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 September 6, 2008

Washington, DC

Announcer: 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 this 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.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury acts as a steward of the U.S. economic and financial system. As such, the Department must keep pace with technological advancements, including those in areas of electronic commerce and security. The continuing rise of electronic commerce requires more efficient and secure IT infrastructure that is flexible and allows a rapid response to a constantly changing environment.

With us this morning to discuss his efforts in this area is our very special guest, Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Good morning, Mike.

Mr. Duffy: Good morning, Al.

Mr. Morales: Also joining us in our studio is Jeff Smith, partner in IBM's federal civilian practice.

Good morning, Jeff.

Mr. Smith: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: Mike, I'd like to start by providing our listeners with some context around the Department. Could you give us an overview of Treasury's history and its mission today?

Mr. Duffy: Sure. First of all, I think Treasury may be the oldest department in the nation here. What I know for a fact is it was created in 1789. We needed a treasury in order to be able to pay the bills of our federal government. Today, Treasury is, as you mentioned, the steward of U.S. economic and financial development, and the financial systems that support that infrastructure.

We like to think of ourselves certainly as an influential participant in the global economy, and we're very proud of the role that we play in that. Some of the particular responsibilities that we have include promoting economic prosperity and ensuring financial security of the United States and the banking system. We're the ones who produce the currency and the coin that's used in our daily transactions.

And we're also the ones that manage all the electronic financial transactions. We have a role in supervising the national banks and thrift institutions. We do a bunch of tasks related to management of the federal government's finances, the internal financial operations, if you will. And then enforcing federal finance and tax laws -- I probably should add in we're also the ones that collect all the taxes, which no doubt endears us to the American public every April 15th.

Mr. Morales: Sure, sure. Well, Mike, that's obviously a very broad mission. So give us a sense of scale here. Can you tell us how Treasury's organized, perhaps a little bit about the size of the budget and the number of employees?

Mr. Duffy: The budget for Treasury is about $12 billion. That's the fiscal year 2008 enacted level. A large portion of that, of course, is for the Internal Revenue Service. And about a quarter of that total actually goes to operations, maintenance, and development of information technology systems. The Department is organized into 13 subunits, if you will, one of which is what we call Departmental Offices, which is headquarters, policy offices. My office falls within that framework as well.

And then we have 12 operational bureaus that carry out the various functions. Folks like the IRS, the Financial Management Service, the Bureau of Public Debt, and then the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. We have a wide variety of activities that fall within those 12 bureaus. Each of them really operates in some regards as a separate business, or a separate line of business.

Mr. Smith: Now that we've talked the larger departmental -- the Department of Treasury organization, can we talk a little bit more about your specific responsibilities as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer within the Department of Treasury?

Mr. Duffy: Sure.

Mr. Smith: Can you tell us about the area in your purview, how you're organized, the size of your staff, your budget?

Mr. Duffy: I actually wear two hats, and my dual titles kind of designate that. As the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems, I play a very operational role. My office runs the IT infrastructure that supports the departmental offices, the headquarters offices. We also operate several Treasury-wide enterprise systems, such as the wide-area network, some enterprise directory services, and those types of infrastructure or Treasury-wide services.

As the CIO, I have what in essence is a policy and oversight role, and I'd like to think a collaborative role working with the bureaus on their bureau-specific IT initiatives, but ensuring that they comply with all the applicable federal laws and policies -- that we're securing those systems responsibly, and that in essence we're managing the taxpayer dollar frugally.

Mr. Smith: Regarding your responsibilities, what are the top three challenges that you face, and how have you addressed these challenges?

Mr. Duffy: I would say right now that the top three challenges probably are this: corporate network security, the governance and capital planning processes that we have, and then one that's a little bit of a broad brush but is kind of my mantra at the moment, using IT as a facilitator of mission accomplishment. Basically, it means using IT to get the business done, not engaging in IT for the sake of playing with technology.

So as we look at those three areas, corporate network security, we're very focused on a couple of areas. One is refining policies. There's quite a bit of government-wide policy, and that's probably 80 percent of what we work with. But then as we look at the specific missions of Treasury, we need to refine those policies or embellish them to deal with the circumstances that we have to handle within Treasury.

Because we're so highly networked, not only with the rest of the federal government, but quite frankly with the better part of American industry, financial and otherwise, policy issues get somewhat interesting for us from time to time. We also are looking at a whole host of IT security tools, kind of moving from simple firewalls and access controls up to the next generation of security measures.

And of course again, given the high degree of network connectivity that we have, we find that to be necessary. And then I should add that we're actively engaged in pursuing all of the government-wide initiatives that have come out in the last several years. So the federal desktop core configuration, implementation of that on the desktop, the implementation of the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, which is the government-wide identity management initiative. And then more recently, the Trusted Internet Connections Program, that's going to help us establish a true, secure, sensitive but unclassified network across the government.

In the capital planning area, the basic deal there quite frankly is just engaging our executives, not just our IT executives, but our business executives, and we've done that through a couple of mechanisms -- probably the most prominent is reestablishing our executive investment review board, which is chaired by the Deputy Secretary. And then finally, on using IT as a facilitator, there, it's kind of taking that executive engagement and taking it down to the bureau level, making sure that we have good visibility into what are the real business problems that each of the bureaus are trying to address, and then trying to marry that up with the technological solutions that are out there in the marketplace.

Mr. Morales: I understand that you came to Treasury after some 15 years with the Department of Justice; is that correct?

Mr. Duffy: That's correct.

Mr. Morales: Could you tell us a little bit about your career path, how you got started, and what brought you over to Treasury?

Mr. Duffy: Just for a quick background, I earned a master's degree in public administration from the University of Massachusetts, and before that, I got a Bachelors of Arts degree from Bowdoin College, and my concentration there was government legal studies. Then I got accepted into the Presidential Management Intern Program back in 1987 and landed a job at Health and Human Services. So that's where I started my federal career.

I parlayed an initial career in financial management into IT primarily by working the financial management aspects of IT at the Department of Justice, starting in '92. From there, I got more and more engaged in IT project management. I had a couple of different jobs. While I was at Justice, I spent actually two years in one of our litigating divisions engaged in strategic planning that gave me a much better sense of the business, and quite frankly, also what it was like to be in a subunit as opposed to the Department. Ultimately, I held jobs in information security, telecommunications, and then most recently was a deputy CIO at the Department of Justice.

Mr. Morales: That's a relatively broad set of experiences across the government. So as you kind of reflect back on those, what lessons have you learned, and how has that sort of affected your management and leadership style today?

Mr. Duffy: You know, the lesson learned is the one that I call my mantra, and that is it's not about the IT, it's about the business. Everything that we try to do in the Office of the CIO at Treasury -- and I'd like to think that I did this when I was at Justice -- everything that we do, we try to do with an eye towards how is this helping the business perform its mission.

That can be difficult at some times when you are dealing with some of the more arcane compliance-type issues. When you start getting into the depths of the Federal Information Security Management Act and the particulars within that or the particulars of how do you do earn value management on a major application. But it's important for us always to take a step back and say, okay, what's the real end objective here. So that's probably the greatest lesson learned.

Mr. Morales: And move on. Great

What about Treasury's information technology strategy?

We will ask Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Treasury 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 Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Jeff Smith.

Mike, we obviously talk a lot about technology on this show, so could you tell us a bit about Treasury's IT strategy? Specifically, could you tell us about your efforts to align information technology to support the departmental and bureau business goals and their strategic priorities?

Mr. Duffy: Absolutely. And indeed, the second part of your question is our strategy. So you saved me some portion of it. The issue of alignment I think is a really good one. We're actually in the process right now working with our bureau executives on refining the Department's IT strategic plan. As you may know, the Secretary released a revised version of his strategic plan back in 2007, as we stood up the executive board this past January.

That was an impetus for my office to start refining our IT strategic plan. So as we look at it right now, I look at three key mission support areas that we need to focus on. First of that is information and data analysis. The fact of the matter is that Treasury processes just incredible quantities of information every day.

A lot of what we do is transactional in nature, but to facilitate improvement in efficiency and accuracy in those transactions, we have to do a fair amount of analysis as well. We're processing incredible amounts of data. We take it in, we manage it, we manipulate it, and then we disperse it in some form or fashion depending on what the transaction is.

So data management tools are critically important to us, and then finally, collaboration tools. In the transactional world that we operate in, so for example, the financial management service, and all the transactions they execute with the banking industry every day, we're pretty mature. Where we have opportunities, I believe, is in the collaboration areas related to some of our enforcement responsibilities, certainly in the policy development and policy promulgation areas.

Then with that as an overall context, there's a couple of specific areas I'd like to be ultimately driving some successes. Obviously improved data management analysis. I've alluded to that already. More timely information sharing. Again, particularly in our enforcement arenas; increasing the reliability and efficiency of electronic transaction services where those opportunities exist

And then probably the two areas that are my greatest focal areas: achieving greater efficiency in our operations, and then the issues of greater data integrity and security. The efficiency of the operations I think is critical for us as a department, as it is for every federal department, because the fact of the matter is the budget is going to be pretty lean over the next several years. I think we all see that.

In order to free up funds to invest in the new capabilities that we want to implement to improve data management and those type of things, we're going to have to basically make our operations less expensive, more efficient. There's different strategies that can be employed there. Some of them are purely management, some of them are heavily technical, and the right mix, we're still working to discern

The IT security as a significant challenge. That's going to dominate, I think, for the next 12 months to 2 years. And then issues of data integrity I think are also very important, particularly as we get into more automated collaboration and information sharing in the policy arena. We need to make sure that the information that we're handling is good information, and certainly what we disseminate and disperse is good information.

Mr. Smith: So along these lines, given the complexity and the scale of Treasury, I would imagine that IT governance is very critical to you with respect to your abilities to respond quickly to changing business needs. So could you tell us a little bit about IT governance at Treasury, but specifically, could you describe your efforts to drive more of an enterprise view across the entire department as opposed to a very -- I hate to use the word traditional, but a more vertical approach to technology.

Mr. Duffy: Let me talk to the IT governance for a quick sec. We reestablished our executive investment review board this past January, and that's a key element to governance for IT. Executive engagement, particularly the business executives, is absolutely essential. Not only because we ultimately will probably have hard tradeoff decisions that we have to make -- we have a limited budget; we may want to buy 10 things but we can only afford 5, which are the 5 we're going to invest in -- but more importantly, to drive the overall direction, what are the key business problems that need IT solutions, and how practical are those IT solutions that us technical whiz guys come up with?

I mean, ultimately, it's not the technical people that are going to use these tools. It's the folks in the business that use the tools. So having that executive engagement is critical.

So we've done that through the e-board. We've also refined the Treasury CIO Council, which is comprised of the CIOs from each of the bureaus, kind of reoriented what we do and how we do it there. And then just the whole issue of driving the concept through my office that our mission is to support the business. And I think those three things are what I consider the three legs of the stool to improve governance.

The issue of enterprise-wide IT, this is one I have some mixed feelings on, because clearly, there are, as I indicated before, a need to have an enterprise view on a number of IT areas: corporate infrastructure, corporate networks, IT security, even things like the high-level IT governance and capital planning processes, those need to be viewed in a corporate way and department-wide. And the e-board and the refined CIO Council I think are the mechanisms through which we achieve that.

And we have some specific success stories I think in terms of dealing with Treasury-wide IT. Our new Treasury network program is an example. The progress we're making on HSPD-12. Treasury's for an extended period had an enterprise-wide directory system. We've had a Treasury-wide PKI capability. So those are good examples of where we're succeeding in the enterprise.

Having said that, it's important to remember that we do have very distinct business operations throughout Treasury, and those demand distinct tailored IT solutions for those businesses. We can certainly reuse particular technologies and techniques, but all those techniques and technologies still have to be tailored to the business. And that ultimately means that we're going to have quite a few bureau-specific applications and bureau-specific IT services.

Mr. Morales: Mike, I understand your Department's information technology capital investment portfolio totals just under $3 billion, or about 25 percent of the Department's overall budget. Kind of a two-part question here: would you elaborate on how you have strengthened the Department's IT capital investment process to ensure that investment decisions are mission-aligned and cost-justified. And the second part is, what roles do the Treasury Executive Investment Review Board, the e-board you've mentioned in the previous question, and the Technical Investment Review Board play in establishing a robust investment review process?

Mr. Duffy: The first response I'll make is that my office plays a role in strengthening our capital planning and investment, but the fact of the matter is that so much of this goes on at the bureau level that it's a lot of the efforts that have gone on at the bureaus, led by the bureau CIOs and the bureau heads that have really led to some of our recent successes.

So I think I really want to make note of that, and within that context, I should say, each of our bureaus has established bureau processes at the department level and we leveraged those. I've talked already about the e-board. That's an integral part to the overall improvement, and bringing the lessons learned, as well as the specific work that's going on at the bureaus, and synthesizing that at the department level is really where we've gained most of our traction.

We have done some more -- for lack of a better term, I'll call them technical things. We've refined our EVM, our earned value management polices and our guidance to help the bureaus implement EVM on all their major projects. We've developed what we call an EVM light for the non-major projects, the smaller projects for which it would be too costly to implement a full ANSI-compliant EVM. And that's helping us collect information on how well we're tracking to our budgets, how well we're tracking to our schedules, and then our performance metrics.

The big thing right now I think for us is really to institutionalize changes and the philosophies that are being promulgated at the executive level, and really push those down into all levels of the Department. In all honesty, probably the biggest challenge there is within the IRS. The Internal Revenue Service is an enormous organization in terms of size. They do incredible amounts of work. They have some of the most mature governance processes at their corporate level, but there are 98,000 people and probably 90 percent of our IT budget.

So even when we get the policy set right and the corporate level infrastructure set properly, there is still an awful lot of work in terms of pushing that down through the entire organization, so that work is well underway, but I would say that's our greatest challenge area.

Mr. Smith: You touched on this with your comments on earned value, but given the complexity and importance of Treasury's complex multimillion dollar projects, from an IT operations perspective, how has your Department sought to improve its project management disciplines and structure for monitoring project or program performance?

Mr. Duffy: We've done a couple of things. I mean, and some of this has been with some coaching from OMB, and quite frankly, even some of the policies that come out of OMB in the last several years, one of which was the requirement to get project managers certified in not just project management disciplines, but also acquisition management disciplines. That's incredibly important for a department like Treasury, where a very substantial amount of IT is actually contracted out.

We gain great benefit from the experience and capabilities of the private sector, but it does place some additional management burdens on us. It's a constant challenge to keep pace with all of those going on in our contracting arena, and quite frankly, to keep people trained at an appropriate level. The project management and acquisition certifications is a key element.

And then basically making better use of that earned value management data. So we have these systems, they produce reports. You get reports on 65 systems. Now you have to synthesize that data and say what does this really mean? Are there trends here that indicate issues that we need to follow up on? If so, then what are those issues and what are the decisions that we have to make? Managing the information that we get out of our earned value management systems and then making good use of that information I think is also a significant challenge area for us.

Mr. Smith: Switching gears just a little bit, technology has clearly enhanced the ability to share information, but it has also made organizations like Treasury more vulnerable to unlawful and destructive penetration. Would you elaborate on some of the critical security threats and challenges facing your agency's IT infrastructure, and the efforts that you've had to enhance your IT security and achieve effectiveness?

Mr. Duffy: In terms of the critical security threats and challenges, the fact of the matter is, as I mentioned earlier, we're so highly networked that almost by definition, we're vulnerable in some degree to every security threat that's out there. Whether it's a teenage hacker or some kind of malicious code that's launched against us in particular, or we just happened to be collateral damage as a result of one of our partners.

We effectively inherit every security threat that's out there just because we touch so many people with our networks in our daily transactions. So that definitely keeps us very, very busy in the IT security arena. Having said that, I don't know that we're all that much more different than many other federal agencies that are highly networked and have a wide variety of business partners, and certainly, we're no different than other parts of the corporate world that are highly leveraging the internet and network.

You know, what we're doing about it is kind of a three-pronged approach. One is again a policy issue, and we look at our policies and we take the government-wide policies, we apply those and then we look to see what are the specifics that we have to deal with within Treasury. Some particular issues we deal with is we have a large number of people that travel. And so we have equipment that's out on the road, we need to protect that equipment.

We need to make sure that their access back into the corporate network is well protected. And we have a number of policy initiatives that are dealing with that. And then those policy initiatives ultimately call for some new tools to be applied. But suffice to say, we're invested heavily in a number of new toolsets. The good news is there is a lot of help being offered by the corporate sector. There are a number of other agencies that have been dealing with these issues as we have, and we collaborate with those other agencies and share lessons learned and tools. And so that's been very helpful.

The other issue that we deal with is what I call security basics. So we go back to some of those core policies -- and just taking one example, configuration management. We're stepping up our monitoring and our enforcement of good IT hygiene, if you will, and making sure that we're doing all those basic things as well as we can. And you know, if we do all three of those, then you stand a fighting chance of being able to operate fairly securely out in the network world.

Mr. Morales: Mike, you talk about some of what I would characterize as the technical aspects of cyber security, but another component to it is the human side.

Mr. Duffy: Right.

Mr. Morales: For example, employees being careless about personal information and data security. So along that dimension, what are you doing to create more of a culture of accountability in protection of some of this sensitive personal information?

Mr. Duffy: Well, accountability kind of starts at the top, and Secretary Paulson has made management accountability a prime part of his strategic plan, and within that, if you read that strategic plan, it talks about IT security in particular. I've had the opportunity to discuss our IT security efforts with the Secretary, and he has tasked us with moving out very, very smartly on our improvement plan. And that accountability then kind of flows down. I can tell you that across the senior executive service ranks of the Department, IT management overall, and within that, IT security management is a core element.

Every executive who has any kind of responsibility whatsoever for IT is being assessed on that. Moving it down to kind of the employee level, that's an area where we're focused on training. We do the annual training. That's kind of the 101 requirement, and now what we're working through is how do we do kind of pervasive small doses of training.

One of the things that we're trying to do in the departmental offices is we have a weekly security tip that we just issue out in a global e-mail. We're starting to do some brown-bag lunches and other types of little town hall-type sessions. And we will focus on a very particular element of IT security. If there's been a particular problem that made the press recently, we'll take that and we'll do a little session on that. So we're looking for different ways to keep IT security on the front burner both at the executive level as well as the staff level. So far, we've seen those to be the most effective techniques.

Mr. Morales: Great. How is Treasury managing its IT infrastructure and its performance?

We will ask Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer, to share with us when we return 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 Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems, and Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Jeff Smith.

Mike, let's spend a little bit of time on the President's Management Agenda, or the PMA. Could you tell us a little bit about how your department has performed overall in this area, and perhaps tell us about any lessons learned as you've executed the PMA?

Mr. Duffy: The President's Management Agenda is something that we spent a lot of time talking about, not just within the Department, but obviously across the federal government, particularly in the e-gov area. In the early stages of the administration, it got off to a rocky start. But over the last several years, I would say it's matured and resulted in a lot of really positive uses of IT, and ultimately is achieving many of its goals. And I think at Treasury, we've been one of the leaders in this area, but I would like to spend a couple of minutes telling you about some of the things that we have been able to achieve.

First of all, Treasury is the lead on several of the e-gov initiatives, including in the HR Line of Business, we're one of the three government HR Lines of Business. We have a system that we call HR Connect, which we're very proud of. Not only do we service all the Department of the Treasury, but we also service Department of Housing and Urban Development, the former Treasury Bureau that we used to call the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Secret Service is also a customer of ours.

So that's been a very, very successful program for us both from an IT technology point of view, but also from an IT governance point of view, which I think is a critical aspect of the PMA. Treasury also is the lead for an initiative called IRS Free File, which as it indicates allows certain taxpayers to be able to file all their taxes electronically at no cost. We also participate as one of the Financial Management Lines of Business and provide financial accounting services to a number of agencies throughout government.

More recently, we've become one of the key contributors to the Budget Formulation Line of Business, and Treasury has a system that we developed to help automate the budget process, the federal budget process, and that system now is being marketed to other federal agencies for use. What's really interesting about the budget line of business is that OMB did not mandate that, several agencies got together and said hey, we think this is a good idea, went to OMB and said, would you sponsor us as line of business? And OMB said, if you can get the money from agencies, we'll sponsor you, and lo and behold, a number of federal agencies kicked in the funds necessary to run this program. So we're very proud of being able to participate in that initiative.

Treasury has also then implemented I think 18 or so of the other e-gov initiatives, everything from the e-learning initiative, what's called GovTrip, which is the automated travel system, e-Rulemaking system, obviously we publish a lot of rules. Bottom line is I think we've done quite a bit of work in this area. We've been able to save the Department money, which means therefore we've been able to save the taxpayers dollars, and we've actually improved services to department users -- where we're talking about internal systems -- and taxpayers when we're talking about external systems.

Mr. Smith: So Mike, with the continuing rise of electronic commerce coupled with broadening counterfeit threat, the success of your department's varied missions relies on a solid information technology capability. But in some quarters, there's a perception the government lags behind the commercial sector in technology innovation.

Do you think that this is a fair perception, and do you think government could enhance its position to become a leader and driver for leveraging technologies, or how do you think that would happen?

Mr. Duffy: Actually, I don't think it's fair to say that the government lags behind technology innovation. I think where we lag behind is in the implementation and use of innovative technology, and there is a little difference there. The fact of the matter is that the government uses quite a bit a very innovative technology. I think we could also identify a couple of areas where the government actually either produced or substantially sponsored innovative technology. The internet and global positioning satellite services are two that come to mind

And it's interesting, because I have three kids who are teenagers, and they all take these very basic services for granted. Indeed, they don't know of a time when those didn't exist and they have no concept that the government actually substantially supported the development of those. So that said, I think, as I indicated, our real problem is we have a problem with the rapid deployment of technology. There's probably lots of different reasons for that. One that I think is a distinction between the government and private sector is our budget process. The fact of the matter is, we the Department of Treasury don't have unilateral authority over our budget; we have to work through a process, working through the President and OMB to get a President's budget, and then that has to go up and be approved through the congressional appropriations process.

And that's the nature of government and we have to work through that, but it is an inhibitor to very rapid expenditure and capitalization. Often in innovative technology, you need a fairly good chunk of dollars in order to make that initial investment, to bring on the talent necessary. By definition, if we're taking about innovative technology, it means that there's a relatively small labor force that can deal with that technology. In most cases, that labor force is not in the government, which means we have to contract for it. So there're processes there. Our processes are defined for very good reasons, but that is a distinction, I think, between the government sector and the private sector.

So what do we do about that? I think we have to recognize what our limitations are, what are the factors that we have to deal with, and we have to do a better job of planning around those. The other thing we can probably do better is actually sharing experiences and success stories across the government. DoD, for example, has done a much better job over the last several years of sharing with the civilian side of the government the different technologies that they are using. Dave Wennergren, for example, at DoD has been a real advocate of a couple of IT security technologies and strategies that have been very successful at DoD, and they are now sharing those with the civilian side of government. And that's incredibly helpful.

We in the civilian side do more of that information sharing. We're going to be able to make up a little ground in terms of the implementation of innovative technology.

Mr. Morales: As you know, transformation creates new competitive areas and competencies. What key competencies will be needed for IT staff to provide proper IT support, and specifically, what steps are being taken to attract and maintain a high quality technical and professional workforce to build these new competencies?

Mr. Duffy: Those are great questions, because that kind of is the crux of it. If we don't have an IT workforce capable of being able to identify what the problems are, be able to identify what the solutions are, and then actually manage the implementation of those, then by definition we won't be successful. So those three things are definitely core competencies and issues that we need to be looking at as managers. Some other things that come to mind is just an awareness of the changes that are going on both in the business that we manage, in this case the financial services for the U.S. government, but also what's going on in private industry. In the case of Treasury, that means the private industry, such as the financial services industry, but then also in the broader IT industry.

Being able to retain and then build, as we face the retirement boom, the subject matter expertise in those three areas, that is definitely going to be a challenge for us. I think in general, a competency that I really kind of gravitate towards when I am hiring new people is just basic problem solving, because so much of what we do is problem solving. When I think about general categories of people, I think of two categories. One is what I call the dreamers, and those are the folks that think up new solutions, not necessarily to any particular problem, but for example, who came up with global positioning satellite services? Who dreamt that one up?

And then there's the very practical, pragmatic problem solvers, and those are the guys who take those technology tools that are developed and actually apply them to specific business areas. So those are kind of very high-level issues that I think we have to deal with as we look at talent. What we're going to have to do more of is develop very, very targeted strategies, recognize where our skill gaps are going to start popping up, and then know in advance what we're going to do in terms of recruitment, what we're going to do in terms of retention and training, and then ultimately how those competencies are probably going to morph over time.

Mr. Morales: As the CIO, a big portion of your job is to put in place the policies and strategies for cultural change and educational outreach to help staff recognize that they are part of a broader enterprise. To this end and as the CIO, what kind of pushback have you gotten, and what are the types of pushback that you have received?

Mr. Duffy: There's two categories that I deal with in some regard. So I have my staff and the Office of the CIO. And the issues there are, like many IT staffs, we tend to be a little older than what you might find in the corporate sector. Many of them were trained in some of the older technologies -- for example, the older telecommunications technologies -- and the issue there is kind of a recognition of why that older technology has reached its end of useful life, and why we need to move to a new technology. So why does frame-relay point-to-point circuits no longer meet the need, and why do we need to move an MPLS network?

You know, why do we want to move off of a tried-and-true analog or a digital telephone system and move to VoiceoverIP? Those are interesting kind of cultural issues. Ultimately, I think what it comes down to again is basically a training issue. And not training in terms of classroom, but training in terms of making sure that my staff has a much better view of the big picture. What are the business drivers, what are the cost-benefit analyses that drive us to move in these directions.

And then the other category, of course, is working with the bureaus. And there, the challenge is I am looking at IT and the IT issues from a corporate perspective. They are looking at it from a very specific bureau mission perspective. The challenge for me is to basically sell my bureau counterparts, if you will, on why this particular policy or this particular strategy, or this particular initiative makes sense for the bureau, what is the bureau going to get out of it. If I can put it into those terms in a convincing way, then there is not much pushback. So that's I think the key challenge.

Mr. Smith: So Mike, we're starting to see many federal agencies as well as other communities launching their own Wikipedias and blogs. Could you tell us a little about -- about any efforts within Treasury to leverage some of these new social networking ideas and technologies?

Mr. Duffy: This is a really interesting area for me. It's one that I am still very much coming up to speed on. The area of information sharing and collaboration, as I think I alluded to earlier, holds a lot of promise for the Department. Figuring out how to work these technologies into our business processes I think is our key challenge. Really what we're doing within the Department is experimenting, I'm going to say, or prototyping these type of technologies for internal use. So we stood up a little wiki inside the Office of the CIO to do some collaborative work as preparation for the development or refinement of our IT strategic plan

We've thought about using a wiki for purposes of doing coordination of different policy documents. So for example, if we get something that comes in in draft that needs to be reviewed across the Department, we're playing around with how can we use a wiki or a blog as a more efficient and user friendly way of collecting comments and then being able to resolve those comments. I don't think we're yet at the point where we're using these operationally; I believe that some of our bureaus are beginning to conceptualize how they are going to be able to do that. But this is definitely I think an untapped area for us in Treasury.

Mr. Morales: So with that, what does the future hold for Treasury's IT capability?

We will ask Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems, and Chief Information Officer, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to our final segment of The Business of Government Hour.

I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems, and Chief Information Officer, at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Also joining us in our studios from IBM is Jeff Smith.

Mike, given the critical role information technology plays in mission and program delivery, could you give us your view on how the role of the CIO has evolved in this regard, and what are the key successful characteristics of a CIO of the future?

Mr. Duffy: You know, as I think back to kind of the advent of the CIO at least in the federal sector, you kind of go back to 1996 and the initial Clinger-Cohen Act, and that act I think got us down on track of -- I'm going to call compliance -- and I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but I think a lot of the CIO responsibilities were very, very focused on making sure that we were doing things right.

And certainly that's an important part of the job. That was I think melded in with CIOs who were very, very technical in nature, and some of them were technologists who then got pushed up into this new role called chief information officer. I think over the last 10 years, the role has really morphed substantially to business facilitator. And it's important for us to be well-versed in policies and process and techniques for good management, and we certainly have a role in making sure that we're doing things correctly. But ultimately, the real value of a CIO is the degree to which IT is furthering the accomplishment of the mission of an agency, or of the business.

So that's really I think the big difference. With that said, I think the key characteristics, underlining characteristics, now are the ability to understand the business, and I see this with many of my peers across the government, and I hope with myself, we spend more time just trying to understand what our agencies do and why we do them, and then mixing that in with an understanding of technology.

I think that places more of a burden on us, certainly from a time point of view, because as technology gets increasingly complicated, we have to ensure that we're investing enough time to at least be somewhat conversant in it. And even the regulatory environment I think has expanded since 1996. But nonetheless, we have to carve out time to actually sit down, read the budget, not just the IT budget, but the mission budget. We need to meet with the mission leaders, the executives, the e-boards, and then even meet with folks outside. At Justice, I actually spent quite a bit of time meeting with law enforcement officials outside the federal government in order to better understand what the federal information sharing requirements were. Ultimately, what that means is that the CIO needs to strive to be more of a business leader and strategist and less of a technologist.

Mr. Morales: So continuing on sort of our view of the future, can you give us a sense of some of the key issues that will affect CIOs government wide across the next couple of years, and in your opinion, given Treasury's chairmanship of the Federal User Group, what emerging technologies do you think hold the most promise for improving federal IT?

Mr. Duffy: So in terms of key issues, protecting information I think is going to be the number one by far. And this is a kind of the confluence of the technical IT security, the policy IT security, and then this emerging area that we call privacy. And in Treasury, the Assistant Secretary for Management is the chief privacy officer, and we have a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Privacy and Records that is the subject matter expert, and supports the Assistant Secretary in that regard.

My office plays a supporting role as well, and we kind of share that responsibility with the privacy office. So the whole information protection area is I think going to be a dominant area for us. And then the other one I think is an issue related to efficiency, particularly in IT infrastructure. I'll reiterate that that's important because of the nature of the federal budget, the fact that our budgets grow at a very modest rates and yet our needs to invest in new technology are growing fairly rapidly.

So the math is that you have to free up money out of infrastructure in order to be able to invest in new capability and new technology. So those are going to be -- if I had to focus on two issues, those would be the two. So as I look at technologies then that address those issues, Federated Identity Management is huge. The fact of the matter is there is no way for any organization to be able to manage the identities of all of the users with whom they are going to interact.

So that is certainly true within Treasury. So in Treasury, we take the view that the actual management of the identity has to be done on a bureau-by-bureau basis. You know, at best, the bureau head is the one who is going to be able to manage their workforce, including managing the credentialing of that workforce. But now we need to be able to say that the credential in the Financial Management Service can be accepted and utilized by the IRS. And that's where the Federated Identity Management comes into play. So the technologies that facilitate that, technology such as PKI and HSPD-12 standards, things like enterprise directories -- all those types of foundational technologies are huge, and then some of the new tools that are coming along to help us there.

Web-based collaboration technologies -- we talked a little bit about that earlier -- that's a growth area, and one that we in the federal space are going to have to continually invest in. Data management tools are another significant opportunity area for us because of the vast amount of information that we collect, and then the information analysis tools.

Mr. Smith: So Mike, what are some of the major opportunities and challenges that the Department of the Treasury is going to encounter in the future, and how do you envision your office will evolve over the next five years?

Mr. Duffy: The challenges I think are fairly apparent. The issues of corporate network security, for all the reasons we've talked about this morning: IT governance; ultimately we have to do a really good job of managing the scarce dollars that we have. And probably more than the scarce dollars -- I mean the scarce dollars, the talent pool of people that we have, and indeed if you look at it more broadly, the information that we're asked to manage. Those are two I think fundamental areas, and then the third goes back to my mantra, and that is making sure that in everything we're doing in the IT area, we're doing with an eye towards how do we facilitate the accomplishment of the mission.

It's very easy on a day-to-day basis to lose sight of that. I myself do, even though I'm out there preaching it half the time, and I see my staff struggle with this every single day, my IT security staff, who is very focused on making sure that we're getting the best grade possible on FSMA audit. And that's exactly what I'm asking them to do, but I also want them to take the half step back and say, why is this important.

So as my office morphs, what do I see? As we talked about before, we do have a well-seasoned staff. So we're going to see a turnover in the staff over in the next five years. That, there is almost no doubt. So we're going to have some significant recruitment and retention issues that we have to deal with. You know, the marketplace is I think continuing to be a very competitive place. And it's an interesting challenge because as we try to hire in more talented, more technologically or business-oriented people, that actually raises their stock and makes them more attractive to the private sector.

So we're going to be I think in a constant challenge area in terms of retaining the good staff that we have. And indeed, I have come to the conclusion that we're probably going to have to reset our expectations in terms of the career length of federal IT workers, whereas before we're very accustomed to the 30-year fed, and you know, I myself have 21 years and so I have at least a reasonable short of making 30. I don't think that's realistic for the upcoming generation. You know, there's too many opportunities. Indeed, we created a very portable federal retirement system which makes it all that much easier for people to come in and out of the government, and we're going to need to plan to deal with that. And that's a human capital issue in some regard, but I think it's particularly acute in IT management, and so CIOs have to recognize that.

And then probably the continuing use of contract support and making sure that we're doing that very, very well. You know, again, the nature of IT is that we don't have a constant set of work challenges. It goes up, it goes down, and that's much more conducive to employing private sector folks to come in and help us get that job done.

Mr. Smith: Mike, you made a decision early on in your education to start a career in government, and you've obviously been very, very successful. So what advice might you give to a person who perhaps is at that stage where they may be either right coming out of school or perhaps maybe even mid-career around getting started in public service or in the federal government?

Mr. Duffy: Well, it's good you mentioned that. One of the things I like to do and try to carve out a little bit of time is actually mentor younger federal employees, particularly people that are in the Presidential Management Fellowship Program, which is the successor to the PMI program that I came in under. I think the primary message is to give public service a try. It's incredibly rewarding. Sometimes you have to go through some frustrations to get to that reward, but if you're willing to work through some of those frustrating times, at the end of a year or 2 years or 30 years, you can look back and see where you made significant contributions to the public and to the nation.

I think in particular in the IT field, we're becoming actually increasingly competitive; and there's variations within that. I think certain technologies, particularly some of the newer technologies we probably don't compete quite as well, but in some of the more mainstream network technologies, even IT security, the federal government actually has some ability to offer comparable compensation packages, particularly if you take into account things we can do with loan repayments and recruitment and retention bonuses, and leave and all that good stuff.

So it's a good opportunity. As somebody enters the workforce, I think my advice would be to focus on what's really important, and this kind of comes back again to my little mantra: why are we here, what are we doing to make the Treasury a better place -- the Treasury a more effective government agency, and ultimately how are we benefiting the taxpayers? If you can get your mind around that and focused on that, then government is definitely a great place to work.

Mr. Morales: That's a great perspective, thank you. Mike, unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule, but more importantly, Jeff and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country across your roles at Justice and now at Treasury.

Mr. Duffy: Well, thank you very much for the opportunity, and I enjoyed it. You know, what I would say is, is anybody who is interested in learning more about the Department of the Treasury or specifically the Chief Information Officers' office, probably the best place to get that info would be via our website, which is treasury.gov.

So I would invite the listening public to take a look there.

Mr. Morales: Great. Thank you.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Mike Duffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems, and Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

My co-host has been Jeff Smith, partner in IBM's Federal Civilian 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 may not be able to 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 October 6, 2008

Washington, D.C.

Announcer: 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 this 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.

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.

Global trends and rapidly evolving societal needs continue to post critical national science challenges. It is the use of natural resources on the global scale, which has the potential to impact the nation's ability to sustain its economy, national security, quality of life, and natural environment.

The U.S. Geological Survey has reputation as a leader in natural science monitoring, assessing, and research. It also plays a vital role in the federal response to many resource challenges facing this nation. With us this morning to discuss his efforts in this area is Robert Doyle, deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Good morning, Robert.

Mr. Doyle: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: Also joining us in our conversation is Kunal Suryavanshi, associate partner in IBM's federal civilian industry practice.

Good morning, Kunal.

Mr. Suryavanshi: Good morning, Al.

Mr. Morales: Bob, let's start off by learning a bit more about the U.S. Geological Survey, or the USGS. Can you take a few minutes to tell us a little bit about its history, its evolution, and the current mission today?

Mr. Doyle: USGS is a science agency for the Department of Interior. We have a long, proud tradition, and well-earned reputation of providing objective and credible science and information products. Our origins date back to 1879 when we were chartered by Congress to classify the public lands and to examine geologic structures and mineral resources on the federal domain. And over the next 130 intervening years, we have become the leading with science agency in the nation.

And we are the primary source of data on nation surface and groundwater resources, important information for water managers, and emergency responders. We produce authoritative assessments of energy and minerals, both on land and offshore; you may be familiar with their recent report on unconventional oil and gas off the coast -- in Alaska and in the Arctic.

We issue hazard warnings for earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, and we also conduct research on wildlife diseases and ecosystem services. And we serve as the premier civilian mapping agency, noted also for our range of products, as topographic maps.

We have tremendous strength in terms of our integrated sciences. We have modeling capabilities and we have our long-term monitoring networks that we're able to bring to bear to address some of the natural resource issues that are facing this country. We provide important science information and products to policymakers and resource managers in the department that demonstrate our relevancy to their work.

Mr. Morales: So that's a very broad mission. Could you give us a sense of the scale at the USGS in terms of how it's organized, size of its overall budget perhaps number of employees, and how you're dispersed across the country?

Mr. Doyle: Sure. We have approximately 8,500 employees -- 1, 800 located at our headquarters in Reston, Virginia, and 7,200 employees that are located in our field offices across the nation. We have an office in every state. Our budget is about $1.4 billion, 400 of which monies that we receive from cooperators and other folks that we do work on their behalf.

As a science organization, we are located near colleges and universities where we have an opportunity to take -- have mutual benefit to share resources with students, professors, and the physical laboratories. We use approximately 250 emeritus scientists. These are people who have retired from the agency but wish to continue to do their science work, to share their institutional knowledge and expertise with the scientists who work -- continue to work at the agency.

And we utilize about 2,500 volunteers, sort of, citizen scientists, and we have about -- anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 contractors and they work for us to help complement our career workforce.

Mr. Morales: So Bob, with this broad overview of the organization, could you tell us a bit more about your specific role as deputy director and what are your specific responsibilities and duties?

Mr. Doyle: Well, our primary role is to focus on internal operations, make sure the buses run, so to speak. Try to make sure that the things are running efficiently and effectively and there we have a system of accountability to ensure that our goals and objectives are accomplished.

Mr. Suryavanshi: So with respect to these responsibilities and duties what would you say are your three most significant challenges that you have faced in your position and how have you addressed these challenges?

Mr. Doyle: I would say the biggest challenges I had was when I first came aboard about 4 years ago was to restore physical integrity to the financial operations. The USGS was in a position where they were unable to get an opinion on their financial statements.

We had some problems in internal operations so my task was to try to restore the credibility to fiscal operations and -- brought in some new people. We made some investments in the financial operations. We hired some new folks. We changed some of our business practices.

We engaged the senior leadership in the organization, engaged the employees to get them to understand and appreciate that financial integrity was their responsibility as much as it was for the administrative folks. And so it was my view that they should be treating administration and financial matters with the same degree of integrity and transparency that they do with their science projects.

Mr. Morales: I understand that you started your federal career back with HUD. Could you tell us a bit about your career and what brought you over to the USGS?

Mr. Doyle: Well, I started with federal service about 35 years ago, GS-13 equal opportunity specialist with the Department of Health and Urban Development, and then over the next 15 years I operated in a number of different positions in the administrative field on budget, finance, and procurement, the human capital, property, and IT.

And so after 15 years at HUD, I decided to take a position with the Department of Interior and I served in the executive capacity within Interior with the bureau -- first with the Bureau Mines, and then later worked with the Bureau of Land Management, and now, I'm currently working with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Mr. Morales: That's great. So Bob, as you, sort of, reflect back on the 35 years of federal service and the various departments and bureaus that you've worked for, how have these experiences prepared you for your current leadership role and how has it shaped your management approach and your leadership style?

Mr. Doyle: Well, I would have to say that I having worked through all the major administrative functional areas, gave me a good appreciation of the governance process that exists within government, across government, within the department, and that knowledge is very helpful in trying to craft strategies for getting things done.

I have had opportunities to take on some very challenging and difficult assignments, taught me how to make some tough decisions. When you serve as the deputy of any agency you have to be willing to say "No." And I've also, you know, worked in a variety of leadership positions at other agencies where you are forced to establish your priorities. You have to learn to where to focus your energies.

Mr. Morales: What is the U.S. Geological Survey science strategy? We will ask Robert Doyle, the deputy director of the USGS 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 Robert Doyle, deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Also joining in our studios from IBM is Kunal Suryavanshi.

Bob, I understand that in 2007, the USGS developed a science strategy, outlining the major natural science issues facing the nation in the next decade. Could you elaborate on this science strategy, and its implications specifically, to what extent does the new strategy better address complex environmental challenges through a systems-based approach?

Mr. Doyle: Well, the new strategy outlines areas where natural sciences can be -- make a substantial contribution to the well-being of the nation. It's a 10-year forward look for the bureau and it gives us some indication of future direction in growth; put together a team of scientists and ask them to do a rigorous assessment of our current science goals and priorities and to identify global trends and national priorities.

And we also asked them to formulate a plan that would build on the existing strengths of the agencies and to challenge us to better integrate the full breadth and depth of our science and our information capabilities.

So the focus of this strategy falls into six thematic areas; climate variability and change, which helps us clarify the record in assessing the consequences; a water census, for quantifying, forecasting and securing fresh water for America's future; energy and minerals, provide scientific foundation for resource security, environmental health, economic vitality and land management. Also have hazards risk and resiliency assessment program ensuring for us a long-term health and wealth for the nation.

Human health is also identified as a theme where we are challenged to develop a system and a process that identifies environmental risks to public health in America. And the final thing deals with the understanding of the ecosystems, and predict an ecosystems change to ensure that the nation's economic and environmental future is secure.

These are thematic areas that represent complex, multi-scale challenges, challenges to which the USGS is uniquely positioned to apply the fundamental understanding of natural processes related to geology, hydrology, biology and geography in a variety of comprehensive, coherent systems approach for addressing these challenges.

Mr. Morales: So the first five, I think, I understand a bit but the last one, ecosystems -- could you tell us a little more what is an ecosystem and why have you focused on understanding these?

Mr. Doyle: Well, ecosystems are viewed as the life support system for us. An ecosystem provides important services for sustaining human life, including fresh air, fresh water, soils, carbon sequestration, and pollinators for crops to name a few.

Ecosystems are generally self-sustaining. However, they can reach a certain threshold beyond which it is unable to repair itself. So USGS, with its multidisciplinary science, is in a unique position to provide a holistic view and a sound understanding of the ecosystems and ecological processes so that wise management can prevent crossing those thresholds.

Mapping, monitoring, modeling and understanding ecosystems is important for informing resource managers in their challenge of balancing land use and land change issues within human needs.

Mr. Morales: So going back to the first one on climate, we are beginning to see how the climate seems to influence every aspect of our life here on earth. Could you elaborate on USGS' effort to deepen and expand the climate science research? Specifically, how is USGS contributing to the global discussion on climate change and how are you supporting decision makers in this area?

Mr. Doyle: Well USGS scientists have spent decades conducting research and collecting information on climate change and its effect on ecosystems and its implication for resource managers.

The Department of the Interior is responsible for management of one in every five acres of land in this country. They have a significant interest on how climate change influences, it's just too much of responsibilities.

As climate predictions are made, USGS scientists can use their understanding of how ecosystems function, to predict how ecosystems will change in a response, allowing resource managers to develop adoption or mitigation strategies for protecting wildlife such as ducks that rely on water or food produced by the ecosystem.

This year, the USGS is engaged in developing a Climate-Effects Network that will serve as a early warning system for resource managers and policy makers, so that they can identify problems before they become chronic or costly.

Well, the debate and the discussions of climate change that occur have many dimensions to it. Our focus has more been on the effects and we will be trying to develop adoption and mitigation strategies that can be used by our resource managers so that we can preserve and protect the resources on our land.

Mr. Suryavanshi: Now Bob, it's my understanding that energy and mineral resources are the backbone of human food supplies, economies and national security. Would you tell us about the USGS' efforts to broaden its energy and mineral resource research? Specifically, what are the key strategic areas that this agency will focus over the next decade in energy and mineral resource research and how will that benefit the United States and resource management?

Mr. Doyle: The U.S. is the largest user of mineral commodities and energy resources in the world. And our economy and our standard of living depend on them. Because many of these resources are imported from trading partners around the world, it's important for us to understand the domestic and global supplies, distribution, use, and their future needs.

As directed by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, over the past four years, the USGS has been studying the resource potential of oil and gas on public lands. In our research plans, where we will be looking at alternative energy sources, we're looking at things like thermal energy, oil shale, wind energy, solar energy -- lot of alternatives besides the petroleum based oil and gas that we have today.

USGS research will be broadened to contribute to the national discussion of our future natural resource security, environmental effects of resource development, economic strength of the nation and management of national resources on public lands.

Mr. Suryavanshi: It's my understanding that domestic geothermal resources have the potential to provide significant amounts of clean, renewable, and reliable energy to the United States. Could you tell us about the USGS' assessment of these conventional, moderate and high temperature geothermal resources and if you can add, what are some of the major technical challenges for increased geothermal development?

Mr. Doyle: Well, without question the nation's energy demands will continue to grow. It is estimated that the United States will need to increase its electric power generating capacity 40 percent to 50 percent over the next 20 years. Geothermal energy is an alternative source available to partially satisfy this increase in demand.

We are currently conducting assessment of moderate and high temperature resources on public lands and the report is due later this year. This will be the first comprehensive assessment in 30 years regarding geothermal resources.

However, since 1979 the technology for power production increased dramatically. For example, the expansion of temperature range of geothermal systems capable of electric power generation makes low and moderate temperature systems more viable. And then, there's enhanced geothermal systems and techniques that create an opportunity to expand existing geothermal reservoirs and capabilities through hydrographic fracturing and other advanced techniques.

We are working collaboratively in our efforts with the Department of Energy, Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies along with the national labs, universities, state and local agencies and even the geothermal industry.

Mr. Suryavanshi: Bob, recent events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and natural fires have resulted in hundreds of deaths, disruption to commerce and destruction of homes and critical infrastructure.

Now, I understand that a core element of the USGS mission is to provide scientific information in order to minimize the loss of life and damage to property from these natural disasters.

Could you tell us about your National Hazards, Risk, and Resilience Assessment Program and your efforts to develop a national risk monitoring program?

Mr. Doyle: Well, the natural environment continues to pose risks to society. USGS has a long and respected history of providing relevant and timely information for responding to hazard events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides and so forth. We have an extensive network of sensors to model, forecast and detect natural hazard events. We work in collaboration with partners around the world as part of the Global Seismic Network with colleagues, universities as part of the Advanced System Seismic Network and a new National Volcanic Early Warning System.

Science and technology can play an important role in developing a disaster resilient program. National science and technology committee has a subcommittee working on disaster reduction and they have identified six grand challenges for the future: To provide hazard and disaster information where and when it's needed, to understand natural processes that produce hazards, develop strategies and technologies to reduce the impact of extreme events, to reduce the vulnerability of infrastructures, develop standardized methods for communities to measure and assess disasters and to promote risk-wise behavior.

Now, we are currently working with the state of California and the Department of Human Services, the state and local entities, to set up a plan -- planning exercise that will culminate in a November earthquake drill entitled the "Great Shakeout". USGS science and information products will significantly inform the exercise.

One of the objectives of the exercise is to translate regional disasters to a local level using a 7.8 earthquake as a triggering mechanism. We expect to have about 5 million citizens participate in the process and, in fact, we have about 2 million people already signed over the Internet.

The exercise also includes the discussion with Canada and Mexico, to explore cross-border implications and opportunities. And then we plan to have an international conference to be held in Los Angeles, for other mega cities participants to learn more from the exercise.

>Mr. Morales: So Bob, you mentioned networks and sensors, could you tell me a little bit more about what some of the key monitoring networks are and what might you be doing to enhance these networks and expand their capabilities?

Mr. Doyle: Well, the networks provide for us the ability to predict and characterize a hazard and provide information for response and recovery efforts. And USGS operates several critical hazard monitoring networks. Our key monitoring networks include the Global Seismic Network, the Advanced Network for Seismic Systems, Stream Gauges, geomagnetic observatory laboratories and satellites. The Global Seismic Network will be expanded to about a 150 stations worldwide, enabling USGS to report on recent earthquakes such as in China, within minutes.

And then in Afghanistan -- with the rebuilding that's occurred there has enabled us to restore an active site for the network to provide a critical coverage in a disaster prone area. We are also expanding our Advanced Network for Seismic Stations, with additional sensors and additional locations. We are upgrading the software to greatly improve our earthquake notification, especially within at-risk urban areas. And we are speaking to partners to improve the quality of regional networks, for example, with California Tech, the University of Nevada, and St. Louis University.

And we are developing a National Volcanic Early Warning System to adequately monitor all high risk volcanoes in the United States, to alert communities at risk as well as aviation at risk to the ash cloud formation. And we also have on the drawing boards a launch of Landsat 8 replace aging fleet of satellites, Landsat 5 and Landsat 7. I'll mention the Landsat 5 has been up and running for about 25 years and Landsat 7 is on its 10th year, and both are well beyond their projected life.

Mr. Morales: Now Bob, you talk about networks and partners but just to clarify and you mentioned some universities, partners can also include other governments around the world?

Mr. Doyle: Yes. So, a lot of the networks are really a collaborative effort that it is a good example of countries reaching together, working together to benefit the world as a whole. And so, we have members in the Global Seismic Network from countries in Iran, in China, here in the United States and Europe, all of us is certainly concerned about the hazards that are generated by earthquakes and all are interested in sharing information across countries so that we can all learn and understand the national -- natural phenomena of earthquakes and try to better advance understanding of that event.

Mr. Morales: I understand that over 75 percent of the declared federal disasters are related to flooding. And certainly we are in the middle of hurricane season and that's top-of-mind to a lot of folks, and obviously we saw a flooding hit the Midwest very hard this year.

Could you tell us about USGS' floods response efforts in this past year, and what are some of the lessons learned during this past, this past year?

Mr. Doyle: Well, the USGS plays an important role in providing real-time information to flood responders. As you said, this past year the Midwest was hit particularly hard by winds and torrential rains. We have a stream gauging network that provides valuable real time data to the national weather organization who forecast potential flood areas. The network consists of over 7,000 gauges and we have dedicated staff to install temporary gauges where coverage is needed during the hazard event.

We also have historical river data that proves to be invaluable to understand the implications of increased volume of water, to better deal -- and the implications for communities in an ecological environment. Recent preparations for Gustav and Hannah, we've had extensive communications and coordination with assigned centers in the affected areas, identifying where additional sensors in the network needed to be added so that while we have 7,000 sensors in permanent locations depending on the hazard and where it occurs, we also have mobile units, and we also have temporary sensors that we put in place to provide us some information.

And I should mention that a lot of this information is telemitted and available, real-time over the Internet. And so, for example, if anybody wanted to see the readings on a particular gauge all they needed to do is go to USGS, www.usgs, and look at our water watch website, and they'll be to see the volume of water and the tide that's occurred in a particular time and be able to see how that measurement compares to historical records and so they get a sense of how high there the water levels are, and how fast the water is flowing. The National Weather Service is extremely reliant on that information because they're the ones responsible for making forecast for a flooding, but they greatly rely on some of the basic data that our scientists provide to them.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic. How is the U.S. Geological Survey using innovative technology to succeed? We will ask Robert Doyle, deputy director of the USGS 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 Robert Doyle, deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Kunal Suryavanshi.

Bob I read about how the U.S. health spending is projected to continue to rise reaching almost 20 percent of the GDP by 2015. We talked about how the environment is one of the major determinants of human health. But can you tell us a bit more about USGS' role in environmental health research specifically monitoring the effects of the environment and wildlife on human health?

Mr. Doyle: Environmental health affects to citizens are increasing. The U.S. proposes to provide scientific and monitoring information essential for helping the nation to identify existing and emerging environmental ecosystem health threats. USGS is engage with a broad spectrum of partners in environmental health research. We characterize exposure to potential contaminants and pathogen in air, dust, soil, and other earth materials.

Monitoring and understanding vector-borne and zoonotic diseases, disease that are transmitted between animals and people such as Avian Flu and West Nile virus. We also characterize exposure to chemicals and pathogens in drinking water, food, and recreational waters. And we work with EPA and state, local water authorities to identify and understand the sources and impacts.

Mr. Morales: So along same lines let me transition a bit to water. According to a 2003 U.S. GAO report it said the nation lacked an adequate picture of water-availability at the national, regional, and local level.

Could you tell us a bit about USGS' efforts in this area specifically around the water census which you mentioned earlier and modernizing the stream gauges?

Mr. Doyle: The 21st century brings a new set of water resource challenges for us. Water shortages and water use conflicts have been more common place across the nation -- for irrigation crops, expanding cities, and communities, for energy production, and for environmental health, and species protection under the law.

The last comprehensive water census was concluded in 1978 and much has changed since that time. For our fiscal year 2009 we have proposed, begin in 10-year effort to undertake a water census that informs managers and policymaker as to what is available, where it is located, and what condition it's in.

Knowing our nation's water assets and rates of use on an ongoing basis is crucial to effective water management. So our initiative is a 10-year study of water-flow, storage and use. We also plan to conduct regional studies comparing storages and flows with prior conditions.

We will be collaborating with state and local governments in selected water studies and aquifers as to increase use of new technology in water planning and management. We will be cooperating with states and local entities to improve characterization of the nation's aquifers and we hope to modernize nations 7300 strain gauges and upgrade the technology, to support real-time data reporting, to provide more timely information for better water management, and to stabilize long-term network by reestablishing critical gauges that have been discontinued in the past 2 years.

Mr. Suryavanshi: Now that's a great information, Bob. As you know, innovative and continually evolving technologies have the potential to transform not just science methods, but even the questions that science can ask.

Could you tell us about a few new and evolving technologies that are particularly relevant to the earth sciences? For example, what is the Geographic Information System and how is that critical for integrating the many kinds of data across disciplines?

Mr. Doyle: Well, let me pick up on the Geographic Information System as one. GIS is an information system that integrates data elements in a geographically referenced way. That is its links to a location or a place on earth and it's a framework for understanding the world and applying geographic knowledge to solving problem, guiding management actions and it gives us the ability to visually relate multiple data sets within a geographic contexts as with a map displaying transportation routes, structures, terrains, rives, and streams and elevation. It's valued as a relational tool. It helps us to visualize and see the interaction of data, the cause and effects of actions in one area and how it affects the areas of the system.

There's a whole host of other new technologies out there that we are anxiously looking at and expecting to take advantage of their capabilities -- molecular genetics, nanotechnology, geomicrobiology, molecular technology, environmental census, particularly wireless census, land imaging -- just a whole range of new technologies out there that have an opportunity to really influence the earth sciences and how we do business.

Mr. Suryavanshi: Along similar lines, could you tell us about the National Map 3.0? How does it provide nationally consistent geospatial framework and also what are the key national geospatial initiatives currently underway?

Mr. Doyle: Well, the national map is our vision to the future -- 3.0 is our vision to the future. Our expectation is that we would have a map that is not dynamic rather than static. That we'll have real-time data represented in the map and so that as land changes occur and that information is made available, it is automatically incorporated into the national map.

Then we have streamflow information connected to real-time data reports and so that if the rivers increase in height and flow faster that information gets accurately represented in the map the day that it occurs. And so it's a real time nature that is envisioned as part of the national map.

We also would look up an opportunity to make 3D graphics, an integral part of the map part of the map and that we would give the user of the map the ability to customize, to be able to go screen and pick out a polygon and create their own map and add changes to that map and to do what-if scenarios and change the elevations on the map, to change some of the transportation routes in some of the structures.

Our kids today are experienced with the technology that gives them the ability to do things onscreen and to imagine and to think about things that aren't -- and to ask question why can't it be this way. This would give us the ability to make the map dynamic and allow people to play with it and to imagine and to configure it differently than what it is.

Mr. Suryavanshi: So it acts as modeling or a predictive tool also?

Mr. Doyle: Absolutely. In fact it -- even now the National Map 1.0 is really instrumental in helping to provide the geographic contexts for lot of our studies. It enabled us to see the ecosystems and see the changes that are taken place on the ecosystems and then be able to make some projections about some of the changes that it might be occurring and how they would be represented on the map.

Mr. Suryavanshi: Just changing the topic slightly, Bob. We heard a lot about collaborations and partnerships both across government and with organizations outside the government. What kinds of partnerships are you developing to improve operations or outcomes at USGS?

Mr. Suryavanshi: Just changing the topic slightly, Bob. We heard a lot about collaborations and partnerships both across government and with organizations outside the government. What kinds of partnerships are you developing to improve operations or outcomes at USGS?

Mr. Doyle: Well, indeed on of the strengths that the USGS possess is the network of partner and collaborators available to draw on. The complexities and many of the issues that we face as a nation require that collective and coordinated efforts of participants, national, international, federal, state, local, NGOs and the commercial sectors as well.

Our extensive network of partners enables us to extend our knowledge and expertise and our capabilities. Some of the more significant partnerships that we have been engaged in, our partnership network in hazards arena is a good illustration to work in collaboration with other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, NOAA, the National Weather Service, state and local government's, colleges and universities.

Hazard events such as Katrina and Southern California fires, Midwest floods demonstrate the importance of working together, the share of information, coordinate activities, and to capitalize on respective resources and capabilities to best avoid and minimize the loss of life and property.

We have numerous partnerships with the Department of Interior Land Management agencies such as Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureaus of Land Management, where we provide important science information and products that inform every source management polices and practices as with the strategic habitant conservation efforts or with energy development on public lands.

Bureaus of Land Management is involved, the Fish and Wildlife Service is involved and the State Fish & Game for the State of Wyoming, we have NGOs, we have a National Nature Reserve is involved and we have the University of Wyoming also involved. So it's a tremendous collaborative effort where a lot of participants who have an interest in what's going on, and ultimately if the plan is going to work, it needs the support of the local people -- trying to look at the issue in Wyoming on landscape scale basis, we have individuals site specific oil wells, but it really has an impact on the larger ecosystem.

And so this is our efforts to try to look at things on a larger scale and to engage partners to join us in that effort and to share of information across organizational lines at the federal, state, and local level.

Mr. Morales: That's great. So Bob, I want to go back to your science strategy and talk a little bit about human capital. With the broad mission and program that you've described, how do you envision USGS' human capital needs evolving over the next couple of years? And specifically, what are doing to attract to maintain a high quality of technical and professional workforce to meet some of these future challenges?

Mr. Doyle: Well, the rate of attrition associated with the much touted baby-boomer bubble hasn't burst us but it certainly has seeped a bit. And what we having been seeing over time is that rather than having abrupt high rate attrition, that people have been slowly leaving the workforce.

So it is a challenge for us in terms to trying to replace the institutional knowledge and the expertise, but it is also an opportunity for us. An opportunity with the science strategy that would be -- take us in new directs, requiring new skills and new capabilities. And so the attrition gives us the opportunity to hire those capabilities to pursue those new directions.

Now a critical aspect to realizing our science goals is an effective human capital strategy for recruiting, develop, and retaining, and managing a highly skilled, flexible, motivated, and diverse workforce. Our major concerning challenge is maintaining the institutional memory as the workforce retires.

We have above 40 percent of our workforce eligible over the next 5 years. But our workforce planning is an integral part of our 5-year program planning process. In 2004 we developed a comprehensive suite of workforce planning tools and guidelines for evaluating both current and future workforce needs.

We currently make extensive use of the student -career-education program, which has proven to be a good source for future employees. And we also maintain an active postdoctoral program both internally within the survey called the Mendenhall Doctoral Program and we also take advantage of the National Academy of Sciences', mentoring program. I think for us to maintain and attract highly qualified talent, I think the answer is in creating a rewarding working environment where employees are valued.

Faster challenges, and interesting, and meaningful work and afford the employees an opportunity to excel, to be recognized, and to be rewarded, to give the employees the freedom to experiment and the latitude to fail -- one that is capitalized on the flexible workplace route that OPM has put in place over the last 3 or 4 years.

Flexi-place, telecommute, work-week alternatives, job sharing et cetera -- and it's important for us also as a science agency to invest in technology and equipment in the creative development of our employees.

I think, if we do all of that and I think we will set ourselves to be able to continue to attract and retain the talent that we will need to carry out the science strategy that we have before us.

Mr. Morales: Now you mentioned knowledge management, and in the last year we have seen that many federal agencies and communities have launched their own versions of Wikipedia or are using blogs.

Could you talk about efforts within USGS to leverage these new societal networking ideas and technologies and how can these tools support your mission and operations?

Mr. Doyle: USGS employees have been strong proponents of social networks and other new technologies that facilitate communication within and across our organization.

Our new generations of employees bring with them a familiarity and a comfort level with electronic information sharing. They have incorporated all of this into there daily life with family and friends. And so introducing these new technologies in the workplaces has been logically and welcomed addition to our communication tools.

Podcasts are frequently used and integrated into our websites. They enable us to reach a new audience in new ways -- they are new, popular way to communicate with the public. And I would invite you both to take advantage of accessing our website, USGS, www.usgs and to click on some of the latest podcasts that we have and that would include the hurricane activities that is occurring in the Gulf of Mexico as well as some thought about the great Shakeout exercise that will be occurring in California in November.

Convening information in nonscientific teams -- using technologies will help us to convey science in non technical terms so that the relevancy of a word can be easily understood by the general public to convey technical topics and essential points in a citizen-friendly science discussions. Our latest statistics on our web show that 1.8 million people have already accessed our sites to take advantage of the podcasts that we've made available.

We also make extensive use blogs which have become and accepted and an effective tool for informally communicating information on a range of issues or for simply sharing observations. It has become a useful tool for rapid dissemination of information, to get a general message out quickly.

We are also using Wikis. We have found them to be invaluable to us to keep our staff informed and up to date on various issues -- and have been very helpful to us in planning process in terms of with 7,300 employees located in our field location across the country with an office in every state -- sometimes it gets difficult to engage them in a process and invite them in and make them feel a part of the process.

But the Wiki technology gives us the ability to solicit comments and we found that to be very effective in some of our planning documents where we invited them to comment on and participant in that process. And so it's simply another way for us to extend their communication tools and to make it easier and more effective for us to get the message out and to increase the understanding across the organization.

Mr. Morales: That's great. Now back on the podcast, I'd just like to also let the listeners know that this very interview will be available on our podcast. So, we can sort of extend the favor there.

What does the future hold for the USGS? We will ask Robert Doyle, deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey to share with us, when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to our final segment of The Business of Government Hour. I am your host, Albert Morales. And this morning's conversation is with Robert Doyle, Deputy Director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Kunal Suryavanshi.

Bob, as you have noted many of the environmental challenges discussed transcend the national boundaries. So to that end, could you tell us a bit more about how the role that USGS plays in international efforts and issues that seek to develop a global understanding of the earth systems?

Mr. Doyle: The USGS has an active international program in part to provide technical systems to foreign countries and to collaborate with scientists around the world to further acknowledge in understanding of its science. We have many international arrangements with the United Nations, with the group, with observations, with the State Department. We work with a voluntary disaster assistance program. We have projects ongoing now with the reconstruction of Afghanistan. We just participated in International Geologic Congress and we are also active in the Circum-Pacific Council.

Indeed, some of the many national and international resource issues transcend jurisdictional boundaries -- issues such as SARS, avian influenza, climate variability, sea level rise, invasive species, drought, volcanic corruptions -- I could go on and on. Collaboration of partnerships are the cornerstone for conducting a wide variety of science and information activities to address these trans-boundary issues.

Let me give a couple of examples here -- I mentioned earlier the Circum-Arctic study that we had undertaken on undiscovered oil and gas for the purpose of assessing what is out there in the Arctic region. And it's part of a larger global study to assess the petroleum basins using standardized and consistent methodology and protocols.

We also have done a study of gas hydrates in 2002. We conducted a gas production test in Mackenzie Delta of the Canadian Arctic, an area of high concentration of gas hydrates. And we conducted by an international consortium of USGS, The Geologic Survey of Canada, Department of Energy, Japan, India, Germany, and Industry Representatives.

We've also done a Global Minerals Resource Assessment. Eight years of cooperative international effort to assess the world's undiscovered non-fuel mineral resources and to develop the methodology for an assessment, new models, and predictive tools for analysis and application of global assessments. We're also very active in International Polar Year Activities and established and operate physical and biological monitoring networks through scientific collaboration within and outside the United States with scientists around the world.

Mr. Suryavanshi: And Bob, I understand that the USGS is participating in an extensive aerial hyperspectral survey of Afghanistan. How can these same advanced techniques be applied to find new and underutilized minerals and resources in our own country?

Mr. Doyle: As part of the U.S. effort to support the reconstruction of Afghanistan, USGS scientists have provided information about the potential energy, minerals, and water resources, important to the development and stability of the Afghanistan economy. A major component of the efforts includes the collaborative effort with NASA and DOD to acquire a hyperspectral infrared imagery of Afghanistan. Hyperspectral imaging allows us to determine the actual composition of rock and minerals at the surface of the earth from a high altitude aircraft traveling a 100 miles an hour.

This technology in data collection process has been an integral part of the USGS Minerals Program for many years. But this is the first time the coverage has been obtained on a national scale. Our work with Afghanistan is also a part of an effort to build capacity in Afghanistan and to train the Afghanistan scientists in the application and use of hyperspectral data.

The Afghanistan experience will allow GS to develop algorithms and data handling techniques to facilitate manipulation of a very large data set. This will allow development of more advanced techniques that can be used to greatly improve resource investigations here in the United States.

This effort in Afghanistan provides a good example of how technology developed by the USGS can be transferred to a distant problem which then feeds back experience to allow the improvement and expansion of a domestic program, for example, applications in Alaska.

This technology is highly accurate and precise and would be especially helpful and flying over the remote areas such as the mountains and wilderness areas of Alaska.

Mr. Morales: So Bob, let me transition to the future of now. Could you give us a sense of some of the key trends that will impact the U.S. Geological Survey in say the next 3 to 5 years?

Mr. Doyle: Well, I would say certainly from a scientific perspective, our science strategy has identified six themes that we think over the next 10 years or more -- provide a good indication of where the future priorities and future focus need to be.

But I would also say that and from the technological standpoint, we see that real-time nature of data demands is going to continue to grow, is going to be an increasing public expectation for current information.

We also see that the public is going to demand free and open access to science data. You maybe aware that the secretary just made a decision recently that the entire archive of Landsat data information that we have been collecting since the 1970s would be made available at no cost over the Internet for the public. And to put that in context, people talked about tetrabytes of data. Now we are talking about petrabytes of data -- there's a tremendous amount of information.

And the challenge will be I think for the -- in the future for all data users is how would we make that information available in a cost-effective way so that people can access it and make use of it. I think that it will have increasing use of modeling and predictive capabilities to better understand the potential impacts of emerging societal issues.

Mr. Morales: So Bob, you certainly have had a very successful career over the past 35 years. As you reflect back on your experiences, what advice might you give to someone out there who perhaps is thinking about a career in public service and perhaps a career in the National Sciences?

Mr. Doyle: Well, based on my experience, I found the public service to still be a noble calling. I found it very satisfying and rewarding personally and a great opportunity for any individual to challenge themselves. The government is a big employer. There are over 2 million jobs in the government. The professions are many. So there's a great opportunity to engage and to be challenged and to have an opportunity to make a difference. And public service affords a rewarding an opportunity to learn more about your government and to get involved n very high levels with responsible work.

So I would encourage any individual out there, that's considering work with the government to think about coming in and sharing and better understanding how the government operates and look for opportunities to make a difference.

Mr. Morales: That's a wonderful advice. Thank you. Bob, unfortunately we have reached end of our time today. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule.

But more importantly Kunal and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country across the many roles that you've held across the federal government.

Mr. Doyle: Well, thank you both for the opportunity to share with you stories about the USGS and about its capabilities and its science, history. As an organization the USGS certainly has strong, proud history and tradition to do in quality science and science that's important and meaningful to this nation.

I certainly want to thank all of the employees of the USGS who have worked so hard to maintain that reputation and continued to do a quality work. I'd I like to close with a little story that I want to share with you.

Back in 2006, the USGS was a recipient of an award for the national Partnership for Public Service. They received the Service to American Medal for community service. And it originated out of the events that occurred with Katrina, down in the Gulf of Mexico. And like many federal agencies, the people who live down there and worked down there will remember the communities and they were affected by that national tragedy.

Many of our employees used the boats that we have down there, used the equipment to participate in the searching rescue and activities and you might recall that. During that effort, the - rescue teams were somewhat frustrated in their efforts because the high-water tended to obliterate the street signs, covered the street addresses, destroyed many of the landmarks.

And so the rescue teams that were in there, many of them from out of state, were not familiar with the area and they had the regular maps that they were using to try to locate people who had called in on their cell phones -- people who were in attics that were trapped, people who were on rooftops -- and they gave them street addresses, which didn't help because the normal maps were not functional.

But our cartographers were able to take those maps and convert them to latitude and longitude so that the rescuers were able to get the calls that were coming in on their cell phones and using GPS technology were able to give them a latitude and longitude location. And so the Coastguard and other rescuers were able to key off of that. It's a very small example that I think of how science can help, improve and make a difference, can improve the quality of the life of people.

And I was there that night and receiving the award on behalf of other survey and I remember the eve in the event remarked into my wife saying that I was proud to be a federal servant. Proud to hear people talk about the contribution we made as public servants to make things a little bit better.

And so I think that's symptomatic of the kind of people that we have working at the survey and the kind of work they do and the kind of contributions they can make to improve the lives of people in this country.

Mr. Morales: That's a wonderful story and certainly puts a sharp point to your message around call to service and federal service. Thank you very much.

This has been The Business of Government Hour featuring a conversation with Robert Doyle, Deputy Director of the U.S. Geological Survey. My co-host has been Kunal Suryavanshi, Associate partner in IBM's Federal Civilian in District 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 may not be able to 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.

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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.

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