Originally Broadcast December 8, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created 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 on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Good morning. I'm Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

In many respects, we are a nation at a crossroads. In the delivery of critical human service programs, policymakers and managers must consider issues such as fundamental reform, funding and financing, and program flexibility to focus on outcome measures and not just the process. In the end, the success of human service programs is measured by the health and well-being of this country's citizens.

As part of a series of discussions on managing human service programs, we have broadened our reach in this space and are honored to welcome our special guest this morning, Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association.

Good morning, Jerry.

Mr. Friedman: Good morning, Albert. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Mr. Morales: Also joining us in our conversation is Nicole Gardner, vice president and partner in IBM's public sector social services practice.

Good morning, Nicole.

Ms. Gardner: Good morning, Al. Good morning, Jerry.

Mr. Friedman: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: Jerry, let's start off by learning a bit more about your organization. Perhaps you can give us an overview of the mission, the history, and the activities of the American Public Human Services Association.

Mr. Friedman: Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning. We always look forward to venues in the public arena where we can talk about human services. The American Public Human Services Association is a 77-year-old organization that started around the same time as the Social Security Act. It was really founded by a group of very visionary administrators who were concerned about what back then they called the distribution of relief. They wanted to have a voice in policy in Washington, D.C., and they wanted to look at best practice. And essentially, that is what our organization has stood for for the past 77 years.

We've undergone several changes. We used to be called the American Public Welfare Association, focusing in on those types of programs. But we've actually broadened our horizon, recognizing that there is a realm of human service programs that need the kind of attention that a national association can give it.

Essentially, our mission is strengthening America through excellence in public human services. I think a lot of people don't realize just how large human services is, and the presence that it has in our society. We are generally one-third to one-half of most state and local budgets, and consequently, we have a large business to run and an obligation to run it effectively. But it also is a compassionate business, so we have kind of this desire to make sure that we're maximizing our resources, but doing it in a kind and compassionate way.

Basically, our association does three things. We work for good public policy. Good public policy meaning that there are adequate resources, that there's flexibility to run the programs, that we can actually look at outcomes and invest in clients rather than in the bureaucracy.

We then work with our members to help them implement that policy in the correct way. We do this through training and research and consulting.

And then the final area that we do is we really work on our public image. I think we can be successful mainly to the extent that the public has confidence in our ability to manage our programs efficiently and effectively. And we do that through radio shows, we do that through our website, through our magazines, publications, newsletters, informing the public as well as the profession is a key component of APHSA.

Mr. Morales: Could you give us a sense then of the scale of the operations at your organization and its affiliates? Can you tell us a little bit about who are some of its members and the size perhaps of your budget and the number of employees?

Mr. Friedman: Sure. In many ways, we serve like the National Governors Association does for governors. We perform the same function for the governors' appointed heads of health and human services programs, the state CEOs.

Our core group really are the states. And I've been very pleased that for the past four years, every state and a number of the territories have been full members of APHSA. That's very important to us, because when we go to Congress and we go to testify to say that we represent states, we truly do. Every state is a member.

We then have several hundred local members, counties, areas as large as New York City and Los Angeles to Tioga County, Pennsylvania, that likes to pride itself in being an area that doesn't have any traffic lights or parking meters, so we have that range. And then we have several thousand individual members.

We're a moderate-sized association. We rely a lot on our membership to provide the kind of support to enhance the field of human services. We have approximately 50 employees; sometimes there are more when we get special grants and projects. And we have an operating budget of around $5 million.

Ms. Gardner: So Jerry, now we understand a little bit more about APHSA. You're the executive director. Can you tell us what you do in your job? What does it entail?

Mr. Friedman: I would say that there are probably three major activities that I'm involved in. The first really is association management. We're unique, I think, in that we have to be very sensitive to the fact that our members operate public entities. We treat every dollar that comes into APHSA as if it was a tax dollar, because in many instances, it is. And so we've very sensitive to making sure that we provide the kind of return on the dollar. So just running the association, our own computer systems, our own budgeting processes, our own personnel, occupies a portion of my time.

Probably the largest portion of it is involving member services: meeting with our members, trying to get a sense of areas that they need us to focus in on; sharing best practice.

And then, of course, there's the work that we do on Capitol Hill and with the administration as well as other associations, partnering with them in trying to obtain good policy, good effective resources in the work that we do in Washington, D.C.

Ms. Gardner: In the context of all that, what are maybe the top three challenges that you face? And what kind of things are you doing to address those challenges?

Mr. Friedman: We certainly have the vast array of human services challenges that all of our members face. Internally, you know, we also have challenges in managing during difficult economic times. When states have downturns, when the revenues decline, that also affects our revenues, so that we've had -- from time to time, had to manage during difficult times.

Staff retention is a big issue for us. We're very fortunate in that being in business for so long and having a reputation, which I think is excellent in this city, we're able to attract very, very talented individuals. They gain national exposure. They get to meet with every state CEO. They get to meet with members of Congress. They get to hang out with other associations. And very often, they get recruited because they are talented. So we probably have a higher -- just by circumstances, a higher ratio of turnover than many other organizations.

And, you know, one of the difficult things for me is that most of our core membership is appointed by governors. When their terms expire, they move on to different things. And we develop these relationships, and it's very difficult sometimes to deal with a lot of turnover within the states.

But I think the main challenge in human services, and I think it's also true for our association and all of its components, is truly our public image. The ability to tell our story not only just in Congress, but to the general public I think is critical. We face very unique challenges in human services. We're one of the few industries that is literally working to put itself out of business. We strive for a better society. We strive to alleviate poverty. We strive to eliminate child abuse. And if we're truly successful, there wouldn't be a need for us.

On the other hand, our failures are very visible. We can be successful in dealing with thousands of children. And when we have that unfortunate situation where a child gets lost, of course the public rightfully is outraged as we are, and that draws attention to us. We conduct our business in the open. We're the American Public Human Services Association, and that means if we make a mistake, you're going to read about in the front pages of the newspaper. And often, corporate America and the business community and even the other nonprofit organizations don't have that kind of exposure. So we have unique problems, but we also have unique opportunities, and I think all of this makes us stronger.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, with that type of a mission, I'm curious, how did you get started in this field? What prompted you to get into this?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I was very fortunate in that I started my career as a probation officer. That may sound like a very strange answer, but when you think about it, what a probation officer does, there's a law enforcement aspect to it, but then on the other hand, there's kind of a case management function. You know, when somebody's coming out of prison, they need a job, they need housing, they need treatment, they may be addicted to drugs and alcohol and you have to work with that. And what I learned from that experience was that very often, the human services system broke down for people, and it was mainly because of the way that we were structured within a categorical system. And that really shaped a lot of my early thinking about how we could provide services in a different way, how we could have a more coordinated strategy for dealing with the multiple problems that people were facing. And so I had this exposure to the broad array of human services through that experience.

I then was fortunate enough to kind of have a career progression that led me to be a county human services administrator in two different counties in Pennsylvania. And then I became a state director of public welfare in Pennsylvania. Later, in Washington state, I was in charge of the Economic Services Administration. And before my job at APHSA, I was the executive deputy commissioner for the Texas Department of Human Services.

What that gave me, I think, was good, practical experience in actually providing the services at the county level, but then having the state experience. And through that, I touched various systems, everything from health care to child welfare to mental health, drug and alcohol programs. And so when the association was recruiting for a new executive director, I think that they wanted somebody with both state and local experience, and having that kind of broader perspective of having administered a wide array of programs.

Mr. Morales: So as you reflect back on your career, is there one aspect of that that you feel has really shaped your current leadership role and perhaps informed your current style?

Mr. Friedman: Albert, the one asset that I think that I bring to APHSA is a 25-year history of being a member. This association was my safety net. When I absolutely needed information and needed it quickly, I had them on my speed dial. When we had public policy that we needed changed -- I can give you a very good example -- and that was with welfare reform when there was a provision that legal immigrants were not entitled to food stamps. Our state legislature and our governor, I was in Washington state at the time, said this is unacceptable, find a way to make a change. It was APHSA, our association, that led the change in Congress that allowed states to purchase food stamp coupons for this population. So I came in with a great deal of passion about the association and the work that the association does as a consumer and as a member.

So what I bring to the association is I have such talented co-workers, oh, they're working on their Ph.D.s and their law degrees and they're just extraordinary, but I can look at something that crossed my desk and say if I was a member, would this make sense to me? And so as long as I think I can keep that member perspective, I'll be able to enrich the association to some degree.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What are some of the lessons learned from welfare reform efforts? We will ask Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association.

Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Nicole Gardner.

Jerry, we've used the term "public human services." Can you elaborate exactly what that means?

Mr. Friedman: Well, there's a debate actually on what public human services are. At one point, it was human services that were provided by government employees, but I think that that's changed a great deal with privatization efforts, with partnerships, with contracting. So now we define it more as services provided under the public aegis, where government dollars are used and there's a level of accountability, but it could be provided by a number of different associations, organizations, companies, both private and not-for-profit.

Mr. Morales: Let me go back in time a little bit. In the 1990s, government had made a statement to end welfare as we know it back then, which launched a series of welfare reform initiatives. Could you remind us of some of the key elements of this welfare reform, and from your perspective, how significant a social policy change does this welfare reform effort represent?

Mr. Friedman: If I look back on events that happened in my career, I think welfare reform was probably the most significant change in social policy in my lifetime. And what it did basically was that it ended individual entitlements for people and gave states block grants with considerable flexibility for states and local governments to design programs that made sense to them. Included were some provisions, like time limits, lifetime time limits, work requirements, just a vast array of significant changes to the way that we looked at what had been a dependency program to one that became a program of self-sufficiency.

In many ways, I think some of the lessons that were learned through welfare reform are really beginning to permeate some of the other human services systems as well. But all in all, I think welfare could be considered a successful program in the United States that brought about significant change.

Ms. Gardner: So Jerry, in that context, tell us a little bit about some of the key lessons we learned in welfare reform.

Mr. Friedman: Well, first, if I could just talk a little bit about some of the successes. And you have to realize that the AFDC program had been in existence for many, many years. It was a well-entrenched program basically operated through federal rules. And so when the new law came into effect and states were empowered to develop their own and design their own programs, there was a great deal of both apprehension as well as a great deal of high expectations for welfare administrators who had really wanted to do something different with the program for a considerable period of time.

It's important to note that welfare reform didn't actually start with the new law. There were over 40 states who had gone to the federal government to seek waivers to say we think that we have a better solution to helping people become self-sufficient. And what the federal legislation really was were some of those common threads through all of those various waiver programs.

But when you look at what happened over the course of a decade, there was a 60 percent decline in welfare caseloads in this country. Child support collections for non-custodial parents doubled. Over 1.5 million welfare recipients who had previously never been attached to the workforce had gainful employment and were no longer reliant on the public welfare system to support them. We implemented a national electronic benefits transfer program, a large computerized effort that actually eliminated food stamp coupons in this country. We created hundreds of thousands of child care slots. We invested in prevention programs that resulted in a decline in teen pregnancy among welfare mothers of one-third. And for the first time, reversing a two-decade trend, we actually had a decline in child poverty rates in this country. So by all accounts, you would consider that a success.

Well, there were many lessons to be learned through that. First, there was a really compelling case for change. Welfare dependency was a bad investment strategy, basically supporting somebody. It didn't help grow our society or our economy or the self-image of those who were receiving those benefits. So that we learned that there was kind of both an economic and a moral imperative for change. Yes, indeed, we are a compassionate society. We are our brother's keeper. But on the other hand, we had an obligation to help people maximize their own personal potential and develop their own capacity.

We learned that personal responsibility can be very effective public policy; that in life, there is a quid pro quo; that reciprocity is just the way that we live as Americans, and that its public policy should reflect that. We learned that people can rise to the occasion, that when they were afforded the opportunity, people became job-ready. They invested when there were both incentives positive and negative. People reacted in that they did want better things for their families. We learned, I think, that the best service delivery was designed at the local level. Welfare reform was not a national strategy. It was saying here's the money, here are the resources, develop a local strategy, and that resulted in those successful efforts.

We learned that we had to rely on partnerships, that welfare in this country couldn't be fixed by government. It required corporate America, the business community, the nonprofit world, the faith-based world, education, all coming together in kind of a uniform strategy to help address this. We learned the importance of services coordination and integrating services. What happened with lifetime time limits was that the bar was raised. We had a finite period of time to have people become job-ready or they would lose this safety net. We know that people don't come to welfare offices simply because they have empty wallets and empty pocketbooks, that there's often just a myriad of other problems that exist, and that we needed to address those. And that required the agencies that provided those services to get together in some kind of coordinated strategy. We also learned that there were other multiple strategies that we needed to look at: asset building, predatory lending. You know, there's a whole industry that thrives just because people are living in poverty.

I think the most important lesson, though, was, you know, for years people railed about the public welfare system, and I was one of them, to be honest with you, that it was a failed system. Well, what we learned was it was failed policy. When people are penalized, when their family condition or economic conditions are worse off because they're trying to better themselves and become employed, when they actually lose money, when the most responsible thing that they can do financially for their family is to stay on welfare rather than try to get to work because they'll be worse off, that's failed policy.

When that changed, we demonstrated it was not a failed workforce. The welfare system, this huge entity in this country, literally turned on a dime. Welfare offices almost overnight were transformed from "welfare offices" to "work centers." You know, the message was clear: What can I do to help you get a job today? This magnificent welfare workforce absolutely transformed themselves because they wanted to. They saw firsthand every day how just handing somebody a check and food stamps and hoping that every problem went away was foolish policy. And when that changed and they could make a real difference, they really rose to the occasion.

Ms. Gardner: That's quite a story. So you mentioned a few minutes ago reauthorization. So where are we with the reauthorization of TANF, and kind of what's the status? Where are we going?

Mr. Friedman: TANF was reauthorized after about 12 or 13 continuing resolutions. We just couldn't seem to get congressional attention because of all of the other priorities. And at the very end of the legislative session last year, as part of the Deficit Reduction Act, TANF reauthorization was passed. As an association, we are very concerned about the kind of micromanagement that's been built back into the welfare system. We think that the broad strategy of providing goals for states to reach, and empowering communities to reach those, worked. Clearly demonstrated that. And so we're concerned that we've taken a huge step backwards when it comes to welfare reform. And administrators, rather than talking about how can we get people into gainful employment, how can we help them get better jobs, how can we improve their economic conditions, they're talking about how we can have something count as a work participation credit because of the penalties that they're going to be facing. We're working very hard to minimize any damage as we see it to this program. To continue to empower states, we strive for maximum flexibility, but we're going to have an uphill battle.

Mr. Morales: Now, Jerry, you mentioned earlier that welfare reform really began at the state and local level. And I believe today, we again are seeing state agencies developing innovative public policy agendas to shape the next decade of service to low-income families. Could you elaborate on some of these innovative state programs? What are some of the strengths that you're seeing in some of these programs?

Mr. Friedman: Well, again, I think drawing off some of the success that we had with welfare reform and just looking at public policy that empowers communities, we're seeing this play out in child welfare programs, we're seeing this played out in health care programs. If you went to a Medicaid director 20 years ago and you said what is your job, they would say my job is to pay bills timely, accurately, and efficiently, and basically they did that. If you ask a Medicaid director today what is your job, well, they're part of a governor's health cabinet. They're looking at universal coverage. They're looking at strategies to cover the uninsured. They are looking beyond just paying bills to what are the best treatments and interventions that we can provide? Where do we get a return on the investment? How can we engage consumers? Now can we embrace prevention and wellness programs?

It's an exciting time right now because of a lot of flexibility that's been given to states around health care design. And I would contend that the real leadership for this is not happening within the confines of Washington, D.C., but it's happening in the statehouses throughout the country.

I think the same is true with public child welfare. Welfare administrators are saying, you know, if I could take the resources that it takes to buy foster care and invest in strategies to build stronger families in the beginning, investing in prevention, investing in interventions that help people become better parents up front, then we could save all this money on the back end. But more importantly, children thrive better in families than they do in foster care. It's more than intuitive. It's supported by all the research and by all the evaluations that happen. So what I see happening now are administrators throughout this country, states approaching the federal government just like they did with welfare reform, saying we think we have a better solution based on our local conditions, by the assets and the resources within our community, and our ability to mobilize them.

The other thing that we didn't have 25 years ago, when I was running programs, is we have more supportive technology. It used to be very hard to keep track of all of the records that you needed and the requirements and the rules and regulations when you had six or seven or eight different categorical programs with rules and different requirements. But with computer systems now and the ability to process information, it is much easier, I think, to manage those programs within the compliance rules of the federal government.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, it sounds like, you know, really workforce strategies are really sort of the key to success here in helping families manage this transition that you describe. But can you give us perhaps some specific examples of programs that are out there that you think are really innovative and are working well?

Mr. Friedman: Well, there are thousands of them. And I think, again, the key was that public administrators were set free to go out and to develop strategies that worked.

You know, one of the things that we used to do, I used to do this when I ran welfare programs, was to go to corporate America and to business and say wouldn't it be nice if you hired somebody off the welfare rolls? You know, it helps the community and it's the right thing to do. Now we can go to corporate America and the business community and say we can help you build your business. We can help your bottom line. We can help your profit. We can do that through tax credits. We can do that through customized job training. We can do that through extended medical assistance coverage and child care subsidies. We can do that through working with new employees to help train them through orientation. So people see this as a better business strategy than they used to as just a social service.

Mr. Morales: So it's about collaboration.

Mr. Friedman: It's about collaboration. It's about partnership. But it's also -- it's about investment. Good public policy, good social policy, good human services policy and making profit don't have to be mutually exclusive principles.

Mr. Morales: That's a very good point.

What emerging technologies hold the most promise for improving human services delivery? We will ask Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association. Also joining us in our conversation is Nicole Gardner, vice president and partner in IBM's public sector social services practice.

Jerry, the goal of working with families in a holistic manner to achieve better outcomes has been around for some time. The change to cross-agency program policy and cross-agency funding streams to support that goal have been somewhat elusive at both the federal and the state levels. Whenever an issue bounces around an industry for so many years and doesn't appear to gain traction, one of two things is usually happening: either, one, the topic is of interest, but there's no real intrinsic value, but the parties sort of enjoy talking about it; or more is happening than we all realize. In your opinion, what's happening here?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think there's a little bit of both to your question, and we're still kind of defining ourselves in human services in our public policy. Very often we find conflicting things with categorical rules that tend to get in the way of integrated strategies. But again, I tend to be optimistic, partially because of the technology, partially because of welfare reform, and to a great extent through the leadership that's coming through human services that are looking at different and more coordinated strategies. The way that we have partnered with the business community, many states now are actually privatizing casework services, something that just didn't exist before. But they're doing it thoughtfully and rationally and in a way that's devised to get better outcomes. I think that it is still a work in progress, but I think more and more, there is a realization that if we are truly to be investing our human resources wisely, this one-half to one-third of local and state budgets, that we need to have the ability to move beyond all of our individual rules and all of our individual program perspective.

There are huge challenges. First off, if you look at the history of human services, it wasn't like it was formed through some kind of great planning strategy. It seemed like Congress would discover a problem, throw some money at it, and hope that it went away. And the residual effect were all these categorical agencies often competing with each other. They had their own infrastructure. They had their own computer systems. They had their own rules and their own regulations. When you couple that with an advocacy community that's pretty singularly focused, we have advocates around hunger, around developmental disabilities, around mental illness, we don't have advocates for services integration. And yet every one of those programs are adversely affected because there's not a single solution or a single cause of many of these maladies that we have in our society. We've begun to rely a little bit better on technology to get us data and to get us information that tells us where we can invest our resources most effectively.

In the health care arena, there's a lot of work that's going on on electronic medical records. In the course of doing that, I think there's a potential to lay a foundation for further integration of human services in this country. In many areas, there are great demonstrations, but we still as a matter of public policy have not embraced this as the way that we should be doing our thinking and investing.

Ms. Gardner: So in the context, Jerry, of the fact that we're looking at a family as a whole in a holistic way, you mentioned the electronic health record, what are some of the other innovations from a technology perspective that help to break down some of those barriers that exist between the competing organizations and the way that the regulations and the laws have developed?

Mr. Friedman: Well, certainly Internet strategies, looking at ways that people can apply for benefits through the Internet, ways that data can be refreshed, where redundancies can be eliminated, I think have great potential. Many states are developing things like kiosks and automated call centers where they can call in and see whether they're eligible. They can do tests, they can do income tests. All of that is still evolving and still growing, but I think is becoming more and more the industry norm.

There are tools that caseworkers are using that I think are pretty exciting that afford not only greater efficiency, but also greater protections. The state of Alabama has just equipped their child welfare workers with electronic notebooks that do amazing things. Caseworkers can do case notes, they can take photos. They can take photos of children that may have scars and abuses that they can forward to their supervisor to say do we go further with this case? They have GPS so that they know where they're at. They can have a level of safety the caseworkers didn't have before.

Also, you know, for many of the challenges that our clients face, technology is a level playing field. When I was working in Austin, Texas, we had a special project where we refurbished computers. We worked with many of the large computer firms, and we provided these to low-income families that otherwise would not be able to have a computer, and it was just amazing to see what children can do when they're set free in this learning environment through the Internet. Again, it's kind of optimistic. I personally am just still learning how to figure out e-mail, but I've got staff that just do amazing things with computers, and they're always trying to educate me.

There also are ways, I think, that we're being able to process information differently. With the old legacy systems and COBOL language and the way that we had to program, literally taking large business applications and trying to retrofit through different algorithms our human services business, often those things got lost in translation. You know, with decision trees and artificial intelligence and more agile and nimble applications, the potential is there. Looking at outcomes, there are a number of different outcome result systems that are being grown by small companies that are approaching human services, and so I think there's vast potential there.

Ms. Gardner: So any time there's an infusion of technology into an environment that has previously not been able to really do much with it, there are usually barriers and challenges that pop up. So what are some of the big challenges to really taking advantage of emerging technologies in your field?

Mr. Friedman: Well, the biggest one for me, and it's kind of a pet rant, is the process that the federal government has for procuring computer equipment. It's called the APD or the advance planning document process. This is a bureaucratic nightmare that's 40 years old, no longer necessary in my estimation. It was created at a time when I think it was appropriate, when computers and computer applications were relatively exotic, they were relatively new. And the federal government was saying, well, listen, why invest in all of these things? Let's look at have some kind of uniform process and see how we can transfer information back and forth. Also to provide a level of fairness in the competitive bid process.

Well, states now have very robust procurement requirements, every bit as robust as anything that the federal government could do. It stalls the procurement of computer equipment. Because it involves, in many instances, multiple federal agencies, each one can trump the other one in terms of the process. It can take two to three years to get approvals. And in some cases, it's just simply the criteria that they have doesn't make sense. I'll give you one example.

There's a dollar limit that if you exceed -- I think it's $5 million; the dollar amount may have changed because I don't do this every day, but it used to be $5 million -- you had to seek the approval of the federal government. Well, I was in Texas, and I was responsible for a 15,000-person workforce. For me to just routinely replace desktop computers after the depreciation life is gone, I had to go and get approval to do that. Now, ironically, if I wanted to hire 100,000 staff, all I had to do was to put in a state plan amendment. Years ago, the Department of Labor did away with this same process because they realized that it was just antiquated. And I think in many ways, by the time they get the approval, the technology's obsolete.

This is something that we have been striving for for at least the past 15 years, to have this reformed or ended or changed. And I think it's just -- you know, if there's anything that the next administration can do to make life easier for state human services administrators, and especially their chief information officers, it's to absolutely reform this system and to have confidence that states make good, thoughtful business decisions about procuring computer equipment.

Ms. Gardner: So let's talk about something that your organization has been working on specifically, something called the "Organizational Effectiveness Institute, Building the 21st Century Workforce." You started this last May, so can you tell us a little bit about this effort? What was it aimed at and what's happening with it?

Mr. Friedman: We have a training/research/consulting practice at APHSA. In many ways, we needed to be clear about our core competencies and to match that with our members' needs. You know, there are dozens of very, very good consulting firms that do training and consulting in this country. We think that we have a unique niche in that we really understand the business of human services. So we began to do a whole series of evaluation of our own programs, asking our members what their needs were. And essentially they're saying that we need help in looking at organizational effectiveness and then developing good leaders.

And the other thing that has always troubled me as a consumer of consulting services and training was that very often we go to a training program and something nice happens, we put it on a shelf, and we get back and our desk is piled high and we kind of forget what we learned through that session. So we're very much into looking at actual products, being able to take something away from this experience. And so we created this concept of having an institute where our members, our states, and in some cases local organizations, would participate not for a one-shot training session, but through a process that would lead to a product.

Now, the workforce institute was particularly interesting because when we meet with our CEOs and we ask them what are your greatest needs, the issue of staff recruitment, retention, early retirements, building a bench for new leadership, I mean, many of my colleagues are my age, you know, baby boomers that are of retirement age, and we stand to lose a significant amount of institutional knowledge as well as leadership if we don't find some way to address that. Well, what we learned through our needs assessment was that very often human resources personnel offices weren't necessarily being seen as a solution, that personnel rules weren't seen as an asset that can help enable addressing that issue.

And so what we did was that we created this institute, and it lasted for a year. There were four group meetings of all of the participants, but then there was a lot of individual consulting and peer consulting, which was very important, that happened in between those meetings. And the end result was that the human resources directors walked away with a product which was a workforce plan that they could take to their governor's office. We actually field tested this by bringing in a number of retired commissioners, secretaries, and directors of human services and saying to them basically if your human resources director submitted this plan to you, is this something that you would support?

And so the end result of this one year was an actual working workforce plan that drilled down beyond, you know, I need 20 caseworkers because my caseloads are going to get this high, but looking at skill sets. Where do you find them? How do you work with the universities? How do you work with the training centers? How do you help grow internally your own training capacity to have this happen? What kind of array of benefits and training opportunities do we create for our workforce? How do we embed quality improvement in the way that we do business? And so it was beyond just how you do a workforce plan. It was how you actually make a more effective organization.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, along these lines, to be a bit more specific, what are some of the workforce capacity building challenges faced by public human service agencies, and how does the institute seek to assist participants in strengthening agencies' workforces and human resource capacities?

Mr. Friedman: Well, what we're trying to do is to embed a strategic process in looking at our workforce needs. And that, I think, has been a missing element. I think we've done traditional recruiting and we've gotten people that have credentials. But when we look at the broader strategy of who's coming into human services today and making it a career, quite frankly, I'm a little troubled.

I'm at the tail-end of my career. I'm in my sixties. I was a product of the 1960s and the 1950s, and I was drawn to public service. It wasn't part of my family tradition. I was drawn to public service by the leadership of this country who talked about human services and public service being an honorable thing that should attract the best and the brightest. You know, we had leaders in this country who were great role models, and it troubles me today that we don't kind of have that sense of government as being such an instrument of good. Not to be critical, but when you turn on the radio programs around the country, all you hear is that government wastes this and government does that. I really take exception to that.

I have worked both in corporate America and I have worked in the public sector, and there are challenges in both and there is competence in both, and unfortunately, there's incompetence sometimes in both. But the public business is a little bit unique because it is in the open. And so I think all of that has created an environment where people just aren't as attracted to public service as they used to be. And so what we're trying to do is to rebuild that through reshaping our public image, getting back to the notion that human services is honorable.

We have always known, those of us who got into this, we didn't get into human services for the money. If we did, we made a very dumb decision. We were driven by a different kind of mission, a desire to make a difference in a different kind of way and contribute in a different way. You know, that spirit I think is something that we want to kind of recapture.

Mr. Morales: What about the future of public human services delivery?

We will ask Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association. Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Nicole Gardner.

Jerry, perhaps you could elaborate on the types of public-private partnerships that your members and affiliates engage in to improve operations or outcomes. And in what areas do you think you would like to enhance or expand these types of collaborations?

Mr. Friedman: Well, that's a very good question. In reality, there has always been, I think, a level of partnership between at least public human services and the private sector. Many of the actual services are provided under contract. Many of the charitable faith-based organizations have been dealing with people with needs, material needs, basic needs, other human services needs for years. So when you look at the array of vast human services networks that are out there, very often, the majority of the programs are actually provided within the private sector. However, recently, there has been more and more of a movement towards privatizing some of the core functions that had traditionally been part of government.

I think what we try to do best as a national association is to work with our members to make sure that they have weighed all of the factors they could consider into whether this is a good decision or not. I think the issue isn't the whos. It's more the issue of the whats, and being clear about what the core competencies are. If government entities are going to be contracting, then I think they need different skill sets, or need to emphasize skill sets a little differently. And I think we have a good example.

Twenty years ago, states ran huge data centers with state employees. In many areas, these are now run by corporate America under contract. What happened, though, in the state information technology world was that the core competencies changed. They changed to project management, contract management, automation planning, quality control. And I think the same needs to happen as we start to look at actual service delivery. But if we're going to be farming these activities out to for-profit or not-for-profit organizations, we need to be real clear about what the expectations are: managing those contracts and those projects effectively. And so I think that's the critical issue. It's not who's doing it, it's what's being done, and is it done with the eye of actually providing an improved service delivery system rather than because it seems to be the local trend.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, obviously you just opened the door for a discussion on the future. What do you see as some of the emerging trends in social welfare policy over, say, the next 5, 6, 7, 10 years?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think we're at a very exciting time. Again, I think the lessons that were learned from welfare reform, the demonstration that state and local governments really can manage programs effectively, is continuing to evolve and continuing to grow.

I see a number of different trends. I think the movement towards services integration clearly is happening in a lot of different areas. I think categorical agencies are beginning to realize that it takes a holistic approach in order to address the needs of families. I think more and more, state and local governments are looking how to return on investment. You know, is this the best result that we can get for the amount of money that we are investing? And I think it kind of goes beyond just looking at a program from a cost perspective. I think we need to look at it from an outcome perspective.

The continued advancement in technology throughout the entire human services system, from consumers to clients to the way that we process mega data in this country, I think is continuing to evolve. And what I see happening is that major corporations are now investing specifically in human services applications rather than retrofitting business applications to human services.

I think that there's going to be a continued movement towards consumerism. You know, there should be nothing about me without me. More and more clients are saying and progressive human services professionals are saying I need to involve a client in this decision in order to have the best outcome. And so there is more of a kind of openness and a willingness to do this.

And I think in many ways it could also be a cost driver, particularly in the health care arena. We need to have the costs of what it takes in medical care to be transparent. We need to know what they are. Consumerism can do a great deal to drive down costs. I heard Speaker Newt Gingrich talk about the airline industry, and he was talking about the combination of deregulation and the Internet and things like Expedia and Priceline and all those different things have driven down the cost of air miles from 29 cents a mile down to 10. It's just a stunning thing what competition can do and we need to start having that application in human services. I think continued partnerships and having strategic approaches and better use of data will continue to be a part of it.

And obviously volunteerism. We need to rely on a community not only for the services that they provide, but for the engagement. My experience is that when people become exposed to what happens in a human services agency or in a human services program or even in an institution, they become advocates for it when they begin to see what it's like. So I think that those are some of the major trends. I think the bottom line, though, to all of these things is what it has always been, and that's we have to keep the clients first. We can't lose sight of our purpose and our reason for being in the human services business in the first place. And that's because people that are at our desks are there with multitude of problems. They're in pain, they're in need. And so we can set up these elaborate systems, but we can't lose our heart. And I think that that's a lesson that's always with us, and to always acknowledge the awesome responsibility that we have in human services.

I used to tell my co-workers you know that a keystroke on a computer can make the critical difference as to whether a child goes to bed hungry or nourished, and that's just an awesome responsibility that plays out a million times a day in this country, and we don't take credit for it. We don't talk about how often the systems work. We focus in on the failures rather than our successes. And if we're going to really change the human services industry and have it grow and thrive as a viable part of our society, we need to change the public image. We need to be able to tell that story better.

Ms. Gardner: So continuing our theme of looking into the future, Jerry, from a policy perspective on some of the specific programs, you know, what's coming up for Medicaid, for TANF, for child welfare? What's going to happen over the next year or two?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I wish I had a crystal ball that I could say that, because we're caught in competing dynamics. You know, I think that there's a growing awareness among people who pay taxes that they want to see a return on their investment. And I think there's also a real acknowledgement that people do have human needs, and I think we're going to continue to strive for that perfect balance. But again, you know, I keep going back to the lessons that we learned through welfare reform about personal responsibility, about work opportunities, about empowering communities to make a difference. I think that those will continue to grow.

The health care area I think is fascinating because we really are, I think, in the early stages of a transformation. I see it happening again with the Medicaid directors in this country and the role that they're playing and looking at prevention and wellness programs, and I think that that'll continue to be a part of it.

I know the direction I would like to see Congress in the next administration go, and that again is always to empower states, to give them flexibility, to have administrative simplicity, to keep client needs at the forefront. And I think if we do that, we can continue to have a stronger society.

Again, the return on investment I think is really important. We as a human services industry need to talk about the return on investment that society does get. You know, when we think about the food stamp program, we don't think about what it infuses into an economy. It's not just that the people who are low wage are able to have better nutrition, but what does it mean for the grocers and the growers and those that transport food and how it contributes to a stronger society?

Think of a society without human services, what kind of world we would have. And so we're getting a little better at telling our story. And I truly appreciate the opportunity to be on a show like this to talk to your listeners and to tell the human services story, to share our challenges as well as some of the opportunities. And I'm just very, very grateful for this experience.

Ms. Gardner: Well, we're honored to have you. In the context of the story you just told about the profound good that can be done, children being nourished, families being helped, if you were to get your aspiration realized that Congress would be proactive and positive in its treatment of human services policy and legislation going forward, how would you challenge your members to then take those things and move forward to really meet the challenge of improving service delivery and living up to the picture that you've painted so articulately?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think two things: to think holistically, how the various parts fit together to a system of care; and secondly, keep the clients first, keep the needs of the children in this country and the families who are struggling in this country. Unfortunately, I can walk out of this nice building in downtown Washington, D.C., and before I hit the next corner, I will be able to see the failures of our society, where people who have been left out and left behind, the homeless population, who aren't afforded, for whatever reasons, the opportunity to participate in the wealth of this great country. You know, we'll always have our work to do. So those are the things, the messages that I would give.

Mr. Morales: Jerry, it's hard not to be moved by your passion and dedication to public human services, so I'm curious, what advice could you give to someone out there who perhaps is thinking about starting a career in public service and perhaps in particular interested in working in the area of public human services?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think that the best experience really is hands-on. I always encourage people to volunteer, to spend time in public facilities, nursing homes, to talk to people who have needs to see where their strengths and where they can contribute. I think that that's the greatest thing is through the exposure. You know, we appreciate all of the courses in social work and public policy that happen, but I think it's that hands-on experience, that personal passion that somebody can have, and the exhilaration of actually seeing somebody who has improved the quality of their lives because you've been there, because you've been working with them, because you've tutored somebody who was illiterate and now they're job-ready. I mean, I just can't tell you. It's like maybe the equivalent, the public human services equivalent, of hitting a grand-slam home run in a World Series.

One of the greatest things that I get to do sometimes is to go to graduation classes of public welfare agencies, where they've taken people who had not been job-ready and they're out and they're ready to join the workforce or perhaps they're already working, to see the transformation in their lives. They have a client come back to them and say thank you, you made a difference.

Just one quick story. When I was a probation officer, I had a huge caseload. I didn't always I mean, you had to kind of triage. And years after I had left this job, I received a call one night at my house and it was from a man and I could tell he was obviously very emotional. And he asked if I was the probation officer that had his case, you know, 5, 10 years earlier. And I had to really search my memory banks, and indeed, it was and I did remember that. And what he wanted to tell me was that he was in the hospital, his wife had just given birth to his first child, a son, and that he wanted me to know I was the second call that he made -- the first was to his parents -- that he would not have had that thrilling opportunity to be a parent had I not intervened in his life in an early stage when he was struggling with substance abuse. Now, I barely remembered the case and I didn't do great casework. I gave him a choice: you're going to rehab or you go to jail, you know. But obviously it made an impact on this person. I hadn't thought of that case in years, but to get that phone call is something that just stayed with me for the rest of my life.

We don't always know that we make a difference. And so that's what I would tell people, that if they want a career where they can have those kind of rewards and benefits, then human services is a place that they ought to look.

Mr. Morales: That's absolutely wonderful. Jerry, unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule. But more importantly, Nicole and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service across the many years and roles that you've had in the area of public human services.

Mr. Friedman: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. If people want to find more about the American Public Human Services Association I urge them to take a look at our website. It has up-to-date information on all of the legislative proposals that are happening in Congress. It's a wealth of information, and it's at www.aphsa.org.

Mr. Morales: Great, thank you. This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association.

My co-host has been Nicole Gardner, vice president and partner in IBM's public sector social services practice.

As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who can't hear this morning's show on how we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales. Thank you for listening.

Announcer: This has been The Business of Government Hour. Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation.

Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org.

Originally Broadcast December 8, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created 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 on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Good morning. I'm Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

In many respects, we are a nation at a crossroads. In the delivery of critical human service programs, policymakers and managers must consider issues such as fundamental reform, funding and financing, and program flexibility to focus on outcome measures and not just the process. In the end, the success of human service programs is measured by the health and well-being of this country's citizens.

As part of a series of discussions on managing human service programs, we have broadened our reach in this space and are honored to welcome our special guest this morning, Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association.

Good morning, Jerry.

Mr. Friedman: Good morning, Albert. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Mr. Morales: Also joining us in our conversation is Nicole Gardner, vice president and partner in IBM's public sector social services practice.

Good morning, Nicole.

Ms. Gardner: Good morning, Al. Good morning, Jerry.

Mr. Friedman: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: Jerry, let's start off by learning a bit more about your organization. Perhaps you can give us an overview of the mission, the history, and the activities of the American Public Human Services Association.

Mr. Friedman: Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning. We always look forward to venues in the public arena where we can talk about human services. The American Public Human Services Association is a 77-year-old organization that started around the same time as the Social Security Act. It was really founded by a group of very visionary administrators who were concerned about what back then they called the distribution of relief. They wanted to have a voice in policy in Washington, D.C., and they wanted to look at best practice. And essentially, that is what our organization has stood for for the past 77 years.

We've undergone several changes. We used to be called the American Public Welfare Association, focusing in on those types of programs. But we've actually broadened our horizon, recognizing that there is a realm of human service programs that need the kind of attention that a national association can give it.

Essentially, our mission is strengthening America through excellence in public human services. I think a lot of people don't realize just how large human services is, and the presence that it has in our society. We are generally one-third to one-half of most state and local budgets, and consequently, we have a large business to run and an obligation to run it effectively. But it also is a compassionate business, so we have kind of this desire to make sure that we're maximizing our resources, but doing it in a kind and compassionate way.

Basically, our association does three things. We work for good public policy. Good public policy meaning that there are adequate resources, that there's flexibility to run the programs, that we can actually look at outcomes and invest in clients rather than in the bureaucracy.

We then work with our members to help them implement that policy in the correct way. We do this through training and research and consulting.

And then the final area that we do is we really work on our public image. I think we can be successful mainly to the extent that the public has confidence in our ability to manage our programs efficiently and effectively. And we do that through radio shows, we do that through our website, through our magazines, publications, newsletters, informing the public as well as the profession is a key component of APHSA.

Mr. Morales: Could you give us a sense then of the scale of the operations at your organization and its affiliates? Can you tell us a little bit about who are some of its members and the size perhaps of your budget and the number of employees?

Mr. Friedman: Sure. In many ways, we serve like the National Governors Association does for governors. We perform the same function for the governors' appointed heads of health and human services programs, the state CEOs.

Our core group really are the states. And I've been very pleased that for the past four years, every state and a number of the territories have been full members of APHSA. That's very important to us, because when we go to Congress and we go to testify to say that we represent states, we truly do. Every state is a member.

We then have several hundred local members, counties, areas as large as New York City and Los Angeles to Tioga County, Pennsylvania, that likes to pride itself in being an area that doesn't have any traffic lights or parking meters, so we have that range. And then we have several thousand individual members.

We're a moderate-sized association. We rely a lot on our membership to provide the kind of support to enhance the field of human services. We have approximately 50 employees; sometimes there are more when we get special grants and projects. And we have an operating budget of around $5 million.

Ms. Gardner: So Jerry, now we understand a little bit more about APHSA. You're the executive director. Can you tell us what you do in your job? What does it entail?

Mr. Friedman: I would say that there are probably three major activities that I'm involved in. The first really is association management. We're unique, I think, in that we have to be very sensitive to the fact that our members operate public entities. We treat every dollar that comes into APHSA as if it was a tax dollar, because in many instances, it is. And so we've very sensitive to making sure that we provide the kind of return on the dollar. So just running the association, our own computer systems, our own budgeting processes, our own personnel, occupies a portion of my time.

Probably the largest portion of it is involving member services: meeting with our members, trying to get a sense of areas that they need us to focus in on; sharing best practice.

And then, of course, there's the work that we do on Capitol Hill and with the administration as well as other associations, partnering with them in trying to obtain good policy, good effective resources in the work that we do in Washington, D.C.

Ms. Gardner: In the context of all that, what are maybe the top three challenges that you face? And what kind of things are you doing to address those challenges?

Mr. Friedman: We certainly have the vast array of human services challenges that all of our members face. Internally, you know, we also have challenges in managing during difficult economic times. When states have downturns, when the revenues decline, that also affects our revenues, so that we've had -- from time to time, had to manage during difficult times.

Staff retention is a big issue for us. We're very fortunate in that being in business for so long and having a reputation, which I think is excellent in this city, we're able to attract very, very talented individuals. They gain national exposure. They get to meet with every state CEO. They get to meet with members of Congress. They get to hang out with other associations. And very often, they get recruited because they are talented. So we probably have a higher -- just by circumstances, a higher ratio of turnover than many other organizations.

And, you know, one of the difficult things for me is that most of our core membership is appointed by governors. When their terms expire, they move on to different things. And we develop these relationships, and it's very difficult sometimes to deal with a lot of turnover within the states.

But I think the main challenge in human services, and I think it's also true for our association and all of its components, is truly our public image. The ability to tell our story not only just in Congress, but to the general public I think is critical. We face very unique challenges in human services. We're one of the few industries that is literally working to put itself out of business. We strive for a better society. We strive to alleviate poverty. We strive to eliminate child abuse. And if we're truly successful, there wouldn't be a need for us.

On the other hand, our failures are very visible. We can be successful in dealing with thousands of children. And when we have that unfortunate situation where a child gets lost, of course the public rightfully is outraged as we are, and that draws attention to us. We conduct our business in the open. We're the American Public Human Services Association, and that means if we make a mistake, you're going to read about in the front pages of the newspaper. And often, corporate America and the business community and even the other nonprofit organizations don't have that kind of exposure. So we have unique problems, but we also have unique opportunities, and I think all of this makes us stronger.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, with that type of a mission, I'm curious, how did you get started in this field? What prompted you to get into this?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I was very fortunate in that I started my career as a probation officer. That may sound like a very strange answer, but when you think about it, what a probation officer does, there's a law enforcement aspect to it, but then on the other hand, there's kind of a case management function. You know, when somebody's coming out of prison, they need a job, they need housing, they need treatment, they may be addicted to drugs and alcohol and you have to work with that. And what I learned from that experience was that very often, the human services system broke down for people, and it was mainly because of the way that we were structured within a categorical system. And that really shaped a lot of my early thinking about how we could provide services in a different way, how we could have a more coordinated strategy for dealing with the multiple problems that people were facing. And so I had this exposure to the broad array of human services through that experience.

I then was fortunate enough to kind of have a career progression that led me to be a county human services administrator in two different counties in Pennsylvania. And then I became a state director of public welfare in Pennsylvania. Later, in Washington state, I was in charge of the Economic Services Administration. And before my job at APHSA, I was the executive deputy commissioner for the Texas Department of Human Services.

What that gave me, I think, was good, practical experience in actually providing the services at the county level, but then having the state experience. And through that, I touched various systems, everything from health care to child welfare to mental health, drug and alcohol programs. And so when the association was recruiting for a new executive director, I think that they wanted somebody with both state and local experience, and having that kind of broader perspective of having administered a wide array of programs.

Mr. Morales: So as you reflect back on your career, is there one aspect of that that you feel has really shaped your current leadership role and perhaps informed your current style?

Mr. Friedman: Albert, the one asset that I think that I bring to APHSA is a 25-year history of being a member. This association was my safety net. When I absolutely needed information and needed it quickly, I had them on my speed dial. When we had public policy that we needed changed -- I can give you a very good example -- and that was with welfare reform when there was a provision that legal immigrants were not entitled to food stamps. Our state legislature and our governor, I was in Washington state at the time, said this is unacceptable, find a way to make a change. It was APHSA, our association, that led the change in Congress that allowed states to purchase food stamp coupons for this population. So I came in with a great deal of passion about the association and the work that the association does as a consumer and as a member.

So what I bring to the association is I have such talented co-workers, oh, they're working on their Ph.D.s and their law degrees and they're just extraordinary, but I can look at something that crossed my desk and say if I was a member, would this make sense to me? And so as long as I think I can keep that member perspective, I'll be able to enrich the association to some degree.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What are some of the lessons learned from welfare reform efforts? We will ask Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association.

Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Nicole Gardner.

Jerry, we've used the term "public human services." Can you elaborate exactly what that means?

Mr. Friedman: Well, there's a debate actually on what public human services are. At one point, it was human services that were provided by government employees, but I think that that's changed a great deal with privatization efforts, with partnerships, with contracting. So now we define it more as services provided under the public aegis, where government dollars are used and there's a level of accountability, but it could be provided by a number of different associations, organizations, companies, both private and not-for-profit.

Mr. Morales: Let me go back in time a little bit. In the 1990s, government had made a statement to end welfare as we know it back then, which launched a series of welfare reform initiatives. Could you remind us of some of the key elements of this welfare reform, and from your perspective, how significant a social policy change does this welfare reform effort represent?

Mr. Friedman: If I look back on events that happened in my career, I think welfare reform was probably the most significant change in social policy in my lifetime. And what it did basically was that it ended individual entitlements for people and gave states block grants with considerable flexibility for states and local governments to design programs that made sense to them. Included were some provisions, like time limits, lifetime time limits, work requirements, just a vast array of significant changes to the way that we looked at what had been a dependency program to one that became a program of self-sufficiency.

In many ways, I think some of the lessons that were learned through welfare reform are really beginning to permeate some of the other human services systems as well. But all in all, I think welfare could be considered a successful program in the United States that brought about significant change.

Ms. Gardner: So Jerry, in that context, tell us a little bit about some of the key lessons we learned in welfare reform.

Mr. Friedman: Well, first, if I could just talk a little bit about some of the successes. And you have to realize that the AFDC program had been in existence for many, many years. It was a well-entrenched program basically operated through federal rules. And so when the new law came into effect and states were empowered to develop their own and design their own programs, there was a great deal of both apprehension as well as a great deal of high expectations for welfare administrators who had really wanted to do something different with the program for a considerable period of time.

It's important to note that welfare reform didn't actually start with the new law. There were over 40 states who had gone to the federal government to seek waivers to say we think that we have a better solution to helping people become self-sufficient. And what the federal legislation really was were some of those common threads through all of those various waiver programs.

But when you look at what happened over the course of a decade, there was a 60 percent decline in welfare caseloads in this country. Child support collections for non-custodial parents doubled. Over 1.5 million welfare recipients who had previously never been attached to the workforce had gainful employment and were no longer reliant on the public welfare system to support them. We implemented a national electronic benefits transfer program, a large computerized effort that actually eliminated food stamp coupons in this country. We created hundreds of thousands of child care slots. We invested in prevention programs that resulted in a decline in teen pregnancy among welfare mothers of one-third. And for the first time, reversing a two-decade trend, we actually had a decline in child poverty rates in this country. So by all accounts, you would consider that a success.

Well, there were many lessons to be learned through that. First, there was a really compelling case for change. Welfare dependency was a bad investment strategy, basically supporting somebody. It didn't help grow our society or our economy or the self-image of those who were receiving those benefits. So that we learned that there was kind of both an economic and a moral imperative for change. Yes, indeed, we are a compassionate society. We are our brother's keeper. But on the other hand, we had an obligation to help people maximize their own personal potential and develop their own capacity.

We learned that personal responsibility can be very effective public policy; that in life, there is a quid pro quo; that reciprocity is just the way that we live as Americans, and that its public policy should reflect that. We learned that people can rise to the occasion, that when they were afforded the opportunity, people became job-ready. They invested when there were both incentives positive and negative. People reacted in that they did want better things for their families. We learned, I think, that the best service delivery was designed at the local level. Welfare reform was not a national strategy. It was saying here's the money, here are the resources, develop a local strategy, and that resulted in those successful efforts.

We learned that we had to rely on partnerships, that welfare in this country couldn't be fixed by government. It required corporate America, the business community, the nonprofit world, the faith-based world, education, all coming together in kind of a uniform strategy to help address this. We learned the importance of services coordination and integrating services. What happened with lifetime time limits was that the bar was raised. We had a finite period of time to have people become job-ready or they would lose this safety net. We know that people don't come to welfare offices simply because they have empty wallets and empty pocketbooks, that there's often just a myriad of other problems that exist, and that we needed to address those. And that required the agencies that provided those services to get together in some kind of coordinated strategy. We also learned that there were other multiple strategies that we needed to look at: asset building, predatory lending. You know, there's a whole industry that thrives just because people are living in poverty.

I think the most important lesson, though, was, you know, for years people railed about the public welfare system, and I was one of them, to be honest with you, that it was a failed system. Well, what we learned was it was failed policy. When people are penalized, when their family condition or economic conditions are worse off because they're trying to better themselves and become employed, when they actually lose money, when the most responsible thing that they can do financially for their family is to stay on welfare rather than try to get to work because they'll be worse off, that's failed policy.

When that changed, we demonstrated it was not a failed workforce. The welfare system, this huge entity in this country, literally turned on a dime. Welfare offices almost overnight were transformed from "welfare offices" to "work centers." You know, the message was clear: What can I do to help you get a job today? This magnificent welfare workforce absolutely transformed themselves because they wanted to. They saw firsthand every day how just handing somebody a check and food stamps and hoping that every problem went away was foolish policy. And when that changed and they could make a real difference, they really rose to the occasion.

Ms. Gardner: That's quite a story. So you mentioned a few minutes ago reauthorization. So where are we with the reauthorization of TANF, and kind of what's the status? Where are we going?

Mr. Friedman: TANF was reauthorized after about 12 or 13 continuing resolutions. We just couldn't seem to get congressional attention because of all of the other priorities. And at the very end of the legislative session last year, as part of the Deficit Reduction Act, TANF reauthorization was passed. As an association, we are very concerned about the kind of micromanagement that's been built back into the welfare system. We think that the broad strategy of providing goals for states to reach, and empowering communities to reach those, worked. Clearly demonstrated that. And so we're concerned that we've taken a huge step backwards when it comes to welfare reform. And administrators, rather than talking about how can we get people into gainful employment, how can we help them get better jobs, how can we improve their economic conditions, they're talking about how we can have something count as a work participation credit because of the penalties that they're going to be facing. We're working very hard to minimize any damage as we see it to this program. To continue to empower states, we strive for maximum flexibility, but we're going to have an uphill battle.

Mr. Morales: Now, Jerry, you mentioned earlier that welfare reform really began at the state and local level. And I believe today, we again are seeing state agencies developing innovative public policy agendas to shape the next decade of service to low-income families. Could you elaborate on some of these innovative state programs? What are some of the strengths that you're seeing in some of these programs?

Mr. Friedman: Well, again, I think drawing off some of the success that we had with welfare reform and just looking at public policy that empowers communities, we're seeing this play out in child welfare programs, we're seeing this played out in health care programs. If you went to a Medicaid director 20 years ago and you said what is your job, they would say my job is to pay bills timely, accurately, and efficiently, and basically they did that. If you ask a Medicaid director today what is your job, well, they're part of a governor's health cabinet. They're looking at universal coverage. They're looking at strategies to cover the uninsured. They are looking beyond just paying bills to what are the best treatments and interventions that we can provide? Where do we get a return on the investment? How can we engage consumers? Now can we embrace prevention and wellness programs?

It's an exciting time right now because of a lot of flexibility that's been given to states around health care design. And I would contend that the real leadership for this is not happening within the confines of Washington, D.C., but it's happening in the statehouses throughout the country.

I think the same is true with public child welfare. Welfare administrators are saying, you know, if I could take the resources that it takes to buy foster care and invest in strategies to build stronger families in the beginning, investing in prevention, investing in interventions that help people become better parents up front, then we could save all this money on the back end. But more importantly, children thrive better in families than they do in foster care. It's more than intuitive. It's supported by all the research and by all the evaluations that happen. So what I see happening now are administrators throughout this country, states approaching the federal government just like they did with welfare reform, saying we think we have a better solution based on our local conditions, by the assets and the resources within our community, and our ability to mobilize them.

The other thing that we didn't have 25 years ago, when I was running programs, is we have more supportive technology. It used to be very hard to keep track of all of the records that you needed and the requirements and the rules and regulations when you had six or seven or eight different categorical programs with rules and different requirements. But with computer systems now and the ability to process information, it is much easier, I think, to manage those programs within the compliance rules of the federal government.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, it sounds like, you know, really workforce strategies are really sort of the key to success here in helping families manage this transition that you describe. But can you give us perhaps some specific examples of programs that are out there that you think are really innovative and are working well?

Mr. Friedman: Well, there are thousands of them. And I think, again, the key was that public administrators were set free to go out and to develop strategies that worked.

You know, one of the things that we used to do, I used to do this when I ran welfare programs, was to go to corporate America and to business and say wouldn't it be nice if you hired somebody off the welfare rolls? You know, it helps the community and it's the right thing to do. Now we can go to corporate America and the business community and say we can help you build your business. We can help your bottom line. We can help your profit. We can do that through tax credits. We can do that through customized job training. We can do that through extended medical assistance coverage and child care subsidies. We can do that through working with new employees to help train them through orientation. So people see this as a better business strategy than they used to as just a social service.

Mr. Morales: So it's about collaboration.

Mr. Friedman: It's about collaboration. It's about partnership. But it's also -- it's about investment. Good public policy, good social policy, good human services policy and making profit don't have to be mutually exclusive principles.

Mr. Morales: That's a very good point.

What emerging technologies hold the most promise for improving human services delivery? We will ask Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association. Also joining us in our conversation is Nicole Gardner, vice president and partner in IBM's public sector social services practice.

Jerry, the goal of working with families in a holistic manner to achieve better outcomes has been around for some time. The change to cross-agency program policy and cross-agency funding streams to support that goal have been somewhat elusive at both the federal and the state levels. Whenever an issue bounces around an industry for so many years and doesn't appear to gain traction, one of two things is usually happening: either, one, the topic is of interest, but there's no real intrinsic value, but the parties sort of enjoy talking about it; or more is happening than we all realize. In your opinion, what's happening here?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think there's a little bit of both to your question, and we're still kind of defining ourselves in human services in our public policy. Very often we find conflicting things with categorical rules that tend to get in the way of integrated strategies. But again, I tend to be optimistic, partially because of the technology, partially because of welfare reform, and to a great extent through the leadership that's coming through human services that are looking at different and more coordinated strategies. The way that we have partnered with the business community, many states now are actually privatizing casework services, something that just didn't exist before. But they're doing it thoughtfully and rationally and in a way that's devised to get better outcomes. I think that it is still a work in progress, but I think more and more, there is a realization that if we are truly to be investing our human resources wisely, this one-half to one-third of local and state budgets, that we need to have the ability to move beyond all of our individual rules and all of our individual program perspective.

There are huge challenges. First off, if you look at the history of human services, it wasn't like it was formed through some kind of great planning strategy. It seemed like Congress would discover a problem, throw some money at it, and hope that it went away. And the residual effect were all these categorical agencies often competing with each other. They had their own infrastructure. They had their own computer systems. They had their own rules and their own regulations. When you couple that with an advocacy community that's pretty singularly focused, we have advocates around hunger, around developmental disabilities, around mental illness, we don't have advocates for services integration. And yet every one of those programs are adversely affected because there's not a single solution or a single cause of many of these maladies that we have in our society. We've begun to rely a little bit better on technology to get us data and to get us information that tells us where we can invest our resources most effectively.

In the health care arena, there's a lot of work that's going on on electronic medical records. In the course of doing that, I think there's a potential to lay a foundation for further integration of human services in this country. In many areas, there are great demonstrations, but we still as a matter of public policy have not embraced this as the way that we should be doing our thinking and investing.

Ms. Gardner: So in the context, Jerry, of the fact that we're looking at a family as a whole in a holistic way, you mentioned the electronic health record, what are some of the other innovations from a technology perspective that help to break down some of those barriers that exist between the competing organizations and the way that the regulations and the laws have developed?

Mr. Friedman: Well, certainly Internet strategies, looking at ways that people can apply for benefits through the Internet, ways that data can be refreshed, where redundancies can be eliminated, I think have great potential. Many states are developing things like kiosks and automated call centers where they can call in and see whether they're eligible. They can do tests, they can do income tests. All of that is still evolving and still growing, but I think is becoming more and more the industry norm.

There are tools that caseworkers are using that I think are pretty exciting that afford not only greater efficiency, but also greater protections. The state of Alabama has just equipped their child welfare workers with electronic notebooks that do amazing things. Caseworkers can do case notes, they can take photos. They can take photos of children that may have scars and abuses that they can forward to their supervisor to say do we go further with this case? They have GPS so that they know where they're at. They can have a level of safety the caseworkers didn't have before.

Also, you know, for many of the challenges that our clients face, technology is a level playing field. When I was working in Austin, Texas, we had a special project where we refurbished computers. We worked with many of the large computer firms, and we provided these to low-income families that otherwise would not be able to have a computer, and it was just amazing to see what children can do when they're set free in this learning environment through the Internet. Again, it's kind of optimistic. I personally am just still learning how to figure out e-mail, but I've got staff that just do amazing things with computers, and they're always trying to educate me.

There also are ways, I think, that we're being able to process information differently. With the old legacy systems and COBOL language and the way that we had to program, literally taking large business applications and trying to retrofit through different algorithms our human services business, often those things got lost in translation. You know, with decision trees and artificial intelligence and more agile and nimble applications, the potential is there. Looking at outcomes, there are a number of different outcome result systems that are being grown by small companies that are approaching human services, and so I think there's vast potential there.

Ms. Gardner: So any time there's an infusion of technology into an environment that has previously not been able to really do much with it, there are usually barriers and challenges that pop up. So what are some of the big challenges to really taking advantage of emerging technologies in your field?

Mr. Friedman: Well, the biggest one for me, and it's kind of a pet rant, is the process that the federal government has for procuring computer equipment. It's called the APD or the advance planning document process. This is a bureaucratic nightmare that's 40 years old, no longer necessary in my estimation. It was created at a time when I think it was appropriate, when computers and computer applications were relatively exotic, they were relatively new. And the federal government was saying, well, listen, why invest in all of these things? Let's look at have some kind of uniform process and see how we can transfer information back and forth. Also to provide a level of fairness in the competitive bid process.

Well, states now have very robust procurement requirements, every bit as robust as anything that the federal government could do. It stalls the procurement of computer equipment. Because it involves, in many instances, multiple federal agencies, each one can trump the other one in terms of the process. It can take two to three years to get approvals. And in some cases, it's just simply the criteria that they have doesn't make sense. I'll give you one example.

There's a dollar limit that if you exceed -- I think it's $5 million; the dollar amount may have changed because I don't do this every day, but it used to be $5 million -- you had to seek the approval of the federal government. Well, I was in Texas, and I was responsible for a 15,000-person workforce. For me to just routinely replace desktop computers after the depreciation life is gone, I had to go and get approval to do that. Now, ironically, if I wanted to hire 100,000 staff, all I had to do was to put in a state plan amendment. Years ago, the Department of Labor did away with this same process because they realized that it was just antiquated. And I think in many ways, by the time they get the approval, the technology's obsolete.

This is something that we have been striving for for at least the past 15 years, to have this reformed or ended or changed. And I think it's just -- you know, if there's anything that the next administration can do to make life easier for state human services administrators, and especially their chief information officers, it's to absolutely reform this system and to have confidence that states make good, thoughtful business decisions about procuring computer equipment.

Ms. Gardner: So let's talk about something that your organization has been working on specifically, something called the "Organizational Effectiveness Institute, Building the 21st Century Workforce." You started this last May, so can you tell us a little bit about this effort? What was it aimed at and what's happening with it?

Mr. Friedman: We have a training/research/consulting practice at APHSA. In many ways, we needed to be clear about our core competencies and to match that with our members' needs. You know, there are dozens of very, very good consulting firms that do training and consulting in this country. We think that we have a unique niche in that we really understand the business of human services. So we began to do a whole series of evaluation of our own programs, asking our members what their needs were. And essentially they're saying that we need help in looking at organizational effectiveness and then developing good leaders.

And the other thing that has always troubled me as a consumer of consulting services and training was that very often we go to a training program and something nice happens, we put it on a shelf, and we get back and our desk is piled high and we kind of forget what we learned through that session. So we're very much into looking at actual products, being able to take something away from this experience. And so we created this concept of having an institute where our members, our states, and in some cases local organizations, would participate not for a one-shot training session, but through a process that would lead to a product.

Now, the workforce institute was particularly interesting because when we meet with our CEOs and we ask them what are your greatest needs, the issue of staff recruitment, retention, early retirements, building a bench for new leadership, I mean, many of my colleagues are my age, you know, baby boomers that are of retirement age, and we stand to lose a significant amount of institutional knowledge as well as leadership if we don't find some way to address that. Well, what we learned through our needs assessment was that very often human resources personnel offices weren't necessarily being seen as a solution, that personnel rules weren't seen as an asset that can help enable addressing that issue.

And so what we did was that we created this institute, and it lasted for a year. There were four group meetings of all of the participants, but then there was a lot of individual consulting and peer consulting, which was very important, that happened in between those meetings. And the end result was that the human resources directors walked away with a product which was a workforce plan that they could take to their governor's office. We actually field tested this by bringing in a number of retired commissioners, secretaries, and directors of human services and saying to them basically if your human resources director submitted this plan to you, is this something that you would support?

And so the end result of this one year was an actual working workforce plan that drilled down beyond, you know, I need 20 caseworkers because my caseloads are going to get this high, but looking at skill sets. Where do you find them? How do you work with the universities? How do you work with the training centers? How do you help grow internally your own training capacity to have this happen? What kind of array of benefits and training opportunities do we create for our workforce? How do we embed quality improvement in the way that we do business? And so it was beyond just how you do a workforce plan. It was how you actually make a more effective organization.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, along these lines, to be a bit more specific, what are some of the workforce capacity building challenges faced by public human service agencies, and how does the institute seek to assist participants in strengthening agencies' workforces and human resource capacities?

Mr. Friedman: Well, what we're trying to do is to embed a strategic process in looking at our workforce needs. And that, I think, has been a missing element. I think we've done traditional recruiting and we've gotten people that have credentials. But when we look at the broader strategy of who's coming into human services today and making it a career, quite frankly, I'm a little troubled.

I'm at the tail-end of my career. I'm in my sixties. I was a product of the 1960s and the 1950s, and I was drawn to public service. It wasn't part of my family tradition. I was drawn to public service by the leadership of this country who talked about human services and public service being an honorable thing that should attract the best and the brightest. You know, we had leaders in this country who were great role models, and it troubles me today that we don't kind of have that sense of government as being such an instrument of good. Not to be critical, but when you turn on the radio programs around the country, all you hear is that government wastes this and government does that. I really take exception to that.

I have worked both in corporate America and I have worked in the public sector, and there are challenges in both and there is competence in both, and unfortunately, there's incompetence sometimes in both. But the public business is a little bit unique because it is in the open. And so I think all of that has created an environment where people just aren't as attracted to public service as they used to be. And so what we're trying to do is to rebuild that through reshaping our public image, getting back to the notion that human services is honorable.

We have always known, those of us who got into this, we didn't get into human services for the money. If we did, we made a very dumb decision. We were driven by a different kind of mission, a desire to make a difference in a different kind of way and contribute in a different way. You know, that spirit I think is something that we want to kind of recapture.

Mr. Morales: What about the future of public human services delivery?

We will ask Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association. Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Nicole Gardner.

Jerry, perhaps you could elaborate on the types of public-private partnerships that your members and affiliates engage in to improve operations or outcomes. And in what areas do you think you would like to enhance or expand these types of collaborations?

Mr. Friedman: Well, that's a very good question. In reality, there has always been, I think, a level of partnership between at least public human services and the private sector. Many of the actual services are provided under contract. Many of the charitable faith-based organizations have been dealing with people with needs, material needs, basic needs, other human services needs for years. So when you look at the array of vast human services networks that are out there, very often, the majority of the programs are actually provided within the private sector. However, recently, there has been more and more of a movement towards privatizing some of the core functions that had traditionally been part of government.

I think what we try to do best as a national association is to work with our members to make sure that they have weighed all of the factors they could consider into whether this is a good decision or not. I think the issue isn't the whos. It's more the issue of the whats, and being clear about what the core competencies are. If government entities are going to be contracting, then I think they need different skill sets, or need to emphasize skill sets a little differently. And I think we have a good example.

Twenty years ago, states ran huge data centers with state employees. In many areas, these are now run by corporate America under contract. What happened, though, in the state information technology world was that the core competencies changed. They changed to project management, contract management, automation planning, quality control. And I think the same needs to happen as we start to look at actual service delivery. But if we're going to be farming these activities out to for-profit or not-for-profit organizations, we need to be real clear about what the expectations are: managing those contracts and those projects effectively. And so I think that's the critical issue. It's not who's doing it, it's what's being done, and is it done with the eye of actually providing an improved service delivery system rather than because it seems to be the local trend.

Mr. Morales: So Jerry, obviously you just opened the door for a discussion on the future. What do you see as some of the emerging trends in social welfare policy over, say, the next 5, 6, 7, 10 years?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think we're at a very exciting time. Again, I think the lessons that were learned from welfare reform, the demonstration that state and local governments really can manage programs effectively, is continuing to evolve and continuing to grow.

I see a number of different trends. I think the movement towards services integration clearly is happening in a lot of different areas. I think categorical agencies are beginning to realize that it takes a holistic approach in order to address the needs of families. I think more and more, state and local governments are looking how to return on investment. You know, is this the best result that we can get for the amount of money that we are investing? And I think it kind of goes beyond just looking at a program from a cost perspective. I think we need to look at it from an outcome perspective.

The continued advancement in technology throughout the entire human services system, from consumers to clients to the way that we process mega data in this country, I think is continuing to evolve. And what I see happening is that major corporations are now investing specifically in human services applications rather than retrofitting business applications to human services.

I think that there's going to be a continued movement towards consumerism. You know, there should be nothing about me without me. More and more clients are saying and progressive human services professionals are saying I need to involve a client in this decision in order to have the best outcome. And so there is more of a kind of openness and a willingness to do this.

And I think in many ways it could also be a cost driver, particularly in the health care arena. We need to have the costs of what it takes in medical care to be transparent. We need to know what they are. Consumerism can do a great deal to drive down costs. I heard Speaker Newt Gingrich talk about the airline industry, and he was talking about the combination of deregulation and the Internet and things like Expedia and Priceline and all those different things have driven down the cost of air miles from 29 cents a mile down to 10. It's just a stunning thing what competition can do and we need to start having that application in human services. I think continued partnerships and having strategic approaches and better use of data will continue to be a part of it.

And obviously volunteerism. We need to rely on a community not only for the services that they provide, but for the engagement. My experience is that when people become exposed to what happens in a human services agency or in a human services program or even in an institution, they become advocates for it when they begin to see what it's like. So I think that those are some of the major trends. I think the bottom line, though, to all of these things is what it has always been, and that's we have to keep the clients first. We can't lose sight of our purpose and our reason for being in the human services business in the first place. And that's because people that are at our desks are there with multitude of problems. They're in pain, they're in need. And so we can set up these elaborate systems, but we can't lose our heart. And I think that that's a lesson that's always with us, and to always acknowledge the awesome responsibility that we have in human services.

I used to tell my co-workers you know that a keystroke on a computer can make the critical difference as to whether a child goes to bed hungry or nourished, and that's just an awesome responsibility that plays out a million times a day in this country, and we don't take credit for it. We don't talk about how often the systems work. We focus in on the failures rather than our successes. And if we're going to really change the human services industry and have it grow and thrive as a viable part of our society, we need to change the public image. We need to be able to tell that story better.

Ms. Gardner: So continuing our theme of looking into the future, Jerry, from a policy perspective on some of the specific programs, you know, what's coming up for Medicaid, for TANF, for child welfare? What's going to happen over the next year or two?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I wish I had a crystal ball that I could say that, because we're caught in competing dynamics. You know, I think that there's a growing awareness among people who pay taxes that they want to see a return on their investment. And I think there's also a real acknowledgement that people do have human needs, and I think we're going to continue to strive for that perfect balance. But again, you know, I keep going back to the lessons that we learned through welfare reform about personal responsibility, about work opportunities, about empowering communities to make a difference. I think that those will continue to grow.

The health care area I think is fascinating because we really are, I think, in the early stages of a transformation. I see it happening again with the Medicaid directors in this country and the role that they're playing and looking at prevention and wellness programs, and I think that that'll continue to be a part of it.

I know the direction I would like to see Congress in the next administration go, and that again is always to empower states, to give them flexibility, to have administrative simplicity, to keep client needs at the forefront. And I think if we do that, we can continue to have a stronger society.

Again, the return on investment I think is really important. We as a human services industry need to talk about the return on investment that society does get. You know, when we think about the food stamp program, we don't think about what it infuses into an economy. It's not just that the people who are low wage are able to have better nutrition, but what does it mean for the grocers and the growers and those that transport food and how it contributes to a stronger society?

Think of a society without human services, what kind of world we would have. And so we're getting a little better at telling our story. And I truly appreciate the opportunity to be on a show like this to talk to your listeners and to tell the human services story, to share our challenges as well as some of the opportunities. And I'm just very, very grateful for this experience.

Ms. Gardner: Well, we're honored to have you. In the context of the story you just told about the profound good that can be done, children being nourished, families being helped, if you were to get your aspiration realized that Congress would be proactive and positive in its treatment of human services policy and legislation going forward, how would you challenge your members to then take those things and move forward to really meet the challenge of improving service delivery and living up to the picture that you've painted so articulately?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think two things: to think holistically, how the various parts fit together to a system of care; and secondly, keep the clients first, keep the needs of the children in this country and the families who are struggling in this country. Unfortunately, I can walk out of this nice building in downtown Washington, D.C., and before I hit the next corner, I will be able to see the failures of our society, where people who have been left out and left behind, the homeless population, who aren't afforded, for whatever reasons, the opportunity to participate in the wealth of this great country. You know, we'll always have our work to do. So those are the things, the messages that I would give.

Mr. Morales: Jerry, it's hard not to be moved by your passion and dedication to public human services, so I'm curious, what advice could you give to someone out there who perhaps is thinking about starting a career in public service and perhaps in particular interested in working in the area of public human services?

Mr. Friedman: Well, I think that the best experience really is hands-on. I always encourage people to volunteer, to spend time in public facilities, nursing homes, to talk to people who have needs to see where their strengths and where they can contribute. I think that that's the greatest thing is through the exposure. You know, we appreciate all of the courses in social work and public policy that happen, but I think it's that hands-on experience, that personal passion that somebody can have, and the exhilaration of actually seeing somebody who has improved the quality of their lives because you've been there, because you've been working with them, because you've tutored somebody who was illiterate and now they're job-ready. I mean, I just can't tell you. It's like maybe the equivalent, the public human services equivalent, of hitting a grand-slam home run in a World Series.

One of the greatest things that I get to do sometimes is to go to graduation classes of public welfare agencies, where they've taken people who had not been job-ready and they're out and they're ready to join the workforce or perhaps they're already working, to see the transformation in their lives. They have a client come back to them and say thank you, you made a difference.

Just one quick story. When I was a probation officer, I had a huge caseload. I didn't always I mean, you had to kind of triage. And years after I had left this job, I received a call one night at my house and it was from a man and I could tell he was obviously very emotional. And he asked if I was the probation officer that had his case, you know, 5, 10 years earlier. And I had to really search my memory banks, and indeed, it was and I did remember that. And what he wanted to tell me was that he was in the hospital, his wife had just given birth to his first child, a son, and that he wanted me to know I was the second call that he made -- the first was to his parents -- that he would not have had that thrilling opportunity to be a parent had I not intervened in his life in an early stage when he was struggling with substance abuse. Now, I barely remembered the case and I didn't do great casework. I gave him a choice: you're going to rehab or you go to jail, you know. But obviously it made an impact on this person. I hadn't thought of that case in years, but to get that phone call is something that just stayed with me for the rest of my life.

We don't always know that we make a difference. And so that's what I would tell people, that if they want a career where they can have those kind of rewards and benefits, then human services is a place that they ought to look.

Mr. Morales: That's absolutely wonderful. Jerry, unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule. But more importantly, Nicole and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service across the many years and roles that you've had in the area of public human services.

Mr. Friedman: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. If people want to find more about the American Public Human Services Association I urge them to take a look at our website. It has up-to-date information on all of the legislative proposals that are happening in Congress. It's a wealth of information, and it's at www.aphsa.org.

Mr. Morales: Great, thank you. This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Jerry Friedman, executive director of the American Public Human Services Association.

My co-host has been Nicole Gardner, vice president and partner in IBM's public sector social services practice.

As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who can't hear this morning's show on how we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales. Thank you for listening.

Announcer: This has been The Business of Government Hour. Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation.

Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org.

Originally Broadcast Saturday, February 10, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created 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 on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Good morning. I'm Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government. Our special guest this morning is Nancy Kichak, Associate Director, Strategic Human Resource Policy, at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Good morning, Nancy.

Ms. Kichak: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation is Ed Vitalos, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Good morning, Ed.

Mr. Vitalos: Good morning, Al. Good morning, Nancy.

Ms. Kichak: Thank you.

Mr. Morales: Nancy, perhaps you can start by giving our listeners a general overview of the history and mission of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Ms. Kichak: Well, the Office of Personnel Management is very proud of its history. We're the successor agency to the Civil Service Commission. The Civil Service Commission was created in 1883 to end the corrupt spoils system, and to establish a merit-based civil service.

The assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a disgruntled jobseeker proved to be a crucial catalyst for civil service reform. One of the first commissioners of the Civil Service Commission, once it was established, was Theodore Roosevelt. He served for six years. If you come to the OPM Building at 19th and E Street, you will see a display of a desk and a typewriter and other things used by the commissioners of the Civil Service Commission during his era. So we call our building the Theodore Roosevelt Building, and we are very proud of our association with President Theodore Roosevelt.

In the late 1970s, there was a renewed impetus for the 20th Century approach to civil service reform, leading to the Civil Service Reform Act. At that time, Congress approved Jimmy Carter's reorganization plan. The plan abolished the Civil Service Commission and divided the functions into two agencies: OPM and the Merit Systems Protection Board. OPM continues to serve in that capacity. Its mission is to ensure that the federal government has an effective civilian workforce.

We accomplish our mission by providing human capital advice and leadership to the President and federal agencies, deliver human resource policies, products, and services, and ensure compliance with merit system principles.

Mr. Morales: Nancy, can you give us a sense of how OPM is organized, and give us a sense of the size of the budget, the number of full-time employees, and a sense of the geographic footprint and the interaction with other federal agencies on the matters associated with the federal workforce?

Ms. Kichak: Okay. OPM has seven major divisions: the Strategic Human Resource Policy Division -- we call ourselves SHRP, and that's the division I head. The Human Capital Leadership and Merit System Accountability Division -- a long name there. We call that HCLMSA. The Human Resources Products and Services Division, the Federal Investigative Services Division, and the Management Services Division, the Chief Financial Officer, and the Human Resource Line of Business.

Like every other agency, we also have a general counsel, congressional relations, communications. SHRP, again the organization that I head, leads the design, development, and implementation of merit-based human resource policies. We provide direction on workforce planning, employment, pay, benefits, performance management, training policy, work-life programs, labor relations; anything in the HR arsenal. We also have government-wide information systems that we provide direction to.

The Human Capital Leadership and Merit Systems Accountability Division leads the government-wide effort to transform human capital management so that agencies are held accountable for managing their workforce effectively, efficiently, and in accordance with merit systems principles. This division works closely with federal agencies, providing services, technical assistance, and current information across the range of human resource programs area.

Mr. Vitalos: Nancy, now that you have given us a good overview of what OPM does, could you just focus a little more on your own organization in terms of its size, budget, number of people that you have?

Ms. Kichak: Okay. I have a very small organization within OPM. I only have about 175 people working for me, but 175 people can do a lot of work. Okay? We have the Center for Talent and Capacity, and those are the folks that develop policies for hiring. We've done such things lately as category rating that help agencies when they hire folks group the candidates into categories so that you don't have to pick the top three anymore, you pick from the top category.

We have the Center for Workforce Relations and Accountability Policy folks. Those are the guys that work on our labor relations policy. And they've been very busy lately with the potential pandemic -- talking about what rights managers have to direct people to work at home or direct people to work at alternative work sites. I have a policy division that works on HR systems requirements, and they tell other agencies how to maintain the official personnel record, what format it should be in, what data it should have.

They've been very busy in the last year building requirements so that when we use other providers of HR services, they know exactly what requirements a provider must meet in order to sell their services to the federal government. I have a Leadership Policy division. I have a Pay and Leave Policy division. Those are the ones that give the instructions on leave under all sorts of circumstances, including when the government closes for snow, or when -- just very recently, the death of President Ford, we honored him with a day of mourning.

We have a division that works on performance management. You know, we've always done performance management in the federal government. But with new pay-for-performance systems, it's becoming more and more important that performance management be done well. I have a policy division that works on the policies for the Federal Employees Health Benefit program, and the retirement systems, and other work/life programs, telework, and things like that.

And then I have my data folks, and that's where my actuaries are. They negotiate the health insurance rates, and they report government-wide how many people are employed, what occupation they're in. So it's 175 people that do a lot of work.

Mr. Vitalos: Quite a bit. Now that you have given us a good overview of OPM and then the Human Resources Policy division, can you tell us a little bit about your career. Where did you start, and how did that path lead you to OPM?

Ms. Kichak: I started with NASA. I'm one of those folks who took a civil service exam, and based on the score, I was offered a job as a contract negotiator with NASA. And I spent a year there, and it was an exciting place to work. But I had wanted be an actuary. So after that year was up, I resigned my job at NASA and was going to work for a private company. And a person in the NASA organization who knew of my work came to me, and said, you know, the government needs actuaries, too, and my next-door neighbor and I talk about this when I mow the grass. And they are looking for actuaries at the Civil Service Commission. Would you be interested?

And of course, I already had a year in the government and I liked government service. So I went to the Civil Service Commission 35 years ago, and started studying to be an actuary. So I was the chief actuary at OPM until OPM reorganized and created the policy division about four years ago, and I was working there in charge of the entire data, not just the actuaries. And the head of policy became available, and I got the job, and I'm glad I did.

Mr. Morales: Nancy, I am curious. You've had a fantastic career with the government, but I always like to ask my guests -- how was your previous experience, these 35 years, prepared you for your current leadership role and shaped your approach to management and your leadership style?

Ms. Kichak: I think the fact that my main career prior to entering the policy field was in the actuarial field; a very highly financial-based, analytical-based profession, it helped me a lot. First of all, one of the things that we are dealing with at OPM, and I think throughout the government right now, is a very constrained financial situation. So I am able, as a leader, to focus more on budget than maybe previous managers.

The other thing is that coming out of the -- really the benefits area, as an actuary, I am bringing a fresh approach to the HR system. In other words, I know how government works because I've been there a long time. But when I look at HR policies and practices, it's new to me. So I have a different perspective than the folks who work for me who have a ton of experience. So new perspective from me, and good knowledge from them. I think it's a very good situation.

Mr. Morales: What are the federal government's strategic human capital priorities? We will ask Nancy Kichak, Associate Director of Strategic Human Resource Policy at the Office of Personnel Management to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Nancy Kichak, Associate Director of Strategic Human Resource Policy at OPM.

Also joining us in our conversation is Ed Vitalos, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Nancy, your organization is responsible for the Federal Human Capital Survey. Could you tell us a little bit about how you use this survey, and discuss other ways you collect information to help improve the management of human capital?

Ms. Kichak: Yes. We surveyed in 2006 over 400,000 people. So we get a lot of information from the Federal Human Capital Survey. And we look at the results from it in four ways: we look at what it tells us about leadership; what it tells us about results-oriented performance; what it tells us about how we're managing our federal workforce; and we find out how much employees are satisfied with certain aspects of their job. We take that information and we give it to agencies, because agencies are the real site of transformation in -- of human capital.

And the agencies take those results and look at where they've done well and where they haven't done so well. We show them the comparison of their results to the government-wide average. We show them the things that they did best in and the things they did the worst in. And we show them where they've improved the most and where they've declined the most, so they get a wealth of information in these areas. And then they develop an action plan and go out and work with their employees to try to improve areas that they've identified that need improvement.

We're concerned at OPM about over-surveying, but it's always good to have information. So we do surveys on benefits alone to find out how employees like their benefits. We're doing surveys on child care subsidies to see if those are meeting the need that they were designed to meet. We do telework surveys to see if folks like their telework benefits, and if they're using their telework benefits. So those are the kinds of things we ask questions of the employees about.

Mr. Morales: Now, the Senior Executive Service performance-based pay system, which has been in effect since 2004 I believe falls under your purview. How does the SES certification process work? And can you discuss the connection between this effort and other pay-for-performance initiatives going on in the federal sector?

Ms. Kichak: I'm going to start with the connection for this pay-for-performance efforts and other efforts. This one is just something that's leading the way. It applies to all SES-ers. As you know, Senior Executive Service folks are the leaders in the federal government, and it's good to start with your leaders, because if it's good for them, then it's good for the employees. We at OPM set criteria that agencies must meet for their senior executive corps in order to be certified. They submit to us what their SES plan looks like, and show us how they've met the criteria.

Part of the criteria is that their performance plans for their senior execs must be aligned with the mission of the agency. You want your folks to be doing work that in some way supports what you're trying to accomplish. So we look at the performance standards, see if they've met the criteria, and if they have, we certify the system. If the system is certified, then the agency has authorization to pay senior executives in that agency above executive level III. So Senior Executive Service pay is capped at $154,600 if you're in a non-certified system, and $168,000 if you're in a certified system.

So you can see the incentive to get certified is very high, and almost all agencies are applying for certification. There are some agencies that only have maybe one or two execs and it's not worth their while to do so. We're hoping that this system will demonstrate that pay-for-performance is a good idea. We believe in pay-for-performance. And we've worked on legislative proposals in the past to get pay-for-performance government-wide, but frankly, right now, the Congress doesn't have much of an appetite for that.

We do have the NSPS -- National Security Personnel System. The DoD has. And they have legislation that allows them to do pay-for-performance. And they're implementing that, and it is also a very successful program. It's in phase two of implementation. Not everybody who's eligible has yet been converted. The system has had some court challenges, so it's not available to everyone. Right now if you're covered by a bargaining unit, you're not going to be covered yet under the NSPS system. So pay-for-performance is something that we think is a good idea.

We think the SES system will demonstrate that, and we'd like to get more history with that that shows its success. And there are other systems in the government that are doing pay-for-performance, but it's certainly not universal at this point.

Mr. Vitalos: Nancy, another new program at OPM is the Career Patterns recruiting strategy. Could you elaborate on Career Patterns in terms of how it differs from traditional recruiting, as well as how things like career pattern scenarios play into that framework?

Ms. Kichak: Career Patterns is one of our efforts to deal with the impending retirement wave for federal employees. We feel that we have to be more strategic in recruiting and retaining people for federal jobs, because just by the demographics of our population, we're poised to lose some very, very good people. And there's always strong competition for good folks. So Career Patterns is a way to identify different forms of employment, different things that will appeal to folks, and to make the agencies -- again the folks that are on the ground recruiting, aware of some of the ways they can structure jobs so they can appeal to a certain segment of the population.

For example, in Career Patterns, we are asking the agencies, do you want to hire a student? Is this job appropriate for a person just starting out, or a new professional, or mid-career, somebody at the end? Think about that. That way, you can target your recruitment to the folks that will best fit their job. We're also asking them to identify whether it's a job with high mobility or low mobility, and we're asking them to look at some of the flexibilities you have in the workplace. What about telework or work from home? What about part-time employment? What about alternative work schedules?

And if those are available, then use them as a recruiting tool and help you get the right person in to do the right jobs. That's the initiative we call Career Patterns. And we think it's appealing to a new workforce. We want to appeal to everybody. We want to appeal to the folks that are willing to do a 9:00 to 5:00 job, folks that want to move, folks that want to stay in place, folks that want to work in the office, and folks that want to work at home. And so we're just trying to make sure that all the flexibilities are on the table when we do our recruiting.

Mr. Vitalos: Very interesting. I recently heard the term called "career sculpting" in the private sector, and it sounds very similar.

One of the other major challenges that is facing all employers is rising health care costs. OPM has announced the premium rates for 2007 Federal Health Benefits Program. And the premium includes only a 1.8 percent rate hike, and that's the lowest since 1997. Can you give us some insight as to how this apparently low premium average increase was accomplished?

Ms. Kichak: Okay. Now, first of all, I am an actuary, so this is definitely my field. So you have to be careful that I don't get wound up and go on this topic for hours and hours. But we're profiting from some very, very good experience in the drug area. I think that frankly, the new Medicare drug program is doing a lot to educate people on the use of generics. We're finding more generics, more drug substitutions. So the trends that we estimated at the time that we set the 2006 rates didn't turn out to be real.

In other words, we overestimated the amount of money that was needed in 2006. So when we did our negotiations this past summer, we knew that we had reserves we could use to defray rate increases, and we used those reserves. This 1.8 percent increase follows a couple of years of much lower-than-average trends in the past. And I think the worst of the drug costs are behind us. That's been driving our costs for a very long time.

Mr. Morales: There's also been much talk about introducing consumer-driven health plans as a choice to the employees. Can you tell us about these plans, and give us a status on offering these plans to federal employees?

Ms. Kichak: Yes. We have two types of consumer-driven health plans in the FEHB -- the Federal Employees Health Benefits program. One kind is called the High Deductible Health Plan, where a health savings account is set up for you. That becomes your health savings account. If you don't use it for health care, it rolls over from year to year. Those plans are accompanied with a high deductible. High deductibles generally run around $800.

The idea is that you have $800 you have to pay out of pocket, and you have an account that is yours. And you have to decide whether you're going to spend that money in your account for health care or whether you're going to forgo certain services. Now, we don't want people not -- in order to save money, skipping things they need. So the deductible doesn't apply to certain well-care -- physicals and things like that. But before you take elective services, you have to decide if you're going to spend that money in your account.

The other kind of account has a health reimbursement account. And the only difference with those accounts is that although the account is set up on your behalf, if you ever dis-enroll, the money goes back to the program, not to you. The reason we have those is that they're a little cheaper since you don't get actual cash that you can carry with you the rest of your life if you don't use it, and because certain people that have Medicare coverage, et cetera, cannot have health savings accounts but they can be in plans that have health reimbursement accounts.

These plans are slow getting started. And we have over 4 million enrollees in the FEHB. Only about 25,000 of them are in these consumer-driven plans. But everything new starts out slow. So we have more plans every year since we started the program, and we think they're going to grow.

Mr. Morales: Interesting, interesting. Now, you've also implemented a new dental and vision insurance program for 2007. Can you describe how these programs work?

Ms. Kichak: Yes. We're really proud of our dental-vision. It became effective, required by the law, on December 31, 2006. And the first enrolments for the first open season are over 700,000. So it shows that employees and retirees really wanted dental-vision. The thing that makes it different than the regular FEHB is that the government does not make a contribution. This is 100 percent employee money paying the premiums. However, employees have the advantage that the premiums are paid pre-tax. So there is a tax advantage to them.

Our retirees do not have that same right under the tax code. We selected through a competitive process seven dental plans and three vision plans. Most of the dental plans are government-wide. We do have two of them that are local plans -- HMOs: GHI in New York, and Comp Benefits that is in the Mid-Atlantic region down through Florida. But otherwise, the plans that participate are nationwide. We ask -- and the plans agree, because there was a requirement, that there be no waiting periods. And the reason there are no waiting periods for services is we thought that would lock people in.

The hallmark of the benefit plans, the FEHB plans that we run -- and now these dental-vision plans -- are that every year there's an open season and people have choice. So there's no waiting, so that you can move freely, except for orthodonture. And that one is so expensive that we wanted to -- you know, the industry standard is that people stay in the area. The premium structure is a little different than for the FEHB. In the FEHB, we have a self-enrollment and a family enrollment. In dental-vision, we have a self, a self plus one, and a family. But it's been real popular. It's been more popular than we ever expected. And we're going to start to pay benefits and see how that goes.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic. That's very fantastic.

How is the federal government managing an aging workforce? We will ask Nancy Kichak, Associate Director of Strategic Human Resources Policy at the Office of Personnel Management to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business Of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Nancy Kichak, Associate Director of Strategic Human Resource Policy at OPM.

Also joining us in our conversation is Ed Vitalos, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Nancy, OPM leadership has been on record publicly on the challenge of the federal aging workforce. And we've talked a little bit about this in our earlier segment. Specifically, can you give us your perspective on this trend and its significance in the coming years?

Ms. Kichak: I think the federal government is like any other employer. We have a large group of people employed from the Baby Boom generation. It mirrors the demographics of the nation. And those Baby Boomers are getting ready to retire. We have -- as you just said, we've been on record of being concerned about this -- our director has talked about the retirement tsunami, and we've been working on preparing. We really have been able to cope with it in a lot of ways. Number one, it's happening gradually. I mean, we're definitely going to peak in retirements, we believe, between 2008 and 2010.

But it gets bigger every year. I mean, 2005 was bigger than 2004. So we've had some time to get ready for this. It's not like a cliff, it's a coming event. We have been working at this problem from two different angles. One, is there any way to retain the people that we have a little bit longer? And number two, how do we get new people in the door? So we're attacking it from both ends. We have some tools for retaining folks. We have retention bonuses that we can use. We can on very, very special occasions grant what's called dual comp waivers, which is a provision where if a person retires, they can come back to work under very limited circumstances and we will continue to pay their pension.

The law only provides for limited circumstances. So one of the things that we're working on right now within the administration is a proposal to be able to bring back retirees on a part-time basis and let them keep their pension. That will have to be legislated; it will have to get approval of the administration. It will have to go through the agency process. But we're very excited. We think that will help.

For those people who are at the end of their career and they don't want to work full-time anymore but they're not quite ready to completely hang it up, we think that's a good solution. On the other hand, as far as bringing in new people, we have a national ad campaign going that is making folks aware of federal jobs. We are targeting areas where there is higher unemployment, to try to get more applications into the federal government, and we're finding that that is a successful program.

Mr. Morales: Now, I understand -- and this may be related to the programs you discussed -- that OPM is interested in re-employing retired federal employees. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this?

Ms. Kichak: Right. Right now -- again, the laws are very restrictive. The law that we operate under lays out very specific criteria on when folks can come back and receive both their pension and employment. And we don't think that provides us enough flexibility, which is why we're working on the legislative proposal that I talked about sooner.

This is something that employees want. We hear about it all the time. The other problem we have is all of our programs are defined by law. Right now, there's an anomaly in the civil service retirement system pension law that if you go part-time at the end of your career, your entire pension is based on that part-time service -- under certain circumstances. So it is a disincentive for people to go part-time.

So we would like to have a way for people who want to retire to ease into retirement. We also want to retain people that aren't ready to retire.

Mr. Vitalos: We understand OPM has been very involved in getting federal agencies ready for a potential pandemic influenza. Can you tell us what you've been doing and is this something that agencies really need to be worried about?

Ms. Kichak: Number one, we're very proud of our work on the pandemic, because we have identified new flexibilities that will be able to keep the government running if we need to close government offices for an extended period of time. This is definitely something agencies need to be prepared for. And this is something that has been identified as a potential problem. Obviously, everybody hopes it doesn't happen --.and it would be quite frightening if it does.

But we've been warned, and we need to prepare. And OPM has prepared many guides, many fact sheets on policies and many ways for agencies to get ready. If you go on to our website, you'll see checklists that agencies should follow about getting their telework policies in place, reviewing their leave policies, talking to their employees about how they should deploy if there is a pandemic. The thing about a pandemic is, as we understand it -- and fortunately, we haven't had real-life experience with it in my career time -- it doesn't hit in the same way a hurricane does. You know, instantly. And so you can prepare for it. We have developed a policy on telling people to work at home and we will give them evacuation pay. In other words, evacuate the worksite.

What this does is it enables you to have the person work at home without having pre-established a telework office in the home. It allows folks that maybe do not have all the technology at home that you would normally require, to work at home using paper, pencil, and perform certain tasks. We want agencies -- and the President is requiring agencies to lay out a pandemic plan and show that they are ready. And our guides will help assure that you're ready from a human capital perspective. Have you done everything you can to get your employees ready?

OPM also has a guide for employees, a handbook that we're hoping agencies will give every employee -- we certainly are at OPM -- that tells employees what their responsibilities are under these circumstances. The point is to be able to keep the government running for extended periods of time when you can't go to the worksite because you may become infected at the worksite.

Mr. Morales: That brings up another topic that's come up in the last two areas we've been probing, and that's the area of telework. The government has had a telework program in place for a number of years. And OPM and agencies like GSA have given a lot of great guidance and resources to implementing those programs. But there still seems to be more opportunities driven by things like pandemic and potentially aging workers who want to stay off the Beltway a little bit. Can you give us your perspective on what potential there still is there, and do you see any barriers? Have the unions brought up any issues associated with telework, and where do you think it's going to go over the next few years?

Ms. Kichak: Telework is one of the hardest things we deal with. In getting ready for the pandemic, we issued a new telework guide, and the new telework guide this time addresses both management concerns and employee concerns. I think that telework is going to become more and more important in the federal government. It's a way to keep people off the Beltway, like you said. It's a way to send people home and have them work in a safe environment if there is an illness situation. It's also a management concern, because there are additional requirements that a manager must meet to make telework effective.

As we put in our guide, you must exercise a written telework agreement, so there is a clear understanding how your communication with the employee will occur. In other words, telework is working. And I think by and large, most employees know it. But the manager needs to know how they will get in touch with that employee. Will we work through telephone; will we work through e-mail, what hours will you be available? Are you -- in these days of flex-time, it's hard to call an employee at home at 7:00 in the morning. They might have been working a 9:30 to 6:00 schedule. So you don't want to call him at home at 7:00.

So our telework guide lays out that you have to plan these things, work these things out with the employees, set those times out so that you can do communication. But I think once that happens, once the employee and the manager have reached an agreement, there are just a wealth of opportunities available here. It's a career pattern thing.

I personally have been able to attract some very good people to my organization that work from home, and it's been a very productive relationship. In the administration of the Federal Human Capital Survey, 400,000 surveys were mailed out from San Diego. I have a person who is able to use the OPM website at the off-hours. Because he's in California, it's convenient for him and it's terrific for me. So telework has a lot of potential. There's definitely more that can be done, but there is a lot to be learned about how to make it effective. And we hope that the recent guidance we provided will lay that out.

The unions obviously are very supportive. They want this for every employee. And there are definitely certain occupations for which it doesn't work. As I always say, your doctor can't be teleworking when you have an emergency. So it's a good program, and we just have to work harder to make it effective.

Mr. Morales: Could you tell us a bit about OPM's recent initiative to formally collect and analyze data on the training federal agencies receive for their employees -- or offer their employees -- I'm sorry.

Ms. Kichak: Yeah. We just issued new requirements for agencies to report to us training data. That training data is going to go into a new data system we're building that's called the EHRI. And it's a data system with a lot of new capabilities, and so we're putting a lot of new data into it. We've asked the agencies to report employee by employee what training folks have had, whether it's management training or not, and how much it has cost, so that we can be more responsive to requests for what the government is investing in training. The bad news is that it will be a while before that data is available. First, the agencies have to build it and then we have to analyze it. And because those requirements are new, and agencies didn't have their systems built to transmit it, it will be at least until the end of next year before we start to receive it from most agencies.

Mr. Morales: How is OPM planning for the federal government's future staffing needs?

We will ask Nancy Kichak, Associate Director of Strategic Human Resource Policy at the Office of Personnel Management, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business Of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business Of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning conversation is with Nancy Kichak, Associate Director of Strategic Human Resource Policy at OPM.

Also joining us in our conversation is Ed Vitalos, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Nancy, there have been many initiatives within the federal government, such as the establishment of the Lines of Business and shared services, which are changing the way government does business. Does this move to the LOBs and shared services have any ameliorating effects on the aging workforce issue?

Ms. Kichak: The HR Line of Business initiative helps us to do more services electronically, so that as more people retire, we don't have to replace as many. So in that respect, it helps us deal with this current retirement wave. The HR Line of Business is a new initiative where the federal government's many agencies identify a small number of agencies that specialize in services and use them so they don't have to repeat the purchase of software, certain services.

The one where we are very successful and is in full swing is e-payroll. We reduced the number of payroll offices in the federal government to a certain number, and then other federal agencies select that number. We are also starting that initiative for shared service, of shared services for HR offices. We have selected five shared service offices for HR. We are in the process of bidding out for private sector companies to also become on that list of potential shared service centers, and agencies are considering what the best way is for them to purchase their HR services.

Mr. Morales: Now, a couple of years ago, OPM launched the Information Technology Exchange Program, or ITEP, which enables government and the private sector to share best practices, and in fact, potentially employees, to enable both sides to gain a better understanding of each others' needs. Would you elaborate on this program and its success to date, and are there any plans to continue the program beyond its already established sunset?

Ms. Kichak: What we had really hoped that would happen when this program was set up by legislation was that there would be an exchange of IT employees between the private sector and the federal sector. To date, we've worked very hard to try and make that happen, but we haven't had any success. In other words, we have not sent any federal employees into the private sector, nor have any private sector employees come on an exchange program into the federal sector.

We haven't given up on this yet. In fact, we're very close, we think, to having our first success. We've been hampered by the fact that IT services are so hard to find, and those are such treasured employees that whoever has them wants to hold on to them. There are also some ethics issues: if a private sector company sends one of its employees to the federal government, does that prohibit them then from bidding on work? Does that prevent or create an unfair advantage? So we are still working with this program. We're still hopeful that we will have a vigorous exchange of employees. But you are right, the program does sunset on December 17, 2007.

We will recommend that it will be extended, because we think we're close to start getting some exchanges, but we're not there yet, so wish us luck on this one. We want this one to work out.

Mr. Morales: Absolutely.

Mr. Vitalos: We sure do. And while we're on the topic of technologies, from your perspective in the human resource field, can you cite the emerging technologies that you feel will have the greatest benefit to managing federal human resources?

Ms. Kichak: Well, I think one of the things that we're proud of is USAJOBS, a central place where you can go and find out about any single job that is available in the federal government, in the Executive Branch. That, number one, makes it easier for prospective jobseekers to know where to go. Now, we're working to improve that technology, because -- just because you find the job on USAJOBS doesn't mean that the resume that you filled out will necessarily be accepted by every single agency that has posted their jobs.

So that's one area where we still think we've got room for improvement. USAJOBS is encouraging more and more people to apply, because they can do it electronically. That means more applications come in, and that means that we have to evaluate them electronically. There are systems available that the personnel offices are using to rate these applications. They are continually changing. We think the shared service concept is going to reduce the number of technologies that will be purchased, and by reducing the number of technologies that will be purchased, you can improve them. If you are only going to have five products, then they can be five really top-notch products.

So that's what the Shared Service Centers, the HR Shared Service Centers that we talked about earlier, will do. It will reduce the need for every single agency to keep buying and modernizing and adjusting to changing issues, and it will allow a select number to specialize in that and become expert in it. So we think the Shared Service Centers pose a lot of potential for improving HR.

Mr. Morales: Beyond the pressing concerns that we discussed around the retirement wave, would you elaborate on other critical human capital issues and challenges facing the federal government within the next five to ten years? And Nancy, what advice might you give the next administration in facing these challenges?

Ms. Kichak: Well, I think the challenges that we face are getting the right person in the right job, and frankly, that's not really a new challenge. There's nothing surprising about that. But the federal sector jobs are very complex, they're very important, and it's important to get the right talent to do those jobs. I think the federal government needs to be flexible, and the federal government is controlled by some rules and regulations, so being flexible is a big challenge to us, but I think we're doing well on it. As we've discussed earlier, telework is a good example. Being ready for the pandemic is a good example, and we're doing that.

I think that we need to drive towards results, and in order to drive towards results, you need good performance management systems. We're working on that. We're educating HR professionals on performance management systems, holding seminars, providing more guidance, and I think that will help us drive towards results. We need to focus more on training, and we've done some things -- of course what we discussed earlier is just collecting training data. But how do you train people? And I think our new technologies -- e-learning -- that presents us new opportunities, and I think the federal government would be remiss if we didn't try to take advantage of those. We need to leverage technology in support of human capital management.

So you asked me what advice I would give to the next administration. I think that that is a challenge, isn't it? I think I would ask them to -- in these times of budget constraints, allow us to continue to invest in technology. I think that's where we get the biggest bang for our buck.

And if you don't have enough resources to keep your technology current, you're forgoing a good opportunity to get a lot more out of the resources available to you. I would suggest that any administration, and I think administrations recognize the talent of federal employees, appreciate the federal employees; they are committed. That's one of the things that our federal human capital surveys always show, is that federal employees are committed to serving the public, and they are committed to their jobs.

So they have good ideas, and they want the best for the nation and for the people they serve. So listen to your employees, they are an asset. That's why we call them human resources, they are a great resource.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic. Nancy, on this same theme, it is very evident that you have a passion for public service, so I'm curious: what advice would you give to someone who is thinking about a career in public service?

Ms. Kichak: I would say if you want a career in public service, go for it. And you are going to get a lot out of it. Employees that work for the federal government by and large think the work they do is very important, and they think they're making a contribution. There are some things in -- when you work for the federal government, you do have to work within the rules and regulations of the federal government.

If you have a good government career, you can learn to do that. You know what the rules are, and you follow them. Benefits are great. Federal employees like their benefits, and they are good. So there are lots of reasons to work for the federal government. There are a lot of ways to contribute, and I think we need very good people in the federal government. There are very interesting jobs, and I certainly would recommend federal employment to anyone.

Mr. Morales: Great. Excellent. Thank you. Unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time. I do want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule today, but more importantly, Ed and I would like to thank you for your 35 years of dedicated service to our country.

Ms. Kichak: Thank you. If people would like more information about some of the things we talked about today, there's a lot of good information on our website, www.opm.gov.

Mr. Morales: This has been The Business Of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Nancy Kichak, Associate Director of Strategic Human Resource Policy at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who can't hear this morning's show on how we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business Of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales.

Thank you for listening.

This has been The Business of Government Hour.

Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs, and get a transcript of today's conversation.

Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org.

Originally Broadcast Saturday, October 21, 2006

Washington, D.C.

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 on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

The Business of Government Radio Hour features a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. Our special guest this morning is Lt. General Roger Brady, Deputy Chief of Staff, Manpower and Personnel, United States Air Force.

Good morning, General.

LTG Brady: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's Human Capital Practice.

Good morning, Bob.

Mr. Bleimeister: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: General, can you tell us about the mission of your office and how it supports the mission of the Department and the Air Force specifically?

LTG Brady: Well, as much as it might seem like a clich�, we like to say that our job is to make sure that we have the right airmen with the right skills in the right place at the right time. That's important for the Air Force; obviously for the individual as well. But we support Air Force commanders, and by extension also combatant commanders around the world, in the variety of missions that airpower is assigned.

Mr. Morales: General, can you give our listeners a sense of scope and scale, how big is the Air Force in terms of military personnel, Reserve civilians; how big is the manpower budget and how big is the overall personnel community?

LTG Brady: Well, it's rather large. When you add civilians and all the components that you talked about, active Guard and Reserve, about 700,000 people. About 350,000 of that is active, about 75,000 Reserves, 105,000 Guard and about 160,000 civilians. So it's a large enterprise of very talented people.

Mr. Bleimeister: General, could you focus a little on your role as Deputy Chief of Staff for Manpower and Personnel, and tell us more about your specific responsibilities?

LTG Brady: Yes, I'm responsible at the headquarters Air Force level. I guess you'd think of it as corporate headquarters in the civilian context for the Air Force's policy on education, training, development, benefits, compensation, also services; the services that we provide our people on bases for family support and recreation as well as manpower. We kind of handle a lot of the cultural issues of the Air Force, like we do uniforms and things of that nature, and currently, we're -- as you may have heard, we're working on a rather significant personnel reduction within the Air Force, which occupies a lot of our effort at the moment.

Mr. Bleimeister: You've had a pretty lengthy career. Could you give us some highlights of that, and perhaps what some of the most important things you did that may have prepared you for this role?

LTG Brady: Well, I think -- I'm not sure that anything prepares you for this role, actually, but I started out during the Vietnam era. I in fact went toVietnam as an intelligence officer, as a lieutenant, then later went to pilot training and flew in the mobility world for a number of years. Also, I was a training command instructor -- pilot training instructor for a long time. I've served in plans jobs, in acquisition and maintenance, personnel operations for many years. So I've seen a wide spectrum of the Air Force.

Mr. Morales: General, I'm curious, you mentioned earlier you have about 700,000 personnel in total in the Air Force community. About how many individuals are in your organization that service those 700,000 people?

LTG Brady: I have a little over 200 people here at Air Force headquarters, but then I have -- we also execute the assignment system for the Air Force, which is -- unlike most industries you would see, we move -- transfer about 160,000 of our people every year, and that execution process is accomplished by an organization in San Antonio that's another 2,500 people. That's our personnel center, and they're kind of the execution arm of Air Force personnel policy.

Mr. Morales: That's a large number. You surely don't see numbers like that in the private sector.

LTG Brady: That's rather large.

Mr. Morales: Great. You talked about some of your earlier experiences going back to the Vietnam War. How have these experiences, such as being a command pilot involved in a variety of major deployments, prepared you for your current role, responsible for Air Force manpower and personnel issues?

LTG Brady: Well, I think the most -- as I look back on my career, I don't think anybody planned back in the late '60s for me to be the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. But as it happens, I have a great background for doing this because I've seen so many parts of the Air Force. Obviously, being an aviator I think teaches you lots of intangibles about situational awareness and knowing what's critical and what's not and what decisions have to be made now and what decisions could be made later. But I think specifically for this job, I have pretty good familiarity with a lot of the different -- as we like to call them -- a lot of the different tribes in the Air Force, the different functional communities, and so they have a different kind of -- sometimes a thought process, cultures within the Air Force culture, and an awareness of those is very helpful in dealing with them in what can be very personal and sometimes emotional issues.

Mr. Morales: Well, I've got to expect with 700,000 people, it's probably several cultures within an organization of that size.

LTG Brady: Yes, there are -- there are.

Mr. Morales: Excellent.

How is the Air Force transforming, maintaining and shaping its force structure? We will ask Lt. General Roger Brady, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff, Manpower and Personnel, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Lt. General Roger Brady, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff, Manpower and Personnel.

Also joining us on our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's Human Capital Practice.

General, many pressing issues have required the United States Armed Forces to reassess and transform the way they operate to properly meet future challenges. Could you give us an overview of the Air Force's transformation strategy?

LTG Brady: Sure, I'd love to, but let me first spend just a moment telling you the environment that we are in that makes this transformation critical. We find ourselves in a situation, as you can well appreciate, fighting the Global War on Terrorism, which we refer to as The Long War. It's going to go on certainly for the rest of our careers, if not the rest of our lives, we anticipate.

So we have to win that war. We also have to be prepared for the next war, whatever that is. And so we find ourselves with a very high tempo operations tempo. We find ourselves with operating costs that are very high, and there is not much flex there because the tempo is so high, and we find ourselves flying very old equipment; the oldest equipment we have ever flown -- the most effective equipment in the world but old -- 23 years old on average -- we'll be over 30 years old, even if we get everything we are trying to buy in the next few years.

So we are way behind in our investment strategy, and people -- as any business will tell you, the cost is going out of sight, particularly health care. So where is our flex? We need to look at our portfolio of human capital and see what we can do there to be more effective, because we can't affect our operating tempo; we have to win. And if we don't want to fly 75-year-old airplanes, we've got to find a capability to recapitalize ourselves.

And so our flex is in people, and we also have to get -- people are our most important asset, and when I say that, you would ask, well, then why are you getting rid of them? I say because they are very valuable, but at the same time, they are very expensive. And the people we have have to be the most flexible, the most educated, the most appropriately trained, and we have to maintain the capability to sustain the benefit -- the benefits that our people have had over the years and have come to expect and deserve, including health care, et cetera.

So we cannot afford to have too many people. We got to have the right number. And so that brings us to the transformation that led to a reduction of some 40,000 full-time equivalents in our people over the next few years, which gets me to your question of strategy. What's the strategy for doing that? Well, again, warfighting is job one. If you do nothing else, you got to win the war. You can't get to be second place in our business. So we're focused on warfighting skills and those capabilities that deploy forward.

We then worked ourselves back from the deployed locations and said, okay, what does it take to sustain the institution, and as you go further back, what does it take to sustain garrison locations, and look at how efficient we are there. We do not want to take risk forward. We will manage risk in the rear, in CONUS, which drives us to seeing how efficient we can be in our organization and our processes, and the use of our very precious human capital resource to affect the future and to be as good and better than we have been in the past.

Mr. Morales: General, you alluded to these reductions in manpower, and I believe you alluded to the program name AFSO21, which stands for the Air Force Smart Operations 21. With all of these reductions and this change, what do you expect the impact to be on the corps airmen and women, especially those that remain?

LTG Brady: Well, I think that we're going to have -- as I said, we're going to have to use our people more efficiently, more effectively. Now, if we don't change the way we do things -- I mean, we can't just expect people to run faster. So we have to help our people learn to work smarter, and that's what AFSO21 is about. Air Force Smart Operations 21 is a combination of all those great management process improvement efforts that have been successful in industry and within the Air Force, such as lean initiatives and things of that nature, so that we can use the people that we have more effectively, help them work smarter and not harder to get the job done. And in many ways, we will broaden the capabilities of our people. We want to enhance their educations in every way that's appropriate, and I think we will make many of the jobs that our people have much more fulfilling. We will expect more of them, but we will prepare them to meet the challenge, and they will.

Mr. Bleimeister: General, given the reductions you've talked about, what actions are being taken to make sure that's the right number, and the shape of the force, once that reduction is taken, meets what you need to do for your strategy?

LTG Brady: Well, we have a -- as you know, we have a volunteer force, which is a huge challenge over time. It's the force we want. 100 percent of our people want to be with us, but they can also leave when their tour of duty is up, if they want to. So we have to be on top of taking care of our people, and we have to have some good analytics that tells us historically what our people are going to do -- you know, we always say it's easy to make personnel policy, but you don't always know how your people are going to respond to it in a voluntary environment.

So we have a very rich history, career field by career field, specialty by specialty of how a career field tends to behave over time, how it relates to market forces, et cetera, and obviously, this is -- I have to tell you, there is a lot of science involved, but it's frankly more art than science in my view. But we have a lot of people who have a lot of talent in this regard to determine, you know, what the force will look like, what it takes to maintain a certain force.

Some of our highly skilled technical people, for example, are the same people that are greatly valued in the outside world. So you find yourself having to perhaps recruit more of those kinds of people, because they tend to not retain as long because there are other attractive opportunities for them. So throughout your force, you have to look at all of those things to make sure that you have the right number of folks, and that you retain the right number of folks for the future to have your force structure look right.

Mr. Bleimeister: A lot of alternatives to work with, but you still have to meet mandated end strength targets each year. For our listeners, end strength refers to the limit set by Congress on the number of people the military can have on active duty.

General, how did you do on end strength in FY '06 as far as those targets went?

LTG Brady: Yes, at the end of fiscal year '06, which ends, of course, at the end of September, and we will -- we came in about 6,000 under, and that's good because we are going down. We're coming down at about 20,000 people in fiscal year '07, so being 6,000 ahead at this point is a good thing. So we would like to stay within one to two percent of our authorized end strength. Given that we are in a reduction mode, we are pretty happy with where we are at the moment.

Mr. Bleimeister: And will normal conditions get you to the '07 number, or are you going to have to implement other force-shaping actions? In the past, things like reduction boards have been held.

LTG Brady: Right. We will do some of that. We have greatly relaxed the requirements for people to get out in terms of -- we've expanded their opportunity to leave if they want to. We've relaxed some of the requirements to serve out commitments that they've made in the past. Career field by career field, as I implied earlier, you know how many people you need in each year group, because at the Air Force, unlike a civilian business, we can't go to another company and hire somebody of a certain grade, certain skill level and certain rank.

So all of our people are all homegrown, so we have to pay attention year group by year group to how big that force is. And so you know how many people you want to leave in each year group. We will provide some monetary incentives and some voluntary separation pay for some year groups, and for people who are already retirement-eligible; in other words, those people at 20 years and out, there will be a selective early retirement board. And again, we will allow some of those people to, who might not be eligible to retirement by virtue of a recent promotion, we've relaxed those rules as well. So we've tried to put together a portfolio, and with the help of the Congress, we are getting the authorities we need to shape our force by a combination of methods.

Mr. Morales: It sounds like there's many levers that you can actuate to meet those goals. I'm not going to ask you which is more complicated, doing that or flying an airplane, although I think many of our listeners may be interested in that answer.

In addition to maintaining and shaping the active duty force, we understand that you also spend a fair amount of time focusing on some of the specialties between the regular, the Air National Guard, the Reserve components as well the civilian components and the contractors, and this is usually described as the total force. Could you describe some of the total force initiatives being pursued to ensure that this balance such as Blue to Green and Palace Chase, among others?

LTG Brady: Right, yes. And I'm glad you mentioned the total force. We are extremely proud of all the components of our force. Our civilians are just absolutely top notch, and our Guard and Reserve are absolutely second to none. They are maintained -- we maintain them at exactly the same level of proficiency as the active force, and when we go forward there -- it's absolutely transparent as to who they are. You wouldn't be able to tell a Guardsman from an active duty from a Reservist.

So they are very critical to that. So we look at -- as you imply, we look at what size we needed those components to be. A lot of our young people that leave us from active duty will look for opportunities in the Guard and Reserve, and there are some opportunities for them to do that, because we need to keep them robust. We are also looking at opportunities for people who are perhaps in skill sets that are overmanned to stay with us as civilians, and there is some opportunity for people to do that and to stay in government service. So you're exactly right, we do pay attention to the size of each component and where those reductions are taken.

Mr. Morales: So it's really a very large portfolio management process in terms of managing the blends of all these characters of people?

LTG Brady: Yes, it is.

Mr. Morales: Excellent.

How is the Air Force personnel function specifically being transformed? We will ask Lt. General Roger Brady, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Manpower and Personnel, to explain this to us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Lt. General Roger Brady, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff, Manpower and Personnel.

Also joining us on our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's Human Capital Practice.

General, force shaping and reductions are only part of the equation. The Air Force is involved in numerous force development programs as well. What is its fundamental purpose of the force development initiative, and can you provide an overview of some of the initiative programs in place to enhance force development, such as the International Affairs Specialist Program.

LTG Brady: The fundamental purpose of force development is to deliberately connect education, training and experience with the goal to be, as I said from the very outset, producing the right number of airmen and with the right competencies at the right time. And recall what I said earlier about we can't hire somebody off the street, you know, mid-level in their career. So we grow our own. So the development part of the personnel business, the human resources business in the Air Force, is absolutely critical to us. And so through the force development initiatives, we want to deliberately develop a cadre' of airmen equipped to tackle our toughest challenges.

Now, before we instituted force development, frankly, it was more ad hoc. Members accrued the right sets of skills eventually, but most of the time the skills were required outside of a formal system, and perhaps sometimes even in spite of the formal system. So force development in its latest iteration, which began about 10 years ago actually, started with a realization that at some times at our most senior levels, our people were too stovepiped.

In other words, their background was too narrow, and so we had very senior people who were very deep in a particular part of the Air Force -- operations or maintenance or whatever -- and yet we needed them and their expertise in a broader set of skills. So the initial effort began with this realization, and the desire perhaps to develop along the way some second competencies for people. A primary competency perhaps and a secondary competency.

And that has become even more important as we find space operations becoming even more important, and now, of course, cyberspace operations. So we need a set of leaders and certainly mid-level people who understand the operational and the strategic level of war and can operate in the different media, the domains that we operate in airspace and cyberspace. So our efforts are along that, with that side picture.

Now, in terms of specific efforts, what we look at is, young airmen and young officers come into the force, and initially their focus is on technical competency and what you might call an occupational skill. But as they get further into the career, we need to broaden them so that they see more of the operation, so they understand how their particular specialty contributes to the overall joint effort within Air Force and with other services.

So when we do that then, we focus on education, we focus on training in schools in which you put all of these people together and they gain a renewed respect for the different talents that are in the Air Force, and they learn how to bring all the different talents of the Air Force to bring to bear combat capabilities that are required. And we have -- we send people to school. We spend a lot of money educating our people.

We send them to a school called Squadron Officer School, for example, at about the four-year point. Now, these are captains, essentially. We then have an intermediate school, when people have made major, and that's at about the 10-, 11-, 12-year point. We bring them -- and that's where they learn more about command and staff. In fact, we have a school called the Air Command and Staff College. Then they go usually and have their first command, squadron command, or go to a staff position. And they will come later to a senior development opportunity at our Air War College, et cetera, where they learn more about the operational art of war, and how you bring all the forces together.

These people are lieutenant colonels and colonels, and they've been in the Air Force around 20 years by this point. So we then continue even after people -- those people who go on and perhaps become general officers and senior leaders in our Air Force, we provide them educational opportunities within the Air Force and also in the civilian world so that we can be as broad as we need to be, at the same time be technically proficient.

Mr. Bleimeister: And how are you aligning these programs to support joint officer requirements as well?

LTG Brady: That's a very good question. As you may know, there was an act passed, I believe in 1986, the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which required -- which dictated joint service -- service in joint assignments with other services at certain times in your career, particularly for those individuals who were going to rise to general officer rank, to flag rank. And so there are times in your career -- that usually comes about the time, for most people, at the major, lieutenant colonel realm -- between, you know, 10 and 15 years, that's about the time that you would get into joint assignments.

And that's where you learn a great deal about not only your own mission, you bring to that effort the expertise of an airman, and so the services provide interdependent competencies that are unique to that service. And we feed the joint fight that way to be what we are, which is the best military in the world. So joint experience gives -- exposes our people to that environment where we see all the competencies of the services and the unique capabilities that they have to come together to perform a mission.

Mr. Morales: General, obviously you are making large investments in people, and whether you are in the public service or even in the private sector, you lose very talented people with critical skills at any given point in time. How do you go about correcting these potential skill imbalances, especially as a result of trying to drive towards a particular end strength requirement?

LTG Brady: Well, as I said earlier, first of all, we have some experience with what the retention rates you might say are -- how good we are at retaining different kinds of skill sets. Now occasionally, the economy will throw us a curve on that, but we have pretty good indications year-in, year-out on what people are going to do in the different skill sets. And quite frankly, we have some skill sets that are very difficult to retain because they have -- people have, with the skill sets, have lots of options. But we are able to deal with that now. As you get more senior, we are able to use people more broadly, so specific technical expertise becomes less -- relatively less important than managerial skills and leadership skills.

So as we get more senior, we can use people a lot more broadly, and we typically, just like industry would do -- you know, you might move a CEO from one company to another, where he really knows nothing about the business, but he understands business. It's the same in the Air Force; you can move many times a colonel or a general officer from one portion of the business to another, where he may not have a specific technical tactical expertise, but he or she understands the Air Force and how things fit together in the fight, and the leadership skills and certainly the talent of the people below you make you successful.

Mr. Bleimeister: General, I'd like to shift our discussion to the personnel function and the personnel organization. We understand there is a lot of transformation being worked with the organization itself called an initiative, Personnel Services Delivery. Could you tell us about PSD and what some of the goals are?

LTG Brady: Certainly. And this is perhaps one of the most challenging things that we've done, certainly in the personnel community, in a long time. To be quite candid, personnel services, or HR, as your audience might be more familiar with, in the Air Force has been and still is to a large degree very much a hands-on operation. If you want something done with your payroll, if you want something -- if you need to talk about benefits, if you want to talk about your next assignment, if you want to talk about another training opportunity, in the Air Force, you can go talk to a human being.

You can go talk to someone. And that's both good and bad, because in many cases, it means you leave your job, you get in your car, you drive across base, you find a person who knows something about what you want to talk about. It's very much hands-on. About 90 percent of our operations are hands-on. In the civilian world -- industry have kind of moved away from that model long ago.

So our challenge that we find ourselves in is how do we do that more efficiently without losing the personal touch and taking care of people? So we have really gone to school with looking at a lot of the civilian world and how HR has done, and so we are looking at how we use call centers, how we transform our processes so that we can reach back from overseas to get thing done. How people could go online and take care of a lot of the purely transactional things that have to do with personnel. If they need to change allotments in their pay, if they want to volunteer for an assignment, if they want to retire for that matter, they can now do that online.

They don't have to get in their car, drive across base, find a parking spot, et cetera, et cetera. So what this means is our personnelists, HR in civilian terms, our specialists in the human capital, are now going to be focusing less on transactional activities and more on being advisors to commanders as to how to train, develop, and take care of their people. So this means, quite frankly, that you are going to need fewer personnelists then we've had in the past, but I think it also means that it's going to be a richer job.

Something that is different in the Air Force that will not change, different from much of the civilian community, is again that cradle-to-grave business we have with our people. And so a large part of human resources in the Air Force is cradle-to-grave development of our people, and so a large part will be advising and being strategic advisors to commanders about how we take care of and mentor, evaluate, motivate, et cetera, our people. So I think it's an exciting possibility.

But it's changed, which means it's challenging, people view it with some suspicion sometimes, some fear, perhaps, a little uneasiness about something that is that significant -- because it's a very significant change in what personnelists have traditionally done in the Air Force. But our folks are starting to embrace it, and I think it's going to do great things for our people and for our Air Force.

Something that's very interesting about this is that the change is also generational. Those of us who are a little older in the force and were around before computers came -- as I like to say -- were used to having our hands held by personnelists. So it's a more difficult change for us to take care of ourselves online or in a call center. But the younger generation has never known anything but that, and so they are eager for it. So it's an interesting challenge, as you relate to the different generations in the Air Force, as to how we take on this issue.

Mr. Bleimeister: So it sounds like the personnel field isn't exempt from the reductions and force shaping initiatives that are going on?

LTG Brady: No. Absolutely not.

Mr. Bleimeister: And what about -- are there initiatives to better integrate from a total force perspective how you manage civilians, Reservists, even the contractor work force --

LTG Brady: Absolutely. In fact, we use our civilians and we use our Air National Guard and our Reserves interchangeably with active duty. And that means that you've go to be as consistent as you can in how you manage those people. So what we are looking at is, as part of our transformation, is when we transform a process, an end-to-end global process -- and because, as I said -- because we move about a third of our people every year, we have to have global processes, because if you move from here to Germany to Japan in your functional community, you need -- we don't want to have to retrain you every time you go there. So it's very important that we have global end-to-end processes.

And when we change a process, unless there is a legal or statutory or Secretary of Defense directive that requires that we treat a component differently, those processes need to be the same. So that's a change for us, but we will work through that. So unless there is a bona fide reason to do something differently in one component from another, we won't.

Mr. Morales: General, we've talked a lot about the focus on the core of the Air Force, and you talked about the 106,000 deployments that occur every year. With these ongoing deployment demands, I'm curious, how are you helping the airmen and their families maintain a total life balance? Are there any key initiatives focused on supporting the Air Force family?

LTG Brady: Now, that's great, that's a great question. It's long been understood in the U.S. military that you recruit the member but you retain the family. And regardless of how happy the military member may be, if the family is not, you're eventually going to lose that person. So families are absolutely critical to us, and unlike a military of generations before us, we are largely a married force. So we are principally a family organization.

So yes, we are. We have great programs in our airmen and family support centers that provide support to people when -- to their families, when they are gone. We have great programs where the individual is left behind, the spouse and family that's left behind, we stay in contact with them. They can always rely upon the service for support. We have sponsored programs that do that. We have capabilities to provide child care for people, to give spouses a break.

We have a very robust program when we reintegrate people back into a family after a deployment. Sometimes separations do interesting things to family relationships, and so if there are challenges or frictions, when that happens, we follow up with people and we do -- we stay in contact with people so that we can provide families whatever support they need, and so there just lots of effort that goes in to make sure that we take care of the entire family unit.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

How will innovative change shape the Air Force of the future? We will ask Lt. General Roger Brady, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff, Manpower and Personnel, to discuss this with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Lt. General Roger Brady, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff, Manpower and Personnel.

Also joining us on our conversation is Bob Bleimeister, partner in IBM's Human Capital Practice.

General, as you look over the next 10 years, what type of personnel concerns do you think the Air Force will face?

LTG Brady: Well, I think there are a couple of challenges as we go forward. We are becoming more and more a technical force. We always have been on the leading edge of technology. But as we go into space and cyberspace, and as we operate in those domains, as equipment becomes more technically oriented, we -- that requires a skill set of people, that requires us to have really good people and to continue to develop, educate, and train them and provide them with a wide variety of experiences. We also find ourselves operating around the world in coalition environments. We need to understand whoever the hostile force is, in a cultural sense.

We also need to understand our partners; our coalition partners, and we will inevitably go to war in the future with coalition partners, as we have -- as we are now and as we have in the recent past. So continuing to develop our people to operate effectively, both in terms of the interface with the technology that we have and the equipment that we have, and also with our coalition partners will be increasingly important to us. And we're placing great focus on that.

Mr. Morales: General, in our time, we haven't had a chance to discuss in too much detail the BRAC and QDR, but I am curious -- how is Personnel and Manpower involved in helping ensure seamless transition to some of the new structures and missions while preserving its unique vital capabilities?

LTG Brady: Well, that's a great question. And obviously, when you move people around and you have units move as we have had associated with the Base Realignment and Closure activity, you have missions that change, you have particularly -- Guard and Reserve, you'll have units change missions. So you've got a lot of people that you've got to train for the -- retrain for the new mission. So there are challenges there.

And as we -- as we draw down also, as I said earlier, we have a reduced manpower pool, but at the same time, we have a mission that's demanding as ever. So that means that we have to pay even more attention than we have in the past -- what we call our tooth-to-tail ratio. So you've got to look at your management structures, because management structure's our tail. And so we have to look and see to make sure that within our processes at every level of the organization, we don't have redundancy in the things that we do.

And as we like to say, we can't have checkers checking checkers. And so a lot of work that we're doing is to make sure that our process is aligned and then we cut out as much redundancy as we can, and we make our organizations as flat as we can.

Mr. Bleimeister: General, I would like to shift to another force of change; the National Security Personnel System, NSPS. Can you give us your -- that will impact the civilian workforce. Can you give us your understanding of NSPS and how you think it will impact the Air Force civilian workforce and your own organization?

LTG Brady: Yes, NSPS is critically important to us. Our civilians are absolutely vital to everything that we do, and we're using them more and more, in fact, right up to a general officer level, and in many cases we're using them interchangeably with general officers, which gives us great flexibility in our general officer corps.

But what NSPS does -- unlike the system that we now live under, NSPS will give us the flexibility to reassign people more easily. It will give us the capability to reward our best people. It greatly cuts down on the bureaucracy associated with skill levels and reclassification of jobs and things like that that make reassignment of people painful for everyone; for the individual, for the organization, et cetera.

I think it will be a great boon to our people. It allows us to move our people around more easily and identify our best people with greater precision, and give people the development that they need so that those civilians who want to serve at higher levels have the capability to get development to do that. So I think it's a wonderful initiative and we're trying very hard to implement it now, and it will pay us great dividends, both to the institution and the people.

Mr. Bleimeister: Organizations going through large scale change like you're going through often conflict with the current culture of the organization. How do you think the Air Force will adapt culturally over the next coming years as this change is implemented?

LTG Brady: Well, we like to believe that we're the most adaptive of all military folks, but you raise an important question. We are a large organization, and some would say a large bureaucracy, and that's true. However, we're an organization that is used to change. We have been, for example, operating in the deserts of Southwest Asia since August of 1990, constantly. So a lot of our people have seen the sandbox.

And when you do that, from the people who have come from the various parts of the Air Force and perhaps grow up in a particular functional area, all of that -- to even a greater degree than at home base, gets melded together, because you are focused on a absolutely critical mission, you live together, you eat together, you work together, and there is a great bonding of airmen in that experience. You gain an incredible appreciation for what the services people do, for what the personnelists do, for what the fighter pilots do, for what the aircraft maintainers do. And if you didn't have that appreciation before, you come away from that experience understanding that it takes all of us to make this work.

So I think we're looking forward to this challenge. And it is change, and because we're humans, we tend to resist change, and change is difficult, but at the same time, I think we've proven over many years that change is something that we can accomplish and we'll thrive in this environment.

Mr. Morales: General, your passion has given us a window into the exciting personnel transformation going on in the Air Force. What advice can you give to a person who is interested in a career in public service, especially in the military? And finally General, what do you say to a young enlisted Lieutenant Airman about the career opportunities and climate of the Air Force in the future?

LTG Brady: I think we would like to say that we have a rich heritage and we have an endless horizon. We're a force that operates in air and space and cyberspace. It is the ultimate high ground. There are incredible challenges. We ask our young people how can we do things better, and they tell us. There is great opportunity for people who want to serve a cause that's greater than themselves. And it is an exciting place to be.

And when you go forward and particularly -- you go to the most difficult, what might be the seemingly most difficult place to serve in our Air Force, you will find the highest morale among our people, because they know they're serving a cause that's greater than themselves. They have come to trust, rely on, and respect each other. It's a wonderful thing to see. It's a very rich life, it's a very demanding life.

I think that many Americans -- young Americans are going to continue to want to do this. We need very talented people who are willing to serve this country and be a part of something very important. And so I think there is great opportunity across a whole array of educational backgrounds and skill sets, men and women -- women have done an incredible job in our force. They represent about 20 percent of our force now, almost, and they're involved in virtually everything that we do and are succeeding marvelously. It's an absolutely -- a great team to be a part of and I'm excited every time my -- every day I come to work to be with great young people -- and they're looking younger and younger to me -- but to be with young people who want to succeed, who want the Air Force to succeed, and want to serve this nation, it's very gratifying.

Mr. Morales: General, that's fantastic. Unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule today, but more importantly, Bob and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country in the various roles you've held in the United States Air Force.

LTG Brady: Thank you very much. And again, thank you for having me here. I always relish the opportunity to talk about our Air Force and the great young men and women who make it such a great institution.

Mr. Morales: Thank you. This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Lt. General Roger Brady of the United States Air Force.

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 fascinating conversation.

Once again, that's businessofgovernment.org. As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad who can't hear this morning's show on how we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales. Thank you for listening.