern site, the site appearance, the search engines, the r�sum� builder, the guidance on the site, how to locate a job that meets your desires or qualifications -- this has all been totally redone. It's now a modern, very robust site. So what's happened is that we're now averaging over 300,000 visits on the site per day, and that comes down to over 70 million people a year are actually going to this website. By every rating that we know -- and we actually have third parties evaluate the site -- 91 percent of the people that go to the site say they would return to the site and recommend the site to other people looking for a federal job.

At this point in time, we have over one million r�sum�s on the site. The site, I think, has met the earlier mandate I mentioned of e-government -- namely, you transformed a business operation, you've done it in a relatively short space of time, and you can prove that it's been successful by the number of visitors and outside surveys judging how well the site services the U. S. public.

The site is still evolving. Now, we are trying to give the applicants more feedback as to the status of their application or r�sum� to actually have it so they will know who's looking at their r�sum�, and what the next step in the hiring process is. This is a significant step forward into fixing the hiring process, which is a very high priority with the U. S. government and the director of the Office of Personnel Management. Where we are now is we're trying to have the site integrated more fully with what I call back-end systems in the agencies. Namely, they have systems that asses the applicant r�sum�, and the more we integrate their assessment systems with the r�sum�s produced by usajobs, the more you'll speed up the time it takes to hire somebody and the more you'll improve the federal hiring process.

Mr. Morales: That's a very impressive transformation. Two years ago, we also discussed your efforts to improve the federal government's security clearance process. Could you describe how the E-Clearance Initiative has transformed this approach to granting security clearances in the federal government?

Mr. Enger: This is a very, very major area -- topic area -- especially after 9/11, when the awareness of security really intensified across the country. There are several aspects to e-clearances, the initiative which we're talking about now. It's one of the original five. The first thing that we did is we built a system called the Clearance Verification System. This system -- it's the first time this was ever established -- this system holds 98 percent of all active security clearances. This covers all of the civilian workforce, the DoD workforce, and also all contractors. So one of our major accomplishments here is to build a central database or a central system whereby authorized people can put a name in and rapidly find out their clearance status and who granted that security clearance.

Also under this initiative we have moved forward to automate the forms people use to apply for a security clearance. One of the more common forms is called the SF-86; there are several other forms. What we have done is we have built electronic versions of all of these forms whereby it simplifies the process of filling out the application and also transferring the information to the appropriate investigative agencies.

The third element to this is to develop the specifications, to image background investigation information, the paper files that are produced by the investigators to do the background investigation. So the three pieces of this were the Clearance Verification System, the automation of the forms -- it's called E-hyphen-Q-I-P or e-QIP -- and also the imaging standards to image background investigations.

So in effect, what we've done here is we have moved from a paper-driven security clearance process to an electronic process. A very significant act was the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. Based upon the mandate of this very important act, and based upon the progress in e-government, we are now looking that 80 percent of all background checks will be finished within 90 days by the end of 2006. As I said earlier, at this point in time, OPM is doing 90 percent of all the federal government's personnel background investigations. At the present time, we're conducting over one million investigations a year.

Mr. Shaw: Norm, one aspect of the Human Resources Line of Business is skill development, employee skill development. Could you share an update on the E-Training Initiative and the usalearning.gov website?

Mr. Enger: Essentially what this was to accomplish was to build a web-based learning site where people could obtain from the Internet, from a website, courses, books, mentoring, the various things required to develop competencies and skills. We launched, in July of 2002, a very, very simple site. It was extremely basic; at that time, Mark Forman was in charge of e-gov -- now it's Karen Evans. Mark Forman was there, and in effect, we launched the site. We had a handful of courses, maybe 30 or 40 courses; we had a handful of books. It was a very, very humble beginning.

Since July of 2002, it's really grown very, very rapidly. We now have four providers of web-based training services under the E-Training Initiative. We have golearn.gov, which is operated by OPM, which is the site that I mentioned that we brought up in July 2002. We have FasTrac, F-A-S-T-R-A-C, a site operated by NSA. We have a site operated by Department of Commerce, NTIS. And our newest web provider is Department of State, the Federal Service Institute. They all are working with us under the E-Training Initiative, and we have, in effect, an advisory council that works with all of these providers.

And what's happened is now we have 1.3 million registered federal people using the courses and materials under the E-Training websites. These courses -- we now have thousands of courses, not 30 courses, but thousands -- we have hundreds of books, we have collaboration on the site, we have mentoring. The site keeps on getting richer and richer, and it's become a primary vehicle to educate and help the federal workforce build knowledge, skills, and also competencies. The site keeps on expanding in terms of what it's offering.

A very significant aspect now is we're moving into career planning or pathing on the site. We worked with the Chief Information Officer Council and we developed, basically, a career path for people in information technology. We mapped out what they should know from an entry-level position in IT to becoming a chief information officer. A person can go into this site and see at every step in their career in IT what they should know in terms of knowledge areas, skills, abilities, and they're able to, in effect, plan a curriculum and using our USALearning, they're able to, in effect, start taking courses, and the site will help them to track their training and their curriculum. So, in effect, you've moved now from just having courses and materials to actually helping people move forward in a well-defined career. This really is improving competencies. We plan to follow this model of building competencies. We're now working with the HR community, the acquisition community, and the financial community to, in effect, add to this web-based training, career pathing, or planning facilities similar to what we did with the IT community.

Let me also add that we have established a council. It's called the Learning and Development Advisory Council. Now, we have 23 agencies, and we have these four service providers all working with us on this council, which, in effect, as a government, is looking together, saying, how can we better use web-based training to improve and help the federal workforce. This ties very, very much into the whole move to pay-for-performance because you have to have people properly trained to do their job in order to be able to have them able to give the results you want, which ties to their performance on the job.

Mr. Morales: How is OPM supporting electronic payroll? We will ask HR Line of Business director Norm Enger to explain this to us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with HR Line of Business director Norm Enger. And joining us in our conversation is Don Shaw.

Mr. Enger: When I joined the government in 2002, I learned that there were 26 agencies paying the 1.8 million federal employees. Coming from the private sector, where efficiency is very important, I was wondering why do you have 26 places paying the federal workforce. It turns out that the same question was asked many, many times by OMB and other parts of the federal government, and in effect, this initiative was to consolidate and standardize civilian payroll processing. What happened is, starting in 2002, we've moved forward, and what we have done is we have gone through a process in establishing 4 of the 26 agencies to be payroll providers, and we are finishing now the consolidation of civilian payroll into those four providers' sites. The four are the National Finance Center, which is part of Agriculture. It's based in New Orleans. You have the National Business Center, which is part of Interior, based in Denver. You have GSA, which is based in Kansas City. And you have, of course, you have DoD, something called Defense Finance Accounting System of services, payroll also.

Now, where we are in this process is we now are 85 percent complete. We now have 1.5 million of the 1.8 million people in the workforce being serviced by these four payroll providers. I think this is a very, very great success in e-government. We've done this in a relatively short space of time, and we've had no significant problems in terms of somebody getting the wrong paycheck or whatever.

Let me also add that one of our sites, the National Finance Center in New Orleans, they actually were shut down, essentially, during Katrina. They were able, through their planning, to be able to operate at other locations. They were able to continue processing pay for roughly 600,000 federal employees, which I think is a real tribute to how robust and how well this E-Payroll Initiative has progressed. From my point of view, the great success of E-Payroll, which has saved large sums of money and led to a more standard and more coherent civilian payroll system, really was one of the main reasons why the government thought of the Lines of Business. A major part of the Lines of Business is moving away from stovepipe installations, moving to more sharing and, in effect, offering modern, robust solutions at these service centers.

Mr. Morales: We know that OPM, GAO, and the OMB are encouraging the link between employee performance, organizational outcome, and pay. How is your office supporting the development of performance-based organizations?

Mr. Enger: Part of the Human Resources Line of Business, we have a task force of 24 agencies that meets every month to talk about direction, progress, for the Line of Business. But in addition to which, we've established something called the requirements board. This requirements board consists of OPM management, but also we have on the board, for example, we have Defense, Homeland Security, and other parts of the civilian workforce. They are looking at the legislation and requirements that drive information systems.

One of the main areas here is compensation management, which deals with payroll and also the various HR systems. What's happening is that they are developing the requirements which, in effect, become the IT structures, if you will, that will be running at the Federal Service Centers. What I'm saying here is that we now are, through the HR Line of Business, we're putting in place the infrastructure, we're putting in place the data centers or the service centers, and also we're putting in place the requirements for the new personnel payroll systems that'll run at those centers. And all of that supports the new pay-for-performance systems, which are now being implemented at DoD, the National Security Personnel System, and you have a new system at DHS -- Homeland Security -- MAX HR, and they're also talking about a new system for the rest of the civilian workforce in the Working for America Act.

In addition, I said earlier that many aspects of my early initiatives, like the E-Training and such, are really key to building competencies necessary for the workforce to perform properly.

Mr. Shaw: Norm, we've been discussing the coming wave of Lines of Business: Human Resources, Financial Management and Grants, and Information Security. We understand that agencies are planning centralized service providers for these functions. What role does your office have in supporting Human Resources shared service centers?

Mr. Enger: When the business case for the HR Line of Business was finished by our task force in 2004 and delivered to OMB, there were essentially two main recommendations in the business case, one of which was the government should move toward establishing shared service centers that would offer quality modern systems to support HR professionals that manage the civilian workforce.

The second major thrust was there should be more standardization -- where it makes sense -- in the HR business processes. What happened is that in roughly September of 2004, OMB asked agencies who would like to volunteer to be a federal shared service center, as we call it in the HR Line of Business -- namely a provider of these services. At that time, five federal agencies submitted proposals to be these centers. There was a proposal from Defense, a proposal from Agriculture -- the National Finance Center, a proposal from Interior -- the National Business Center, a proposal from Health and Human Services, and a proposal from Treasury. OMB reviewed these five proposals and in February of last year, they announced that from their point of view, from a budgetary and managerial point of view, they passed the OMB review. They were called candidates.

At that point in time, the proposals were turned over to OPM and the HR Line of Business, and we formed a number of panels, a technical and also an advisory board, and we spent many months analyzing these five proposals. We asked for more information from these five proposed providers, we met with them, et cetera. In September of 2005, the director of OPM, Linda Springer, and OMB announced that these had also passed the criteria, if you will, to be certified by OPM. So, in effect, as of September of 2005, you had five established, certified, federal shared service centers. And right now, these centers are in business to, in effect, offer agencies solutions, and they're following all the guidelines of the HR Line of Business, and they're also taking and looking at and moving toward meeting the requirements that we're publishing all the time relative to what they should be offering in terms of modernizing the IT systems that support the federal government.

Let me also add that beyond the IT services, they can offer other services also, but essentially, we're looking at moving routine, back-office type of work from the agencies to these centers.

Mr. Shaw: We understand the Human Resources Line of Business is a significant collaborative effort across multiple agencies. How would you characterize this collaboration, and what lessons learned can you share with us?

Mr. Enger: Well, we established the HRLOB task force in March of 2004, and it meets every month. And the task force is very, very active. We have very, very strong participation. The task force, of course, developed the business case for the line of business, the task force reviews all of the requirements we're putting out in terms of what should be offered at our shared service centers. And what we have now, we have established -- I think there are four poles to the HR Line of Business. One is we have the governance structure, which is the task force of 24 agencies with many, many sub-working groups. We also have established a shared service center advisory council, which consists of the four new HR service providers. And on the same council we also have the earlier four payroll providers, so there are nine components there. Then we also have as part of the task force, we have a group of 11 agencies that represent the voice of the customer.

So we have now the governance structure. We have the voice of the customer, which is a part of my task force, to speak for what the customers want, and they'll develop service-level agreements and performance metrics whereby they'll say what they want from the service centers. Then we have the voice of the service centers, or providers, which is this advisory council I mentioned before. And the last piece, the fourth piece, is we're publishing and making available to both the private sector and the federal government what we want in terms of the modern business systems. We're defining exactly what those systems should do and how they should operate and what their functionality should be. So we're actually telling the private sector and these centers, here's what those systems should do in terms of responsiveness, functionality, and also, you know, various performance criteria. So those are the four poles, if you will, of the HRLOB.

Now, to answer your question, though, what I've learned from this is that you can never do too much communication. You really have to outreach as much as possible to, in effect, make people understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. I've learned, if you will -- it's reinforced what I guess I understood earlier -- that you've got to make an effort, go out to meet whoever wants to meet with you in Congress or an agency, who wants to know more about what you're doing and why you're doing it, and make the presentations. And in that way you build the support which is really critical to moving ahead with these initiatives.

Mr. Shaw: Norm, can you briefly describe the technology that will support the HR Line of Business solution? Are you planning COTS software, or will custom software development be required?

Mr. Enger: Well, essentially, the federal government very much wants to learn and use the private sector as much as possible. There's a real movement away from the federal government building its own systems. So a major thrust here will be to, as much as possible, use commercial off-the-shelf software. Wherever possible, turn to the private sector, bring in their commercial software, and contract with them to, in effect, use that software and benefit from all the evolving technology they've put into that software. A major thrust also is to use the private sector wherever it makes sense, and contract out where it makes sense, and then, in terms of technology, it's really no different from what the private sector is facing in moving toward XML, Java, moving more and more toward Internet-based systems, moving away from the client server toward the Internet-hosted and -based systems. In terms of technology, it's really the exact same technology any large American corporation would be looking at and assessing at this point in time.

Mr. Morales: What does the future hold for the HR Line of Business? We will ask OPM director Norm Enger to discuss this with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Norm Enger, HR Line of Business director at OPM. Also joining us in our conversation is Don Shaw.

Mr. Enger: I mentioned earlier that we now have in place five federal HR service centers. We anticipate that in fiscal '06 three agencies at least will migrate major HR functions to these Shared Service Centers. I anticipate that the numbers will accelerate in the next fiscal year, so we'll see over the course of the next year more and more of the back-office work moving from the agencies to these service providers. In the course of this year, we'll continue our meetings with the task force, we'll meet every month with these five providers -- we have a council of five providers -- we also will continue the work we're doing to, in effect, define the solutions that we want to run at these service centers.

I think that the work we've done in defining solutions is really key to the future because for the first time, the government is defining what do we want these federal HR systems to do, and these are coming out in published specifications available to the private sector so they can build systems that meet those requirements.

So we have a lot of activity this year to, in effect, move forward defining solutions, and I might add also in defining solutions, that we anticipate that at some point in time, we'll actually be able to certify solutions. So if a vendor says, I have a new HR system that does this and this, we'd be able to take that and match it to our requirements, and then if it passes the requirements testing, we could certify that as a certified federal HR system. And that, of course, would wind up running at one of our shared service centers.

Mr. Morales: Norm, we spent a fair amount of time talking about commercial best practices, and certainly, you have a perspective coming from the private sector. What emerging technologies hold the most promise for improving the federal management of human resources?

Mr. Enger: Well, from a technology point of view, I think we're looking at knowledge management being one broad area. I think open architectures being another one. Web-based services, XML -- I mentioned this before. I think that the technologies that let us integrate systems more and pass information more easily and seamlessly between systems, all of this -- which is really the keynote of the open architecture -- will let us have more flexibility in how these service centers operate, how they communicate with each other, and how they're able to add new functionality, in terms of new vendor software becomes available, and they can plug this in, if you will, and offer this to the federal agencies.

Mr. Shaw: Norm, if we can ask you to look into the future now, what types of human resources concerns will face the federal government in 10 years and then even further out in 25 years?

Mr. Enger: Well, the federal government, as Linda Springer, our director, has said several times now, we're facing the fact that roughly 60 percent of the federal workforce can retire within five years. So you're looking at a very large potential for retirement from a 1.8 million civilian workforce. This puts great pressure on the federal government to do succession planning -- namely to be training people, hiring people to replace these people who leave. Because they leave with many years of knowledge about certain activities and functions, so you have to have in place people who are able to understand that functionality and replace these people.

So we're looking at that, which ties into the very important task of attracting talented young people into the federal workforce. It's very key that we have the ability to attract these young people. One step forward has been this usajobs site that I mentioned. We have to make the federal government more attractive to young college graduates and people looking for long-term careers. The federal government right now has an aging population and in effect, we now really need some new blood and quality -- talented young blood to enter our federal workforce.

Looking forward, we're looking at a more diverse population, a more diverse federal workforce which reflects the American population. The federal government tries to, in effect, represent the U.S. population, which is becoming more diverse. I think we're talking about what I call a blended federal workforce. We find that, in reality, most of your major operations or programs are a blend of both federal people and contractor. We're looking at a realization that we can't just look at a federal workforce, but we have to realize that it's a federal workforce totally supported by a competent private-sector workforce. So you really have to look at the whole picture -- the blended workforce is what I call it. I think this requires a little bit of assessment as to the best way to deal with the blended workforce.

The other issues, I think, are more general, like globalization. You know, there are jobs going overseas, software is being built in India and elsewhere. This does have some impact upon the long-term view we have as to what we're doing in the federal sector.

Mr. Shaw: How will OPM need to evolve to respond to these significant challenges in the future, Norm?

Mr. Enger: Well, the OPM, as I mentioned earlier, is really the guardian of the civilian workforce. Essentially, OPM has as a goal to have agencies adopt human resource systems that allow them to build a competent workforce. A second goal of OPM is to create a work environment so that people want to stay with the federal government or join the federal government. So OPM puts in place the policies, the guidance, to agencies that lets them establish this positive work environment so people can, in effect, do their job properly and, in effect, be results-oriented.

And the third part of OPM's goal here is to deliver services that are both efficient and quality. OPM has major, major roles in benefits, retirement systems, health benefit systems, and also investigative service systems. So OPM wants to deliver its services to the U. S. public very effectively and efficiently and cost-effectively. And also to pass on this view to the agencies that in turn have to service or are servicing both U.S. public and the civilian workforce.

Mr. Morales: Norm, on this theme of guidance, you spent most of your career in the private sector. But you've obviously successfully transferred to public service. What advice could you give a person who's interested in a career in public service?

Mr. Enger: Well, I think we have a significant situation now in terms of the federal government wants to be more like the private sector where it makes sense. The whole idea of pay-for-performance whereby every year you put in place a plan which specifies your goals for the year and ways to measure your achievement of those goals, this is very much a private-sector mentality. I think this will attract many young people who are looking for challenges, who are looking for accomplishments. The federal government offers individuals a chance to work on systems and projects that are much larger than most private companies can offer. I mean, you're talking about systems that affect millions of people, that involve billions of dollars in many cases, and the scale here is quite attractive, I think, to many young professionals coming out of college.

This is a good time for a person to join the federal government. Hopefully our usajobs website has been able to show people some of the benefits of working for agencies and working for the federal government. We have, on usajobs, numerous aids to help people who might have interest in the environment, interest in law enforcement, intelligence, military, whatever -- there are numerous guides on the site that let a person put in their desires, what they'd like to see in the job that'll guide them to what jobs are available in the federal sector. I encourage young people to go to this site and explore the site.

We also have on the site a special area for student jobs. In effect, someone who wants to work part time for the government can go to Student Jobs and find these part-time jobs. We also have something called a Presidential Management Fellows Program, designed to attract young people into the federal service, a special program to motivate and incentivize these young people.

So in summary, I think that this is a very, very good time for a young person looking for a positive career to consider federal service.

Mr. Morales: That's great advice. Norm, we've unfortunately run out of time, and that'll have to be our last question. First, I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule today. Second, Don and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to the public and our country in the various roles you've held at the Office of Personnel Management and in the information technology industry.

Mr. Enger: Yeah, I would suggest that people go to the opm.gov website. There's much more information about the Line of Business at the site. And also I mentioned the usajobs.gov website where a person can locate and apply for a federal job. Thank you very much.

Mr. Morales: This has been The Business of Government Hour featuring a conversation with Norm Enger, director of the Office of HR Line of Business at the Office of Personnel Management. Be sure to visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation. Once again, that's businessofgovernment.org.