Originally Broadcast April 12, 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 The Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

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

Today, scientific discoveries are emerging at an accelerating pace in virtually every field, transforming the science and engineering landscape and opening entirely new territory for exploration. As one of the premier federal agencies supporting basic research at the frontiers of discovery across all fields, the National Science Foundation plays a critical role in keeping the U.S. competitive in the sciences. The success of such a vital national mission rests on the pursuit of an effective resource management approach and workforce strategy.

With us this morning to discuss NSF's strategic efforts in these areas is Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and NSF human capital officer.

Good morning, Anthony.

Mr. Arnolie: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation is Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's Human Capital Practice.

Good morning, Solly.

Mr. Thomas: Good morning, Al. And good morning, Anthony. Good to see you again.

Mr. Morales: Anthony, let's start by setting some context for our listeners. Could you take a few minutes to provide us a general overview of the National Science Foundation, including its history and its mission today?

Mr. Arnolie: Certainly. The National Science Foundation is an independent federal government agency created by Congress in 1950 to, at that time, promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense. Today, we fund basic research in scientific disciplines such as biology, geosciences, computer sciences, engineering, and education. And we fund researchers in all 50 states through grants to about 1,700 universities. And each year, we receive about 42,000 competitive proposals, and award about 10,000 new funding grants each year.

Mr. Morales: That's a fairly competitive statistic. Could you perhaps share some additional details to give us a perspective on the organization, such as how the Foundation is organized, the size of the overall budget, number of full-time employees and contractors, if you have such a mix?

Mr. Arnolie: The Foundation is run by a director and a deputy director who oversee the staff and management responsible for program creation and administration, merit review, planning, budget, and day-to-day operations. We also have a 24-member National Science Board that establishes the overall policies for the Foundation.

This year, our current budget is about $6 billion. And at present, we have a total workforce of about 1,700. That includes about 1,200 career employees, about 200 scientists from research institutions on temporary duty, and about 300 contract workers. And we're located in Arlington, Virginia.

Each year, NSF supports an average of about 200,000 scientists, engineers, educators, and students at universities, laboratories, and field sites across the country and throughout the world, from Alaska to Alabama and from Africa to Antarctica. You could say that NSF support goes to the ends of the earth to learn more about the planet and its inhabitants and to produce fundamental discoveries.

Mr. Thomas: Anthony, now that you've provided us with a sense of the larger organization, perhaps you could tell us more about your specific program. What are your responsibilities and duties as the director of the Office of Information and Resource Management, and as the National Science Foundation's chief human capital officer? Could you take a moment and tell us about the programs under your purview, how your office is organized, and the size of your staff and your budget?

Mr. Arnolie: Sure. As director of the Office of Information and Resource Management, I'm responsible for ensuring that NSF runs smoothly and efficiently from an operational perspective. Organizationally, I'm responsible for three divisions: the Division of Information Systems, the Division of Administrative Services, and the Division of Human Resource Management. These divisions collectively are responsible for developing and maintaining the technology infrastructure and systems that facilitate business operations, as well as the underlying IT security for managing the day-to-day administrative functions, such as building security, facilities management, proposal processing, conference and events management and visitor services, and also leading the agency's effective recruitment retention, motivation development, and utilization of NSF staff.

I manage about 165 federal employees and well over 200 contractors who work within these three divisions. Approximately 75 percent of the contractors perform information technology services, including application development, data center operations, and help desk support.

From a funding perspective, I'm responsible for a budget of approximately $100 million. And as the chief human capital officer, I serve as the senior strategic advisor for the deputy and the director of the agency on all human capital management issues. I'm accountable for the strategic management of NSF's unique workforce, which includes a large planned turnover of our scientific staff annually.

Mr. Morales: Anthony, if I may, just as a quick follow-up, is your role as director of the Office of Information and Resource Management effectively what people might recognize as a CIO?

Mr. Arnolie: The information technology function falls under my purview, but the CIO function and the Office of the CIO function is a separate function. So my role is a bit broader than just information technology, much like even though I hold the title of chief human capital officer, my role is broader than just human capital management.

Mr. Morales: Okay, thank you.

Mr. Thomas: Anthony, regarding your responsibilities and duties, what are the most significant challenges that you've faced in your position, and how have you addressed these challenges?

Mr. Arnolie: I would say the most significant challenge I've faced since I've been at NSF has been funding constraints and competing priorities, which are not unusual to small agencies in particular. We've been evolving from a small sort of off-the-radar agency to a much more highly visible one, which brings with it greater oversight and increased demands. Until this year, our funding for administrative activities has not kept pace with our needs and those demands, although I am beginning to see that change this year, finally, and I'm really excited about what the future holds as a result.

As a result of that situation, we've had to make some difficult choices among competing priorities. So for example, I oversee information technology as well as human capital management. Both of those are funded traditionally out of the same budget. And so there are often times where a decision has to maybe be made between hiring more people or investing more in technology, and clearly both of those are imperative to our mission, and so it does create some difficult challenges.

What I've done in my position is to aggressively work to educate our senior leadership on the importance of the administrative functions to the execution of our mission. And as I said, I think this year, we are finally starting to make some inroads and those messages are starting to take hold and we're starting to see the benefits in terms of a bigger budget.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

Now, Anthony, I understand that prior to joining NSF, you came from the private sector. Could you describe your career path for our listeners? How did you get started, and what brought you to NSF?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, up until 2003, when I joined NSF, I spent my entire career in the private sector working for a number of accounting and professional services firms. I spent most of my career managing IT organizations, providing internal support to the consultants and accountants.

My most recent position was a partner in charge of technology administration at Arthur Andersen in New York. And it's not unknown to most what happened to Arthur Andersen as a part of the situation that took place with Enron. At the time, my wife and I were both partners at Arthur Andersen. We had met and both worked here in the D.C. area. We decided to move back. She continued in the accounting profession. We thought it wise for us to both not make the same mistake twice, if you will. And so I sought to find a challenging yet somewhat more stable occupation in the interest of our family.

Mr. Thomas: Diversification strategy.

Mr. Arnolie: Absolutely. Absolutely. Too many eggs in the same basket the first time around.

I was fortunate that the opportunity at NSF came up because it was similar from a functional standpoint to roles that I had had in the private sector, albeit obviously in a very different sector, which has been quite an interesting experience for me.

Mr. Morales: So as you sort of reflect on these experiences, how have they prepared you for your current leadership role at NSF and perhaps shaped your management approach and your leadership style today?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, I've had the fortune over my career of having six outstanding bosses, all of whom when perhaps I was maybe too young to trust, trusted me with quite a bit of responsibility. I think that what they did and the themes that I took away from working for them are ones that I apply today. The first being communication is critical. They taught me to speak honestly and frankly and expect the same in return.

The second is you must empower your staff and make sure that they take ownership for the success of whatever they're assigned with. Thirdly, that you must support them when they make mistakes and when they're being treated unfairly. And last but not least, as a leader, you must maintain your poise at all times, especially in the most difficult of situations. And as I said, each of my previous bosses exhibited those qualities, and I've tried to employ those in my management and leadership style.

Mr. Morales: Those are wonderful principles.

What is NSF's human resource strategy? We will ask Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and chief human capital officer at the National Science Foundation, 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 Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and chief human capital officer at the National Science Foundation.

Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Solly Thomas.

Anthony, let's talk a bit now about the President's Management Agenda and its focus on the improvement of management and accountability. What are some of the efforts within NSF to meet the requirements of the PMA today?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, when we embarked upon the PMA a few years ago, it really helped us as a small agency to institutionalize some of our important human capital functions and activities. And in particular, it helped us to bring some rigor to our evaluation processes.

NSF achieved green in human capital in 2005, and maintained that green for about two years up until this past June. The challenge that we faced, as I've alluded to earlier, had to do with limited funding. And as a result, we reached a point where there was a divergence between the agency priorities and some of the PMA requirements, and that left us in somewhat of a difficult position. Our funding was limited, and over time, we found it difficult to meet some of the ongoing requirements and still do what senior leadership at NSF was asking us to do.

Now, the good news is we had engaged senior leadership to the point where they had given us quite a list of human capital imperatives that they wanted us to carry out. We were working closely with senior management as well as all levels of the organization. And so while we would like to continue to work with OPM to see if we can get credit for some of the great work we're doing as an agency, and I think our director and deputy would support this, we're proud of the progress that we've been making, and we do credit the PMA for really getting us started down this road of a more rigorous approach to human capital management.

Mr. Morales: Anthony, let's probe on this area a bit more. If we focus on the theme of human capital, could you give us an overview of NSF's human capital strategy, and your efforts to develop a strategic human capital plan? How does the strategy align with and support the Foundation's core mission, goals, and organizational objectives?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, we've recently undertaken an effort to update our strategic human capital management plan, and the basis for that was the most recent update to the NSF strategic plan, so there is a very tight linkage between the human capital management plan and the agency's strategic plan. Our human capital vision is to attract, develop, and retain a diverse world-class workforce that is continually learning and expanding its capacity to shape the agency's future.

To that end, NSF senior leadership recognizes the value of strategic human capital planning as a key component of excellence in management. This is shown through the recent enhancement and ongoing implementation of our human capital management plan. And this plan is aligned to the agency's overall strategic plan as well as outlines goals, plans, and evaluation methods. A working group of senior career federal executives representing all of our key scientific disciplines was formed to update the plan and to ensure its relevancy to the agency's strategic goals and the needs of the strategic and scientific workforce.

Mr. Thomas: Anthony, staying on the human capital topic, as you know, the federal human resources community is changing from a transaction-based environment to a more strategic and consultative role. Could you tell the listeners about your efforts to transform the human resources function within the National Science Foundation? Specifically, how are you engaging the program directorates in order to anticipate human capital issues and improve processes while at the same time operating as consultants?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, under my tenure and under the leadership of the deputy CHCO, we've contracted out, over the last two years, many of our traditionally transaction-oriented duties. What that's allowed us to do is it's provided additional time for our permanent staff to serve in a more consultative role.

Additionally, we've recently implemented a service team concept. And what this entails is while we maintain our traditional functional branches, we deploy customer account representatives - CARs, we call them that are directly aligned to our internal customer organizations. These specialists strive to consult, coordinate, and communicate with their assigned organizations in order to improve our understanding of customer needs and to collaborate more closely for better, faster service. And so far, this concept seems to be working and our customers like it.

In addition, we are engaging senior leadership on a regular basis and discussing human capital issues that are of relevance to the strategic mission of the Foundation. On a quarterly basis, if not more often than that, we have a full agenda at our senior management meetings where we talk about a variety of human capital issues. The important point here is we don't spend a lot of time talking about staffing and classification, but really talking more about how we shape or reshape the workforce to respond to the needs of the scientific community.

And in addition, because we are a highly participatory organization, all of our strategic human capital initiatives are done in collaboration with the program directorates. I mentioned the updating of the human capital management plan as one example, but just about every one of our initiatives from a human capital standpoint is overseen by a steering committee or a working group that consists of representation from all parts of our organization.

Mr. Thomas: Anthony, let's talk a little bit about performance management. Could you tell us about the National Science Foundation's efforts to develop and implement an agency-wide performance management system, and in particular, the focus on aligning employee performance expectations with organizational goals and objectives?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, our performance plans for executives have been aligned to the agency mission for quite some time. In 2004, we expanded this to all general workforce performance plans. We held briefings for supervisors and staff. We set up frequently asked questions, and even created an internal web page to provide information and sample performance plans showing linkage to the mission. And within a short period of time, we had full compliance throughout the agency, and have been pleased with this result. As research shows that when employees see how their daily work supports the organization's goals, then their performance improves, and from there, organizational performance improves.

As far as the executive performance plans, we take a very rigorous and we'd like to think transparent approach to both the evaluation of the plans themselves and their linkage to mission, along with an evaluation of the appraisals and how effective the executives have been at carrying out what's documented in the performance plans. We think that this has been very important, both in terms of making sure that activities are aligned to the mission, and also that our executives are held accountable for delivering on those things documented in their plans.

Mr. Thomas: To accomplish its mission, the National Science Foundation invests in the best ideas generated by scientists, engineers, and educators across all fields of research and education. Could you give our listeners an overview of the Foundation's performance assessment framework? What exactly is the framework, and to what extent does it enable continuous improvement and ensure openness to the research and education communities serviced by the Foundation?

Mr. Arnolie: NSF conducts a wide range of internal and external assessment activities to evaluate and report on our strategic investments and how effectively the strategic plan is being implemented. Since we fund basic research in science and engineering and education, it's sometimes not possible to directly link outcomes to annual investments because the results from basic research oftentimes takes years to come to fruition. Consequently, we believe in assessing the true impact of NSF's activities by utilizing the qualitative judgment of outside experts. To that end, we have a few activities.

One is what we call committees of visitors. We rely on these external committees of experts to evaluate long-term outcomes resulting from NSF grants. The COVs, as we call them, meet every three years to review the program reviews and to provide into two areas: the assessment of the quality and integrity of program operations, and how the research results have contributed to the attainment of NSF's mission and strategic outcome goals.

We also utilize directorate and office advisory committees. The judgment of these external experts help NSF to maintain high standards of program management. They also provide advice for continuous improvement and ensure openness to the research and education community served by the Foundation. Each of our directorates has an external advisory committee that meets twice a year to provide a review of program operations, discuss important current issues, and approve recent reports from the relevant COVs.

Last but not least, we have an advisory committee for Government Performance and Results Act. This external advisory committee conducts an assessment of the entire portfolio of NSF investments in science, engineering, and education. Each year, the committee reviews the Foundation's investments to determine if NSF demonstrated significant achievement under these strategic goals. The committee submits a report to the NSF director, which is incorporated into the Foundation's annual report each year.

Mr. Morales: Now, Anthony, you talked a little bit about the connection between the program leadership and your organization. And I'm sure that the increase in multidisciplinary projects, international activities, and major research projects has increased the volume as well as the complexity of the workload over at NSF. But could you tell us a little bit more about the efforts to analyze these workload requirements? And what can you tell us about a pilot program currently underway to test a new organizational structure and operations model?

Mr. Arnolie: For many years, NSF has been a leading federal agency in leveraging technology to support business processes. With rapid increases in e-government solutions to conduct our core business, we discovered that there were resultant changes in employees' job functions and competencies.

In 2007, we developed a weighted workload model that compares NSF's workload indicators to the staffing levels in our directorates and offices. The trend data allows us to track changes in workload by workload type and by scientific discipline for each directorate and for each program. The model shows a significant increase in overall workload in the last seven years, with only a modest increase in our staffing levels. Further, the model projects continued increases in the coming years, and we continue to refine the model as new data becomes available.

In terms of the pilot, about two years ago we undertook what we called an administrative function study in order to understand and address the impact of changing business process and technology on the program support workforce. The goal was to better align the functions assigned to the administrative staff in support of the mission and to increase professional development opportunities for administrative staff by establishing career paths and learning maps.

The program support staff at NSF represents about 30 percent of our permanent workforce. And recommendations from this study have led to the development of new program support positions that have become part of a clearer career paths with extended professional opportunities that did not previously exist at NSF. In addition to the new positions and career paths, we've developed learning maps that help guide employees through their options for individual competency development, and allows them to target professional development opportunities at the Foundation.

The pilot was initiated in 2007 to test the management positions of this new model we created, and a structured learning and development plan is in place for each of the pilot positions for the duration in order to address the competency gaps assessed prior to the beginning of the pilot. Additional competency gap analysis will be conducted during the pilot. And at the end of the pilot, we will perform a formal evaluation in addition to the rolling evaluations to assess the validity of the pilot and to determine future plans for the new management positions.

Mr. Morales: That's great. It sounds like it's going very well.

Let me switch gears for a moment here, Anthony, and talk a little bit about the NSF Academy. Could you elaborate on how the Academy provides learning opportunities which support the agency's vision and mission? And since we do like to talk about technologies here, can you tell us a little bit about something called "Academy Learn?"

Mr. Arnolie: The NSF Academy serves as the catalyst for the creation of a continuous learning organization at the National Science Foundation. We have a highly educated workforce, and sometimes convincing them that further development and enrichment is necessary. But what we've tried to do with the Academy is, as I said, to simply serve as a catalyst for stimulating discussion and dialogue that might lead to that enrichment.

The Academy promotes organizational excellence through the advancement of human capital by proactively identifying and implementing programs necessary for the development of all of our employees. One unique offering that supports our mission-critical occupations is the Program Management Seminar. This seminar is NSF's orientation for new program officers, many of whom have never worked for the federal government before. In addition to introducing them to federal government requirements, the seminar examines our agency's culture and values centered around NSF's merit review of submitted proposals, and it also raises the new program officer's awareness of the diverse composition of NSF's workforce.

We also offer division director retreats twice a year and division director roundtables on a quarterly basis that are structured around topics of interest to our division directors and our deputy division directors. As an example of how NSF is a highly participatory organization, the planning committees who determine the agendas, the topics, the guests, are all the division directors and deputy division directors, with some assistance from my staff. In addition, the Academy is consistently evaluating and redesigning these programs to better meet the needs of our internal customers.

The NSF Academy is also embarking upon a blended approach to learning that enhances employee learning by allowing individuals to select the learning medium that best fits their individual needs. For example, the Academy provides standard classroom education, but it also provides e-business courses that can be accessed online 24/7 from home or work or while on travel.

We're currently implementing Academy Learn, a learning management system that contains a course catalogue of over 2,000 online courses, has an online technical library, and also has an individual learning plan built in that can communicate the employee's training needs and wants to their supervisor, so that supervisors can more fully support the learning process for our employees.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

How does NSF manage a blended workforce? We will ask Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and chief human capital officer at NSF, 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 Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and chief human capital officer at the National Science Foundation.

Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Solly Thomas.

Anthony, like most organizations, workforce planning must be critical in helping your agency's leadership draw a clearer picture of the nature of the current and future human capital decisions. Could you tell us a bit about your efforts to enhance and institutionalize, perhaps, workforce planning within the Foundation?

Mr. Arnolie: Certainly. There's been quite a lot of activity around this in the last two years. As I mentioned before, our human capital strategic plan also includes a workforce plan as well as a succession plan, and those were recently updated to more closely align with the NSF's strategic plan. We assembled a group of senior executives from across the Foundation who led that effort and drafted a plan that was distributed to all NSF staff for comment, another example of the highly participatory nature even after the plan was developed. And we did this with the strategic plan as well. It was posted for comment for about three weeks for each and every one of the employees to provide feedback, and we did make changes as a result of that. That's somewhat of an aside.

But in any case, the workforce plan itself identifies the steps to align our workforce with our current and projected work requirements. Each year, the Division of Human Resource Management facilitates a workforce planning process with NSF senior management that results in an updated set of goals, priorities, and action strategies for workforce and staffing planning across the Foundation. This structured process has focused management efforts on strategic workforce planning, and I would say that's for the first time in many years at the Foundation.

At the same time, we've implemented a biannual staffing planning process with each directorate and office that focuses specifically on developing work unit staffing plans. The staffing planning process encourages directorates and offices to align their staffing strategies to the overall workforce plan.

Mr. Morales: Anthony, you mentioned succession planning. What are some of the efforts at NSF to ensure continuity of leadership through succession planning and executive development? Specifically, what changes are you perhaps making to the recruitment process that enable you to use flexible compensation strategies to attract and retain employees in some of the mission-critical areas?

Mr. Arnolie: The goal of our succession planning activities is to ensure a seamless transition in all of our executive leadership positions. We strive to enable continuity of business operations and to preserve critical organizational knowledge. Finally, we want to develop and nurture a cadre of executives that can lead the agency into the future. Some of our implementation strategies aim to broaden and deepen NSF's leadership pipeline through the implementation of a comprehensive leadership development program, to prepare leadership transition plans for all executive positions, and last but not least, to establish a comprehensive knowledge management and transfer strategy for all of our executive leadership positions.

Regarding our recruiting strategies, we use two principal avenues to hire staff. The first is the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, that authorized the creation of the agency and also authorizes us to appoint scientists and engineers without competition under the accepted service authority unique to our agency. This appointing authority provides us with the necessary flexibility to fill these mission-critical occupations. Compensation for these scientists and engineers is set within pay bands, and the use of additional incentives can also be authorized. Our administrative staff is hired using the same appointing and compensation rules as other agencies in the Executive Branch.

There are similarities in the recruiting processes for both of these groups and we've made substantial efforts to simplify the process, to leverage technology, and to look for ways to streamline the process. For example, we post our job information on both nsf.gov and USA Jobs. To the extent that there are individuals who are specifically looking for NSF opportunities, they would obviously find those on our website. And there are other individuals who may be seeking opportunities from NSF along with many other alternatives.

We've also adapted our recruiting processes to the needs and expectations of our key target applicant groups. For our professional scientific and engineering community, we use a streamlined application process. And these applicants may submit resumes that are much more in line with the types of CVs typically used in those professional communities. We also have extensive outreach efforts to the various scientific communities through what we call "Dear Colleague" letters, which solicit interest in our vacancies by contacting presidents of universities and chancellors who might know of worthy candidates who would be interested in an opportunity at NSF.

Last but not least, word of mouth is an extremely important tool in filling these positions. We turn over about 30 percent of our scientific workforce each year by design. And it's key for us for those individuals when they return to their home institutions to have had a positive experience, and therefore, be in a great position to recommend the next wave of individuals to serve the country by working at NSF.

Mr. Morales: That's great. It sounds like you're making it easier not only for the applicant, but as well as the managers within the organization who are seeking these candidates.

Mr. Thomas: Anthony, given NSF's mission, you seem to rely on a continual and transparent exchange between the broader science community and the Foundation itself. Could you tell us how federal managers can effectively manage an ever-increasing blended workforce composed of contractors and federal workers? And what are some of the key differences intrinsic to these core groups?

Mr. Arnolie: Our success in engaging the science community is in large part because we interact with them regularly and rely on them heavily to perform many key business functions of the Foundation. We not only recruit them for key leadership and program management positions, but we utilize them for merit review of competitive proposals as well as our performance assessment activities.

Now, while this enables fresh ideas regarding scientific research and the management of the agency, it does bring with it some challenges in terms of managing a blended workforce. When you factor in the increased reliance on contractors to perform many administrative functions, managing the NSF workforce can be challenging.

The good news is we have a very collegial culture, and the career federal employees at NSF provide mentoring support, and most importantly, stability to the agency's operations. One of the things that we try to do is we both try and engage the contractors and temporary staff as part of the NSF family. At the same time, we work closely to establish a strong core among the career executives and staff, because it's important for the contractors and temporary workers to hear and for the messages to be reinforced as to what's important to the Foundation.

And so we find that it's the permanent staff that allow us to do that. We have a very dedicated and committed staff, and they really make it possible for this rotation of temporary workers to come in and out and still allow the business of the Foundation to continue.

Mr. Thomas: As you know, Anthony, the younger employees have different attitudes, behaviors, and expectations for their careers and the workplace. In general, they tend to be more flexible and more mobile, and therefore, we expect them to change employers and jobs several times. They also typically look for more flexibility from their employers and greater support at the workplace.

Could you tell our listeners about the National Science Foundation's efforts to meet the challenge of this changing workforce?

Mr. Arnolie: In part, I think we're meeting the needs of this group by expanding our use of the Federal Career Intern Program as well as the Presidential Management Fellows Program. In addition, as you know, we're widely recognized as one of the great places to work in the federal government, and we offer many amenities, such as an on-site fitness center, an on-site child care center, on-site health services, on-site caf�, library services, and proximity to a shopping mall.

We also offer detailed assignments that offer interesting developmental opportunities for our employees. For the last six years, the number of telework agreements on file at the Foundation have increased, and telework is clearly one of those areas that's appealing to employees of all ages. That said, NSF is in a somewhat unique position because for many of the positions we try and fill, the requirements greatly limit our pool and our opportunities to go after some of the younger employees, in that a Ph.D. with six years of experience after attaining it is often a requirement for many of our program management positions. And so we look to leverage as best we can the opportunities to attract younger employees for those positions that they would qualify for.

Mr. Thomas: The NSF is also co-managing partner and a consortium leader for the grants management line of business. And you recently launched a web portal called research.gov. Could you tell us about this specific effort, and to what extent does your office support systems necessary to manage the Foundation's grant-making process?

Mr. Arnolie: Certainly. NSF is a single-mission agency that fulfills that mission by issuing grants, so it's critical that our IT investments support and enable those business processes. Research.gov is a new initiative that supports the grant-making process by providing a menu of services tailored to the needs of the research community, and enables NSF to comply with recent government-wide mandates and guidelines.

We were selected by OMB to lead the research focus grants management consortium because of our successful track record with our existing grants management system, FastLane, our leadership position in the research community, and our high standards and performance for our customers. Research.gov allows us to leverage FastLane's capabilities to deliver common grants management services, and allows us to serve as a lead partner for federal research-oriented, grant-making agencies with a shared vision of increasing customer service for the research community while streamlining and standardizing the business process among the partner agencies. Research.gov provides public-facing services for the broader research community, and business services for institutions that apply for and receive grants from participating federal research agencies.

The first of many business services that we offer is grants application status, and we recently released this in a beta mode. It will allow applicants to check the status of grant applications submitted to NSF and any of its research.gov partners in one single location. As this initiative matures, research.gov will continue to develop and implement additional services in support of the science, engineering, research, and education mission.

Mr. Morales: Anthony, in the past year, we've seen a surge of federal agencies and a variety of communities launching their own version of a Wikipedia or a blog. Could you talk about efforts within NSF to leverage these new social networking ideas and technologies such as blogs and wikis? And specifically from perhaps your vantage point, how can such tools enhance NSF's ability to collaborate and communicate?

Mr. Arnolie: NSF has several methods by which we interact with our communities, both internal and external. There's active interest among our scientists and engineers to explore and use various collaboration tools, and our connection with the academic community keeps us on the constant lookout for the latest technologies.

Regarding wiki technology, we launched the first NSF wiki in 2005, and it has been in agency-wide use for over the last two or three years. Currently, we have about 20 distinct groups that use the NSF wiki for a variety of purposes, such as project updates, meeting minutes, notices of interest, and posting and updating standard operating procedures. Right now, we're exploring the development of a wiki that can be used for both internal staff and their external communities for collaboration. All these tools can help NSF to better communicate and collaborate. We also have the luxury internally of being located in one location, which facilitates a lot more face-to-face collaboration, which is not always an option for some other organizations.

Mr. Morales: Let me switch subjects here for a moment. A major cyber security concern with the federal government these days is employees perhaps not thinking about the risks and being careless about personal information and data security. What steps have you taken to create or cultivate a culture of accountability and protection for sensitive personal information?

Mr. Arnolie: We strive to balance security and privacy considerations, such as the protection of personal information and data, with the open and collaborative environment that's central to the scientific research and discovery. User education we think is the critical success factor in maintaining this appropriate balance.

Our key message establishes accountability. Each employee is responsible for recognizing personal information and avoiding inappropriate access, use, or disclosure. We hold annual security awareness training, which is required or all employees and other on-site staff. We also hold ongoing outreach activities to remind employees of their responsibilities with respect to protection of personal information.

Keeping users informed is just one component of NSF's security and privacy strategy. NSF's information systems are designed to facilitate work processes while providing appropriate levels of protection for security information, which is not a trivial task given that we receive 42,000 proposals each year for research, education, and training projects, and we receive several thousand applications annually for graduate and postdoctoral fellowships.

One of the things that we've done recently, in 2007, we stopped collecting Social Security numbers from individuals that conduct business with the Foundation, and assigned unique NSF IDs to replace those SSNs for all individual accounts in our grants management system, and this constituted over 350,000 records. We also implemented other technical controls, such as data encryption and secure access mechanisms that are employed where appropriate to provide additional layers of protection for sensitive personal information.

Finally, our security and privacy program could not be successful without the involvement and dedication of senior management, particularly the director and the deputy director. When senior leadership makes it clear that security and privacy are priorities, then the Foundation listens.

Mr. Morales: That's great.

What does the future hold for the National Science Foundation? We will ask Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and chief human capital officer at the Foundation, 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 Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and chief human capital officer at the NSF.

Also joining us in our conversation from IBM is Solly Thomas.

Anthony, in addition to your role at NSF, I understand that you're also the chairman of the Small Agency Council. Could you tell us more about the Council and its charter? Specifically, what kinds of agencies are represented on the Council and what are the goals of the Council?

Mr. Arnolie: Sure. The Small Agency Council is a voluntary management association of sub-cabinet independent federal agencies. It was established in 1986 with the purpose of achieving three major goals: the first, to ensure that federal policy oversight agencies consider implications to small agencies when developing management policies; the second, to exchange approaches for improving management and productivity at small agencies; and the third, to share management resources so as to strengthen the internal management practices of small agencies.

Now, the loose definition of a small agency is an agency with less than 6,000 employees. Currently, the Small Agency Council has over 80 member agencies representing about 50,000 federal employees, and each of those agencies is represented by a principal management official who generally oversees agency management functions such as personnel, budget, procurement, finance, and information resources management. The full Council meets at least two times a year to discuss a variety of management issues of concern to small agencies.

The Council also has a number of committees that represent small agencies on specialized issues, including information technology, finance, procurement, training, and administrative services. Personnel from these agencies who work in these functional areas sit on these committees and help to widen the overall scope and effectiveness of the Council. In addition, we're also represented on many federal policy oversight organizations such as the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, the Federal CFO Council, and the Federal CIO Council.

Small agencies that have joined the Council are responsible for managing a wide array of federal programs and implementing various statutes. Members have diverse program responsibilities, including private and public sector employment, commerce and trade, energy and science, transportation, national defense, finance, and cultural issues. Almost half of the Council is divided among regulatory and enforcement agencies, and the remaining half is divided among grant-making, advisory, and uniquely chartered organizations. There are many sized agencies represented, including several so-called micro agencies with less than 100 employees.

During my tenure as chair, I believe the Council has further advanced the cause and unique issue of small agencies through the power of its collective voice and membership, which is really the main charter of the Council. For those who are interested in learning more about the Small Agency Council, please visit www.sac.gov.

Mr. Morales: Great.

Now, as a follow-up, could you tell us more about the efforts on the part of the Council to establish a human resources training academy? What is this training academy, and how might it operate?

Mr. Arnolie: Actually it's not the Small Agency Council, but the Small Agency Human Resource Council that has created the human resources training academy for small agencies. The "SAHR C," as they're called, operates independently from the Small Agency Council. However, because my deputy division director for human resource management is a co-chair of this training committee, I can actually tell you a little bit more about it.

Two courses have recently been held, and both were well-attended. And at this time, instructors are being sought among the different small agencies to train on a wide variety of topics within the HR arena, such as workforce planning, labor relations, and benefits. I should also mention that the Small Agency Council administers a training program each year through voluntary contributions from member agencies. This program allows us to pool and leverage funding from across the government agencies to make training opportunities available to small agency personnel. This is particularly beneficial to some of the micro agencies and other really small agencies that would otherwise not have the opportunity in some cases to provide their personnel with required training.

Mr. Thomas: Anthony, let's come back to your role at the National Science Foundation. In transitioning to the future, how do you envision NSF's human capital needs evolving in the next two to three years? And how do you envision your office evolving over that same period of time to support this transition?

Mr. Arnolie: I think what we'll do is we will continue our aggressive push to hire more staff. We're in desperate need, and we'll continue to focus on that. We plan to continue our efforts to redefine the NSF workforce and equip them with the skills and competencies that they need to be successful and to carry out the agency's mission. We'll continue to look for ways to leverage technology solutions to improve our work processes. And we'll also continue to implement work-life programs that improve both the quality of work and the quality of life for our staff.

My office will continue to strategically align itself with our customers, listen intently to their needs, and work closely with them to create and customize our service offerings and deliver the services and solutions that help the agency carry out its mission.

Mr. Thomas: Now, there has been much discussion about the pending retirement wave in government and what type of impact it will have on agencies. What are you seeing within NSF, and what plans are in place to mitigate its effect?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, as it turns out, our retirement projections aren't as grim as the federal government overall. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 50 percent of all federal employees and 70 percent of all federal senior managers will be eligible to retire by 2010. At NSF, by contrast, only about 20 percent are eligible today, and 39 percent will be eligible in 2011. In addition, and maybe more importantly, NSF staff tend to work longer into their retirement eligibility years.

With the recent adoption of the updated NSF strategic plan and the importance of aligning the agency's human capital management with the Foundation's strategic goals and priorities, a succession planning working group was tasked to update key elements of the human capital management strategy, including leadership succession planning, goals, and strategies.

Some specific succession planning concepts being implemented include identifying best practices in leadership transition and knowledge transfer, providing hands-on learning and mentoring for potential leaders, and appraising senior leadership on their succession planning efforts. And we believe that focusing on those particular areas will put us in the best position to handle any retirement wave that we might face in the years to come.

Mr. Morales: Anthony, you previously talked about how NSF has received the honors as one of the agencies titled as the best places to work. And in fact, you've obviously ranked consistently near the top on that list. So other than some of the things that you've mentioned, what do you think are some of the keys to your success as a best place to work?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, I'd like to take a lot of credit for that since it's the Federal Human Capital Survey that yields those results, but the truth is it's the NSF staff that make NSF a great place to work. It's very participatory, as I said before. Every individual believes that they have a voice and that what they have to say can influence the agency's priorities and the agency's strategic direction. I think that that is an important factor in people coming to the Foundation and wanting to stay at the Foundation.

In addition, I think that we have a very unique and very important mission in terms of funding basic research. We promote science and innovation through all types of science disciplines, and I think it's critically important. Two items that might not directly be connected to NSF in the public's eyes would be the initial investments we made to lead to the creation of the Internet, or the investments that we made in a small group of principal investigators who later went on to found Google. So those are two of the things that as an employee of NSF, you recognize that the work we do really in the near and the longer term future promote incredible innovations in science, engineering, research, and education that are critically important to the country.

As I said earlier, one of the other reasons I think we are considered one of the best places to work is we do all that we can to provide a variety of work-life programs that are meaningful and beneficial to our staff. I mentioned the on-site child care center, the on-site fitness center, the on-site health services, along with retirement counseling and tuition assistance. We continue to try and add to our portfolio work-life programs to the fullest extent possible.

Mr. Morales: That's great.

On that same note, Anthony, we have a number of listeners who may be thinking about a career in public service. Now, given your own federal experience and the transition from the private sector, what advice might you give someone out there who's perhaps considering a role in government?

Mr. Arnolie: Well, there are a number of agencies with different missions who serve this country in different ways. I would suggest that you explore a bit to find a fit between what you value and what you're interested in and what your strengths are and what those agencies do. I know that agencies are working hard to be more flexible in terms of work schedules and work assignments, so don't assume there isn't a good fit for you. Finally, understand that there's nothing more important than service to your country, so lend us your talents and you might find a rewarding, challenging, and personally enriching opportunity awaits you. That was certainly the case for me, and continues to be the case for me at NSF.

Mr. Morales: That's wonderful advice.

Unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time. I do want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule, but more importantly, Solly and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country in your roles at NSF.

Mr. Arnolie: Thank you. And I guess I'd like to finish by saying a recent study said that there was a very positive impression of who NSF was, but by that same audience, not a clear understanding of exactly what we do. So what I would encourage you to do is to go to www.nsf.gov and learn more about what the Foundation is all about, the areas that we provide funding for, and the types of activities that might be of interest to those of you seeking employment in the federal government.

Mr. Morales: That's great.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Anthony Arnolie, director of the Office of Information and Resource Management and chief human capital officer at the National Science Foundation.

My co host has been Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's Human Capital 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.

Full Radio Interview Transcript

Dr. Jeff Pon
Chief Human Capital Officer
Department of Energy

Originally Broadcast Saturday, June 30, 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. This is Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a rich and diverse history, with the lineage tracing back to the Manhattan Project. Today, DOE stands at the forefront of helping this nation meet its energy, scientific, environmental, and national security goal of developing and deploying new energy technologies and reducing our dependence on foreign energy sources.

The success of such a critical mission rests on DOE's pursuit of an effective workforce strategy.

With us this morning to discuss the Department of Energy's strategic human capital efforts is Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Good morning, Jeff.

Dr. Pon: Good morning, Albert.

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

Good morning, Solly.

Mr. Thomas: Good morning, Al, and good morning, Jeff.

Dr. Pon: Good morning, Solly.

Mr. Morales: Jeff, let's start off by learning more about your department. Many of our listeners are generally familiar with the U.S. Department of Energy. But can you give us an overview of the history and the mission of the Department?

Dr. Pon: Absolutely. It's probably one of the richest histories in our nation. As you take a look at the Department of Energy, I'd like to hearken it back to the three isms. We've combated three isms: one, fascism, Manhattan Project yielding the atomic bomb ending World War II; communism, the Cold War era, where we had to basically give a lot of resources to the nuclear complex to combat the rise and fall of the former U.S.S.R; and now terrorism. We're developing bomb technology, different types of detection technology. We are tasked as a mission for non-nuclear proliferation across the world, and we also maintain the nuclear stockpile.

Those are three great missions that the U.S. Department of Energy has had in its history. But truth be known about this, as I was prepping for this interview, many people always hearken back to the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer and how he built the team with contractors.

But I had this factoid actually run across my desk. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein actually wrote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about research in developing a powerful bomb, and that Einstein noted that Germans had stopped the sales of uranium, and German physicists were engaging in uranium research. That was probably one of the pivotal points where a scientist actually interacted with one of our chiefs of state. And I think from that interaction kind of grew a lot of the notion of a patriotic scientist.

Mr. Morales: Well, Jeff, that's certainly a very rich history and a very broad mission that you've described for the Department. To help give us a sense of scale, could you tell us how the Department is organized? Can you tell us a little bit about the size, the budget? You referenced the mix between federal employees and contractors. And also, can you describe the geographic footprint of the Department?

Dr. Pon: Sure, absolutely. Well, first, I forgot to mention that in 1977, President Carter actually formalized the Department of Energy, and our first Energy Secretary was Jim Schlesinger. About 200 employees actually took over Building 5 at DoD, which is now known as the Forrestal Building.

But in 1977, we kind of came together kind of like DHS. I sometimes describe the Energy Department as being a myriad of different types of agencies. Those agencies were the Federal Energy Administration, Energy Research and Development Administration, Federal Power Commissions. We run Bonneville Power Administration, which has a lot of different dams, utilities, transmission lines all the way from the Columbia River system, Washington, Oregon, and also California, and it runs the gamut. So we do a lot of different things and a lot of different missions.

Really, I think it's important to note that the Department Of Energy's footprint is a domestic agenda. We have about 14,000 federal people across the whole entire complex. We run 27 national laboratories, some of which you probably know of: Lawrence Berkeley, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne, Fermi, too many to list in this conversation. But we pride ourselves as being on the forefront of scientific discovery. Where else in the whole entire world can you actually claim that you work for an organization that's trying to discover the meaning of the universe, mapping the human genome, making little stars at the NIF program? NIF stands for National Ignition Facility, where we actually fuse materials together to create different types of materials.

One of my first experiences as a person that was growing up in the Bay Area was actually taking a tour at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. And it was so inspirational, after 20-30 years growing up in the Bay Area and going over Interstate 280 and looking at, very quickly, on Sand Hill Road, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, that big two-mile stretch that goes right underneath 280, and actually knowing that you're a part of that complex and knowing that you're a part of a rich history of science and technology, 85 Nobel laureates that are associated with our DOE complex. That's just something that I take great pride in representing. And I hope that we're great stewards of the future of scientists and technologists in the Department of Energy.

Mr. Morales: Absolutely fascinating.

Mr. Thomas: Jeff, now that you've provided us with the scope of the Department, and certainly a very fascinating description of the Department, could you tell us more about your specific role? What are your responsibilities and duties as Energy's Chief Human Capital Officer? And could you tell us about the areas under your purview, how your office is organized, the size of your staff, as well as the budget?

Dr. Pon: Solly, I'll address that in a couple of different ways. I'll give you the standard one, which is the CHCO Act, or the Chief Human Capital Officers Act of 2002. We're supposed to be the principal advisors to the head of the agencies. I do act as the principal advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary in all matters concerning our workforce, the development, retention, and recruitment of our workforce.

But moreover, I think in the private sector, you have this thing called "duties as assigned." That's very much emphasized here. We're not only working as human resources people, but really as strategic business partners to our most-senior leadership here. We're in a business model. We run a $24 billion business. We're the largest funder of the physical sciences, so we have a large responsibility to do what's critical for workforce planning in alignment with the mission. That is my primary mission and goal, to make sure that we have the right talent at the right time at the right place.

Mr. Thomas: And regarding those responsibilities and duties, what are the most significant challenges that you face in your position, and how have you addressed these challenges?

Dr. Pon: My responsibility is to make sure that each and every one of our managers has the right information to make some critical decisions. We make sure while we are recruiting, selecting, and retaining people that our workforce strategies are effective, in alignment with our priorities as an organization.

If you take a look at the history of DOE, one of the chief challenges that we have is working together. Each and every one of our sites has a rich history, has their Nobel Prize winners. These different types of confluences around our whole entire complex makes it very difficult to align to a whole entire strategic mission and be one Energy Department.

But when you come down to it, I think if you were to explain the Department of Energy, we're really in the business of managing science, technology for energy security, national security, and American competitiveness in an environmentally responsible way. That's a huge portfolio.

I asked the Secretary of Energy, are we a one company, one corporation, with a leadership philosophy that's integrated across our organization, where the golden mean or the bar is set at a certain level and everybody follows it, or are we a holding company with 24 or 27 different LLCs? He answered it by saying, "I believe that we are the latter, but striving to be the former."

And that's my job here, it's to make sure that we're aligning people practices, financial practices with the CFO acquisition practices, because at the end of the day, if you're talking about functional things, and I know that The Business of Government program has not only human capital officers on but CFO, COOs, and other different types, the bottom line is making sure your organization effectively is managed across the organization. So that's what we're trying to do.

And in my office, we're tasked with doing some pretty interesting things that aren't just human resources-related, but human capital-related. running in human resources, too.

Mr. Morales: Well, I do want to get into some of the details of how you do keep the trains running in such a complex organization. But I'd like to learn a little bit more about you first, Jeff.

You referenced the private sector, and you're relatively new to the government, so I'm curious. Can you tell us a little bit about your private sector career and what brought you to the federal government?

Dr. Pon: Sure. I came here to the federal government as a Presidential appointee this time. I came here to serve this country and give back. That's one of the more important things that myself and my family wanted to do. It's really unplugged from the private sector. My wife and I were working in some great companies. I ran a couple of companies then at the time. I was experienced in doing a large-scale change at a big technology company, a Fortune 250 company, repositioning them, going from 57 general ledgers to three.

So is that human capital? I would say it is because it has to do with the management of human resources and how people make decisions.

Mr. Morales: Jeff, that's obviously a very broad background, so I'm curious. How have those experiences shaped your current leadership style and how you manage today?

Dr. Pon: I think I'm blessed to having this job come here, because it's really at the intersection of where my sweet spot is. I'm an industrial organizational psychologist, an organizational change management expert.

And I take a look at the government as being the most challenging organization, the most important company to run -- 1.8 billion people. So I take a look at the complexity of our human resources function here in the federal government, and I take a look at it as an opportunity to improve an existing working system, and taking the evolutionary approach of doing things in the government that's very meaningful for managers.

Some of the policies and personnel procedures that we have were designed in the 1940s and '50s, and continue to be managed and run that way. We have certain market pressures that we face as a federal government, and we're addressing those things in a concerted effort. So what brings me here is really a sense of challenge. It's really to make sure that it's a collaborative -- as the President says -- citizen-centered, market-driven, results-oriented government. And I think that's what the taxpayer expects. They want to make sure that the federal government is working in an effective and efficient manner.

Mr. Morales: That's great.

So what is the Department of Energy's human resource strategy? We will ask Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy, 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 Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy.

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

Jeff, let's take a moment to discuss the President's Management Agenda, or the PMA. The Department of Energy continues to maintain its Green status in human capital management under the PMA. Could you elaborate on your efforts in getting to Green? What challenges did DOE have in overcoming its own internal workings to get to this level? And what does the Department need to do to sustain the status going forward?

Dr. Pon: Just to qualify, I've been at the Department of Energy for about 14, 15 months. We were Green when I entered; hopefully it'll stay that way. So that was largely with my partner over there, Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer, Claudia Cross, and the staff that she built.

The areas that we've achieved to get to Green is making sure that we have a strategic plan for the whole entire organization -- a five-year strategic human capital plan that's integrated across our whole entire organization. It's making sure that we're closing the gaps in mission critical occupations, in IT, in program management, in project management, HR. There's a lot of different good work that has been done in the last five years, six years, in getting us to Green. And I think we're going to maintain that if we do our work in making sure that performance management is central to that.

One of the key challenges in getting to Green and staying Green is not just being Green. It's really related to how do we operate our business? And I think that's the core essence of the President's Management Agenda. And that has been one of the highlights in his presidency, and hopefully, the work will continue in its institutionalized form with the scorecards, and many of the practices that come from a President that is an MBA. I think it's very important to understand what we're trying to do here in human capital in the Department of Energy. We're making sure that our human capital processes are in support of the program mission.

We're getting back into the nuclear energy business. We're making sure that there's a global nuclear energy partnership, making sure that as our science and technology people that average the age of 50 in our complex, while they're going out, we have knowledge management and learning development-type of strategies. Those are what's important to me and captured in our scorecard.

It helps keep transparency and accountability across our whole entire organization, but bottom-line is, are you doing the right thing? I'm going to be emphasizing really a lot of alignment between performance accountability -- we've aligned our mission goals all the way down to the individual, so each individual knows their individual role and responsibility to the mission.

That's a large accomplishment in and of itself, but now we have to really justify how we keep track of the "what do you do" and "how do you do it." So "what do you do" is the accomplishments, but "how do you do it" is just as important, which is a cultural element of it.

So I think we're one of the leaders in the government in trying to change the culture and operationalizing the culture through the human capital plan, and through what work we do with the Office of Personnel Management and OMB. And as a result, it's not just about checking the boxes. We want to make sure that these priorities are meaningful so that we have the right people, right place, right time. We're training and developing the best of the best, because we are the best of the best, and we want to remain that way as a nation in this global competitive environment.

Mr. Morales: So it's really about institutionalizing the changes that you set forth in your strategy.

You referenced the strategy, and you talked about its linkage to the mission of the Department. Jeff, I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit more on that. Can you give us perhaps a more-detailed overview of the DOE's human capital strategy, and some examples of how you're aligning that with the mission goals of the larger department?

Dr. Pon: Sure, absolutely. Actually, the President and Secretary of Energy have 10 priorities, one of which is the strategic management of human capital. That was a great surprise to me, a great endorsement of what the Secretary actually believes where human capital should play. It's at the mission level of the Department. Why is it so important to do that? It's because human capital is something that has to be on the forefront of the conversation as opposed to human resources, as in the transactional nature of those things.

I would think that the strategic management of human capital is a wide brush of how we do things in the Department in terms of what do we find important in terms of knowledge skills, abilities, and experiences of our employees, but moreover, from there, you can actually define your recruitment strategies, hiring strategies, your development strategy and retention strategies. Sometimes I go into other organizations and talk this language in the private sector -- the make, rent, or buy type of strategy.

Well, many of us in the government don't really talk that way. Well, you make, which is develop people; you want to rent contractors, or you want to buy, which is recruiting people from outside the government or outside other agencies in doing that. That is central to running an effective organization, and the strategic plan actually reflects that: where are the hiring priorities, where are the development priorities, and actually managing it as one organization.

Our organization has many silos within -- you have power marketing administrations, utilities, you have the national Nuclear Security Administration dealing with national security, the nuclear complex, and then you have the different types of technologies dealing with renewable energy. That's a wide portfolio, and the different types of people that we're recruiting can be different types of strategies. So we're rolling all that up and actually saying hey, there are many different ways of engaging with these strategies, but here are our priorities.

As a chief human capital officer and the principal advisor to the Secretary, he expects me to understand how we're pulling that all together, how we are recruiting for the next generation of our scientists, technologists, or anything like that. We're integrating these internship programs, so we have one face to the public.

We're going to be developing a web that actually integrates all of the different internship programs, and we're going to on a voluntary basis profile a lot of our candidates so that we can place them directly on a goodness-of-fit type of way in matching the candidate pool with the jobs that we have across our whole entire department, as opposed to the public going on one site, different site, different manager and all those things. And that's one example of what we're trying to do that's operationalized in our strategic plan.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic. Jeff, we understand that you are establishing a Human Capital Coalition. Would you give us a sense of the new and innovative human capital management activities that this group will be developing for DOE?

Dr. Pon: Absolutely. This is a little bit different than what is known in our complex called functional accountability. Human Capital Coalition preceded the notion of functional accountability. Human Capital Coalition is a coalition of human resources professionals across our whole entire department, and also the administrative officers that actually interact with the organization. It is a very important key aspect of how do you run an organization through governance.

The Human Capital Coalition, what it's done is it's formed the relationship basis of teeing up what the human capital needs are -- requirements -- what types of things we're doing about it -- initiatives -- and how we programmatically track these things.

I think it's a really good way of establishing a governance that's not really in the law. It's actually volunteering to get on a conference call and say what are we doing about integrating internships? What are we doing to develop people or prevent cyber security-type of breaches? Those types of things, we address in this Human Capital Coalition. And it's much better to I think run an organization where the ideas come from the why perspective as opposed to just the top-down.

The policy stick is something that I know is within the purview of the Human Capital Office, but at the same time, when I first came to government, my approach was to make sure we identify what everybody is doing, what we should all be going towards -- so specifications, standards in the IT world, and policy is what we have to do all of the time. So by establishing that type of governance, I get to explore the ideas, explore the current practices, and identify some of the practices and best-in-class practices, and actually address some of the issues that we have across the complex with my partners.

We do not have dotted-line or cross-line type of relationships if you're talking about the personnel world. But we are forming these dotted-line types of relationships informally to get the job done. And that's what matters the most, getting the job done.

Mr. Thomas: Jeff, you had talked a little earlier about the functional accountability initiative, and let's talk a little bit more about it in detail. I understand that the initiative's in place as a way of improving the financial, human capital, IT, and some other operational functions. Why don't you describe to our listeners a little bit more about this initiative, and also perhaps how it looks to enhance oversight and accountability?

Dr. Pon: I think it was really important for the Secretary to initiate this activity across the organization. We in the Department are working towards being much more integrated. In the areas of functional accountability, we have HR, or human capital, as I call it, general counsel, information technology, or the CIO office, the financial organization, and also the procurement organization. We have dotted-line relationships now across the Department based upon the Secretary's delegation of certain types of authorities. There are seven authorities.

It's concurrence with existing management to establish positions, including grade level or appointment type; concurrence on new hires -- of the head of the site office in HR, for instance; concurrence on making sure that the workforce shaping authorities like VSIPs or voluntary early retirement and VERAs -- that's the VERA part, but the VSIPs, the voluntary separation incentive package -- are concurred on. Moreover, there are a lot of different authorities that the Secretary actually granted us, like active participation in employee development performance standards for the people that are "dotted line" to us now.

Why is that all important? Well, the whole entire motivation from my point of view on this was making sure that we as chief information or human capital people had knowledge, knew what the budgets were, knew people, time, and resources, what the efforts are, and really take a look at it as a whole and manage it.

And that's a very, very tough thing to do in any organization, whether private of public. It's really taking a look at matricizing an organization. So on the one hand, you have the people that have the direct line of authority in the programs, and they have a human capital person actually working for them. But it's actually given me input in on what their performance goals are, who they are, how we're selecting and developing the whole entire function of human capital. So that has been a monumental thing for this Secretary, and for a lot of our functional heads, to tackle.

As one of our site managers said in implementing this -- he said to me, "Jeff, you know, this is all good. We want to make sure that we're working together as one, branding the Department of Energy as one so we have the same entrée as a NASA is to the public than Department of Energy is to the public right now." However, the biggest challenge that we have is change. And what he said -- going back to what he said was, "Jeff, we're all for this stuff, but we're so good at not changing."

And that's what we're trying to do here. It's not just about dotted-line relationships. It's really about coordinating how we run the Department of Energy.

The last responsibility or authority that the Secretary gave of note is active participation in what's called our corporate performance review. I don't know if any other agency does this, but what we do internally is all of the Assistant Secretaries and the Under Secretaries and the functional managers such as myself actually get into a room on a day-to-day basis for about three or four weeks and review each and every one of our budgets. So it's a shared knowledge of here's what I am doing, here's what you're doing, where's the overlap, where are the priorities in preparing a budget? As a part of this process, guess what? Human capital is now on the crosscut basis, so I get to understand what everybody is spending in people development. That's unheard of. It's usually buried in somebody's budget and they're doing X, Y, and Z, and the people from headquarters, the bad old headquarters, never know about it.

But this is a way in which we're working together as an organization to pulling the whole entire organization in a much more effective way. Efficiency will come, but the effectiveness of our organization in decision-making is happening not only at the top, but actually at the field managers level, and also our contractor environment. I'm really delighted working for Secretary Bodman, because it's so easy for me to, as a person formerly from the private sector, to understand what he's doing.

He's trying to make sure that we have a consistency across our organization in our management practices, in our execution, holding people accountable. And I get to be a champion of that. It's so important to understand that the Department of Energy is not just about the deliverables and goals that we have in our Energy Policy Act of 2005, it's really how do we do it, how do we coordinate science and technology.

If you take a look at one of the major challenges as a nation, it is how do we as a government improve the life cycle development of technologies? Because in a global competitiveness perspective, we've gone through manufacturing, we've gone through agriculture; we've been leaders in that. But really the engine of the nation has to be science and technology. And as a principal sponsor for the physical sciences, we play a vital role. So we have the basic science of R&D looking out 10, 15, 20 years, and taking a look at the fabrication of those things has been a missing link within the government.

It's really understanding where we are in terms of proof of concept and demonstrating of the principles. But there is a large gap between how do we get that to the commercial sector and where we are in terms of fabrication in the tooling, in the manufacturing capability, of that type of technology. So that's one of the things that we're trying to concentrate on. It's really managing the portfolio of different things. And I'll give you one short example of this. I've mentioned that we have four of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

Why? Well, it's because of the multidisciplinary focus of our laboratories that is needed to accelerate the growth of technology. Why is that important? Well, Human Genome Project. Could you imagine the processing that it takes on a DNA level that we need to have in modeling these things? It wasn't available five, ten years ago. And with the computer science, and also biological and organic chemistry-type of science that's coming out of our labs, they're actually working together in cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams, and accelerating the pace of science and technology.

Not many people know about that. And that's so exciting to be at the forefront of scientific discovery and technology, but at the same time understanding what the Department of Energy's role is. You can't just focus on basic science. You have to make sure that the sciences are being promulgated across the commercial sector. And we play a very important role in working together with our private sector partners in developing certain initiatives such as the corn ethanol or cellulosic ethanol, such as nuclear power plants, certain things like that.

Government is not going to be getting into the business of building nuclear power plants, but many of the private sector will. And we need to encourage the bedrock of how the foundational aspects of getting into that type of businesses is.

Mr. Thomas: Jeff, prior to assuming your current role, you served as the Office of Personnel Management's e-Government Deputy Director, and in that role, leading the government-wide effort to implement the five e-Government initiatives as well as the HR -- the Human Resources Line of Business. Could you elaborate on Energy's plans to transition to an HR Line of Business, and other government initiatives that relate to human resources?

Dr. Pon: The Human Resources Line of Business is a very, very important effort across the government. It really is having to do with what is the business of HR. It's really defining what the business is, what the different types of services HR provides, how do we keep track of this performance, what's the information that we track, and what's the technology.

But aside from that, it's really taking a look at the shape of HR and what we do now. I would say that as a characterization of human resources across the federal government, we're still in the age of doing a lot of transactional administrative work. We're still chasing the paper. And HRLOB along with the e-Government initiatives is really taking a look at how do we go from a paper-based human resources function to a digital function. And I think that's a very important aspect, because it's the on-demand data that you have that I don't have right now.

If you talk about what's happening in the private sector or even some parts in our government, the ready use of data is so important to making critical timely decisions. It's a matter of -- when you talk about a report being generated from your official personnel files, it takes months and months to roll all that information up and ship it to Office of Personnel Management, and they'll take a couple of months to decipher it and issue a official report. But in this digital age, you should have access to all of that information, gathering that information and synthesizing it. Technology offers that to us.

And the Human Resources Line of Business is really taking a look at some core functions of human resources such as personnel processing, such as time and attendance, certain things like that, and taking a look at how better to out-task that assignment -- and I'll be very careful with these words, because they've been such hotbed issues for this whole entire -- you know, people say, oh, you're going to outsource HR. No, we're out-tasking certain things that we all do, and some agencies do it better.

E-payroll is an example. As a government, we had 26 separate payroll systems, now we have four. Economies of scale actually speak to that. You don't really change too many things in terms of personnel processing or even payroll for that aspect. So certain organizations have been tasked with that; same with the Human Resources Line of Business. We are trying to make sure we know what are the core transactional things, and get the agencies out of that business, get them out of the business of transactional administration, and get them into the more strategic role.

Mr. Morales: So it's really focusing on the high-value-added activities?

Dr. Pon: Absolutely.

Mr. Morales: Great.

How is Energy managing its blended workforce?

We will ask Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy, 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 Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Also joining us on our conversation is Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's human capital practice.

Jeff, workforce planning is vital in helping your leadership draw a clear picture of the nature of the current and future human resource decisions. Could you describe your efforts to enhance and institutionalize workforce planning within DOE? And to what extent does DOE's technical qualification program assist in these efforts?

Dr. Pon: Well, workforce planning is central to human capital management, first of all. It's a contract between the programmatic manager and human resources. With a workforce plan, you actually have a forecast and model on what their priorities are, who they're going to be recruiting, what their next 100 hires are going to be, who they're developing. Those are things that are so important to our organization in identifying, and each and every manager needs to have that.

I'm sitting down with each and every one of our Assistant Secretaries and going through their workforce plans. I expect them to actually understand what is their workforce, what is it composed of, where does it need to be in one, three, and five years, and how are we going to be closing the gap through that make, rent or buy type of strategy, which is how do we recruit them, how do we develop them, how do we supplement them from a contractor workforce perspective.

So that's a very important aspect of our human capital strategy; it's effective workforce plans and how we roll those things up and integrate that into our strategic workforce planning process. In terms of the DOE technical qualifications program, obviously, human capital, one thing that we aren't experts in is in the technical aspects of our technical workforce. I mean, we have nuclear engineers, physicists, tooling and manufacturing-type of vocations. We can't know it all, so what these forms do, actually, they set certain types of criteria or standards, maybe towards certifications, just like we've done in our contracting workforce and in our programmatic workforce.

So there are a lot of more certifications coming out of that, but then it really balances out the understanding of what it is that you do from a technical aspect, what it is that you do from a leadership perspective and a management perspective. And that is really the competency profile that we have as the Department of Energy, and we operationalize that through our competency management approach. We're not there yet, but we're developing that and pulling it all together. These last several years, it's been the effort to pulling it all together so that everybody's at the table in deciding what is a corporate model for the competency management and workforce planning.

Mr. Morales: Jeff, along similar lines, you described earlier for us the composition or the mix between contractors and federal employees at the Department of Energy. Could you tell us how federal managers can effectively manage this ever-increasing blended workforce composed of the two, and what are some of the key differences intrinsic to these two core groups of federal employees and contractors?

Dr. Pon: That's one of the chief challenges that I have here in the Department. I view my role as not just caring for the federal workforce; it's really taking a look at our whole entire workforce. Probably one of the more unique organizations in its profile, because 90 percent of our workforce are contractors, and our contractors work on some engineering feats that are simply amazing, like the National Ignition Facility, where fusion technology is happening; Stanford Linear Accelerator; the International Hadron Colliders.

A lot of these things are engineering marvels and feats, but what's important to understand is where does our workforce need to have its greatest talent and what are we doing about it? My approach to this is making sure that the knitting is done for the federal workforce first, so we have our strategic plan. We have our workforce, integrated workforce plan as a whole entire organization. I'm making that public to our contractors, because there are certain things that the Department of Energy is not very well-equipped on doing.

Nuclear engineers -- for instance, out of college, they're getting offers, 10 to 15 offers for about $100,000 to $120,000, and as you know on our GS or general schedule, we can pay a college grad at the General Schedule 7, Step 10, about $46,000 to $47,000. There's a huge disparity on that. I realize, as an effective manager, that I can't compete on a compensation basis, but our contractors can. So when we identify that skills gap, hopefully they're doing something about it.

So we're mapping out for our workforce plan for each and every one of our sites. So as people ebb and flow on the federal workforce or on the contracting workforce, the institutionalization of the process of workforce planning will be something that is comprehensive across our organization.

That's what we're doing in managing a multi-sector workforce. I think many government agencies will have that challenge as we go from a smaller workforce, larger workforce, contractor expertise or not. Federal government really does have a vested interest on understanding and working with their contractor workforce, too, because at the end of the day, there's only a certain amount of scientists, technology, engineering and mathematicians around the world.

Mr. Morales: Great. It sounds like you're driving a certain level of collaboration also with your contractor community.

Dr. Pon: Absolutely. To within the laws of the FAR, but making sure that we're voluntarily giving them information and telling them that it's not "you must do" in their contract, but it's here's what we're doing, does it make sense for you to participate in on these things on a voluntary basis? And quite frankly, from a strategic point of view, they understand the importance of participating in on this cross-collaboration and being effective competitors within their own fields, too.

Mr. Thomas: Jeff, staying on the theme of competing for talent, can you talk a little bit about what changes you're making to the recruitment process at Energy, and on the same wave, does the agency use flexible compensation strategies to attract and retain quality employees?

Dr. Pon: Solly, I think we're doing everything we can within the law from exercising the three Rs, and really taking a look at how we manage the workforce is a very difficult thing when you have certain types of capabilities within your own HR organization. I'll be frank; we don't do enough in recruiting as a government. I know that there's job fairs that we go to from time to time, but I take a look at the private sector and who we're directly competing with. One technology organization that has about 13,000 people has a workforce of 400 recruiters working in that one part of their business.

In my part of my business, I can count my recruiters on 10 fingers, so just from a number standpoint, we are encumbered upon how much resource we have in doing recruiting, active recruiting. We should be taking a look at our perspectives on that, but what we're doing about it, despite the resource challenge that we have, is really taking a look at a long-term perspective. And many, I guess, administrations really don't focus on the 10-year-type thing, but we have to as a nation in my role.

We're looking at high schools and colleges. We sponsored the National Science Bowl that just concluded. While we do direct recruiting, and post our jobs on the website, we're going with the Department of Labor and Education, along with the Department of Energy, with this thing called the American Competitiveness Initiative, and it's really reinvesting in our education structure, in our key markets in our labor force, and also in science and technology. And we're making concerted efforts and working together towards recruiting, enabling scholarships, grants to internships, to federal service or contractor organizations.

We have internship programs that come and go. But what we're trying to do right now is really wire the process where we're getting them excited about science and technology, taking the pre-algebra, algebra, because if they don't, it's over already. And really encouraging them to take internships in our complex, whether it's in our contractor workforce or on our federal side, and mapping out where they want to go and keeping them there, because I can't sell them on the dollars associated with it.

Sure you're compensated in a fair and equitable way in the federal government, but just taking a look at our science mission and taking a look at the importance of our mission as a nation -- you take a look at what's happening in the Generation Y or millennials, they are not there to hop from job to job to job. They're really trying to take a grasp of what can I do, and how can I have continuity, how can I make a meaningful contribution in this nation?

Mr. Thomas: Jeff, I'd like you to talk a little bit about the Department of Energy's learning management system. Maybe you could talk a little about how it enables Energy to more closely link training to competencies and also to employees' career plans. And on a related note, what plans does Energy have to develop an enterprise e-learning strategy as a way of shifting from a classroom-based to a more technology-enabled learning environment?

Dr. Pon: We have a long ways to go here. I used to be the e-training acting project manager. I was tasked with implementing learning management systems across the federal government. Here at the Department of Energy, we have a very good learning management system that is more on the forefront of integrating a lot of the point solutions that we have. So you can't really talk about learning management solutions without the content, without the competency management type of tools, which invariably are separate. And I think the software space right now is trying to integrate that.

And the companies that I think are doing very well are the organizations that conceptually get it, understanding that competency management is the basis of identifying your skill sets. And having that gap actually linked to your recruitment and assessment tools, linked towards your development and training things: IDPs, individual development planning. And the companies that I think will survive and be the leaders in this space will be the organizations that actually integrate a lot of the point solutions that we all love but are poorly integrated right now.

So in the Department of Energy, we have these tools, but we have a challenge in integrating these things. We come from a very strong training instructor-led type of culture, so either you're training or you're working, as opposed to a blended learning where you can take a class and then actually study on your own, an asynchronous type of learning, e-learning, or even just the e-learning type of courses with the different types of libraries and resources.

Now, in this day, it's what version do you want it in, you know? How many different citations do you have to have? So the way in which we're trying to adapt to technology is very much a bifurcated strategy, because we have on the one hand an exiting population that is used to doing certain things a certain way, and at the same time, you have an on-demand type of generation that expect nothing but the best graphics, the best type of simulation and interactiveness, or else you lose their attention. So there is a big challenge between balancing the two, but we're doing both, and blending those, and making sure that the options are there. But the challenge is the utilization of a learning management system, and using that as an effective strategy for cost avoidance and the learning experience.

Mr. Morales: Jeff, we spent a fair amount of time talking about the workforce within the Department. I want to transition a little bit now to the leadership portion of the organization. What are some of the efforts at DOE to ensure continuity of leadership through succession planning and executive development?

Dr. Pon: I like to define my terms first. Succession planning is something different than what I was accustomed to -- when you talk about succession planning on a best practice basis, you hearken to the GE Session C-type of models or different things like that where you put your high performance people and your high potential people on a 2x2 grid. And you might have nine different squares and see what you do with the northeast quadrant, which we all know about, and the bottom quadrant, which is a really easy thing to do, too. But it's the middle part that you need to figure out what to do with.

In the federal government, I don't know of many agencies that actually do really succession planning. We do replacement charting. If Bob leaves, who are we going to replace him with? And that's what we're doing. We have replacement charting, a comprehensive plan to make sure that we know who's going to be coming in and coming out while the changes of administration happen, where's your career staff that's going to be the bedrock and foundation for the next one, three, five years?

It's impressive to know that the Deputy Secretary of Energy wants to ensure that the career people are solid and intact, and he prides himself in making sure that those critical decisions are made on a consistent basis. He chairs our Executive Resources Board, and we make sure that we're identifying the future leaders so that the Department of Energy actually has some continuity going forward.

That's a very important aspect of taking a long-term view of management and succession. Our government does not identify leaders across. That's what the SCS was designed for first. We don't rotate across very readily or anything like that. So we need to do a better job at that.

We're doing a lot, but we're not doing enough.

Mr. Morales: What does the future hold for the Department of Energy's human capital efforts?

We will ask Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy, 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 Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy.

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

Jeff, given the evolution of global energy markets, how do you envision DOE's human capital needs evolving in, say, the next three or five years? And how do you envision your human resources office will need to evolve to support this change?

Dr. Pon: I think our challenge is to get out of transactional administration and go towards more strategic. It's really working with the businesses directly. Instead of just processing the blue paper or the 52s and the 50s -- that's HRspeak for the process paper -- we really need to get in front of that, which is taking a look at what is the mission of an organization; how are they meeting the challenges of the next one, three, five years; what are their areas of growth or decline; how are you going to identify the right vocations within that skill set in the next one, three, and five years. That should all be teed up by a human capital professional.

How are we going to be identifying that from a workforce planning standpoint, and what are the resources that we have? It makes it much clearer as a role to serve as opposed to processing the paper on who just came onboard; how are we recruiting; did you position classify. It's the operations elements. That's our bread and butter right now. Hopefully, our bread and butter will be a business partner that identifies how do you design an organization; what are your chief strategies for your learning, your recruitment and your retention?

Mr. Thomas: Jeff, you chair the Subcommittee on Human Resources Workforce of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council. Can you tell us a bit about the Subcommittee role and responsibilities as well as its initiatives underway to address the federal workforce challenges?

Dr. Pon: As the Subcommittee chair, it's an interesting group to chair, because human resources people working on human resources people is really the Subcommittee, so it's like the consultant taking the consultant's advice. We try to make sure we identify what is currently available in terms of competencies. OPM, Office of Personnel Management, had all of the agencies actually take a competency assessment across agencies, so we really know what's there right now, but really, it's how do you get to the strategic role; what is the competency of the future? And we're identifying that with the Office of Personnel Management. And then we're going to be migrating our whole entire population to that plan.

It's identifying what skills they don't have right now, and making sure that there is a road map for getting them there, or hiring people to supplement that. So that's really the big thrust of the Human Capital Workforce Subcommittee. We're also doing innovative efforts such as inviting public and private people that are of note to share best practices with. We're taking field trips to some of our local private industry counterparts that are really deep into human resources information technology that actually have automated systems, so we know when we get to the other side, this is how it's going to look, and it's not going to be all sugar and honey; it's warts and all, and this is what they had to do.

So there's a logical progression to getting us to a human capital type of skill, and I think we have a long ways to go, but we're making sure that we know what the best practices are. So we're setting the bar, we know where we are, and we're coming up with the strategies to close the gaps.

Mr. Thomas: Jeff, you're a previous recipient of the Federal 100 Award, which goes to individuals who've made a difference in government technology in any given year.

First of all, congratulations on receiving such a significant award.

But given such a perspective, could you tell us what emerging technologies you see that hold the most promise for improving the federal management of human resources?

Dr. Pon: I think before we get into a digital economy for HR, we really need to know what it is that we're trying to answer; why do we want to do things? I always ask the first question, why do you do the things that you do to my managers, and they go through their programmatic accomplishments -- I went to this meeting, had this conversation. I said but why do you do that? And the question on why do you want to utilize technology in human resources is pretty simple. It's we need to be much more effective in delivering the data so we have knowledge. Knowledge to behave, behave to perform and have the performance, quite simply. And that's what technology does.

In our generation, I think what's different about any other generation that has preceded us are two things: one is the way in which we work as teams; and technology. And those are the two enablers that have shaped the way in which we work right now. For the federal government to be slow on adapting technologies creates completely complex systems. If you take a look at the proliferation of technology, as a government, we actually bought on the personal computer basis, then the LANs, the local area networks, and then the WANs, and so on, and so forth, and we collected all those things up. And guess what, it didn't all connect together. Surprisingly so. Why? It's because it was locally brought up.

Same with human resources. A lot of our practices were brought up in a localized environment, and what we're trying to do is come up with standardization in all those things, and at the same time institute technology. Technology can be an enabler for standardizing these different types of practices, so there is employee self-service, management self-service, and reporting self-service. It's frustrating as a citizen when you can't look up your tax returns for the last seven or eight or nine years, but they're working on that. You can actually file your taxes now to the IRS via e-mail. Wouldn't it be nice if we could actually submit our resumes online?

Yes, we can now. So we've made some pretty significant strides in adapting towards technology, but we're at the tip of the iceberg in terms of how we utilize technology in the management of human capital.

Mr. Morales: Jeff, you've obviously had a very successful career within the public service, and you have a tremendous amount of passion for the job that you have over at DOE. I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person who perhaps is thinking about a career in public service?

Dr. Pon: I came here to serve the federal government, and I think for my career counterparts, there's no higher calling than serving as a civil servant. We sometimes recognize the good men and women of our military, but from a management standpoint, from the bread and butter of how our government works, the Executive branch civil service is where it all meets. And I think it's an honor to work with our career civil service people, and encourage at every single conversation that I have with our young people that federal service is not something that should be considered; it should be something that you do in your life.

I encourage the young people to make sure that they're not only on the job market, but they're citizens. To be a citizen of the United States -- in my family history, it's being a citizen of choice. We came to this nation generations back, but it's just like every other story that we hear. We come here in search of hope, of liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I think there's no other higher calling than actually serving that institution for some time in your lifetime. Maybe as a whole entire career, maybe as two or three years, but that's the draw there.

You're doing good for the rest of your whole entire citizenship, and that's something -- at times, a very -- gulp in the back of your throat and saying, gosh, I'm glad I'm serving my time here in that capacity and giving back as opposed to -- you know, I love building companies and certain things like that. But this has been such a delight to give back to the federal government.

Mr. Morales: Jeff, that's just a wonderful perspective. Thank you.

Unfortunately, we have reached the top of our hour, so we've run out of time.

I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule today, but more importantly, Solly and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country at the Department of Energy.

Dr. Pon: Albert, thank you so much. And Solly, thank you for the questions, too.

I appreciate the time that you've spent with me in discussing some of the important efforts in the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy is a vast and broad organization that can't really be covered in one hour, but I would encourage some of your listeners to really take a look at the Department of Energy's website, www.doe.gov. It talks about the rich history, about the interactions of Enrico Fermi, of Oppenheimer, of Einstein, of our 85 Nobel Prize winners, and how they've actually combated the three things that I talked about -- the three isms -- the communism, the fascism, and terrorism right now.

There's no more important issue that we have in energy security, national security and also American competitiveness, and I'm glad to serve at the pleasure of the President and the Secretary and this nation, as a taxpayer and also as a civil servant.

Mr. Morales: Great. Thank you very much.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Dr. Jeff Pon, Chief Human Capital Officer at the U.S. Department of Energy.

My co-host has been Solly Thomas, associate partner in IBM's human capital 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.

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.

Thursday, January 25, 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 www.businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Good morning. This is Albert Morales, managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government, and your host for The Business of Government Radio Hour.

Never before have the issues surrounding the management of human capital been more important than they are today. Globalization, the maturing of a Baby Boomer workforce, the high costs of health care and changing demographics are all forcing the government, and the private sector, for that matter, to take on the challenges of managing a diverse workforce.

With us this morning to discuss their organization's role on this topic is our special guest John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Good morning, John.

Mr. Salamone: Good morning, Al; good morning, John. It's a pleasure to be here.

Mr. Morales: Also joining us in our conversation is John Kamensky, associate partner and senior fellow at The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

Good morning, John.

Mr. Kamensky: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: John, perhaps you could start by giving us a brief overview of the mission of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, otherwise known as OPM.

Mr. Salamone: Thank you, Al, I would be happy to. For your listeners who may not be familiar with the agency, they can go to our website, which is opm.gov, and there, they would be able to find our 2006 to 2010 strategic and operational plan. In that plan, they will find OPM's mission, which is to ensure that the federal government has an effective civilian workforce, and they will also find our roles and responsibilities, which are multifaceted. For example, we accomplish our mission by providing federal agencies with personnel services ranging from recruitment tools to background investigations, as well as the administration of the federal retirement benefits and health insurance plans.

OPM also provides leadership for federal agencies on human resources policies. We provide guidance on labor management relations and programs to improve workforce performance. We do this in a way that's really designed to ensure compliance with the Merit Systems principles, and also protection from prohibited personnel practices. So basically, OPM's job is to hold agencies accountable for their human capital practices.

Mr. Morales: The Chief Human Capital Officers Act of 2002 established the Chief Human Capital Officer position as well as the Chief Human Capital Officers Council. At the time, I believe you were working for Senator Voinovich of Ohio, who championed this Act. Can you give us some background on the Act and why the Chief Human Capital Officer's position and the Council were established?

Mr. Salamone: Sure, I would be happy to. And I have the unique role, I think, of working for Senator Voinovich when he was working on the Chief Human Capital Officers Act, and now in my role in overseeing the Council. So I've had an interesting dynamic, and it's a unique perspective, I think. I will say that when I took the job, when I told Senator Voinovich that I was going to take the job, he sat me down and said, well here's what we would like you to accomplish, or here's what I would like you to accomplish. So I have my marching orders from the Director of OPM, but also from Senator Voinovich.

But to get at your question, both the position of the Chief Human Capital Officer and the Chief Human Capital Officers Council were created through Title 13 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The legislation created both the positions of the Chief Human Capital Officer and the Council really to elevate the importance of strategic human capital management in the federal government. Prior to the creation of the Council, there was some talk within the federal government that we really needed to elevate HR so human resources could be on a level playing field with some of the other chiefs; the chief information officer, the chief financial officer, really to get human resource professionals to have a seat at the table with the top level management in federal agencies.

Mr. Kamensky: John, before we discuss the Council and its role, let's talk a little bit about the Chief Human Capital Officer's position itself. Can you explain sort of what that role is and what the scope of responsibilities are of that officer within an agency?

Mr. Salamone: I would be happy to, John, that's a very good question. And actually, the Act specifically notes the responsibilities of the Chief Human Capital Officers, and those roles and responsibilities include such things as setting the workforce development strategy of the agencies, assessing workforce characteristics and future needs based on the agency's mission and strategic plan, allowing the agency's human resources policies and programs with the organization's mission, strategic goals and performance outcomes, developing and advocating a culture of continuous learning to attract and retain employees with superior abilities, and also identifying best practices and benchmarking studies.

And I would be happy actually on that last point to talk a little bit about what we've got going on in the Council with identifying best practices.

Mr. Kamensky: The Council that you just mentioned, could you tell us a little bit about the mission and the charter of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council and -- like how many people are on it, and their responsibilities, and how does that operate?

Mr. Salamone: Sure. I would be happy to. And in the Act actually, they specifically mentioned three areas for the Council and what the Council should be focusing on: first of all, working toward modernizing human resources systems; improving the quality of human resources information; and influencing legislation affecting human resources operations in organizations.

Now, the Director of OPM, Linda Springer, serves as the Chair of the Council, and the OMP Deputy Director for Management, Clay Johnson, serves as the Vice Chair.

We also have Chief Human Capital Officers from the 15 departments and other agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Social Security Administration, the Director of National Intelligence, and we also have a small agency representative in the National Science Foundation.

The Council has -- in addition to just the Council structure, we have six subcommittees: Emergency Preparedness; Hiring and Succession Planning; the Human Capital Workforce; the Human Resource Line of Business; Learning and Development and Performance Management.

Mr. Morales: John, can you tell us specifically about your role and responsibilities at OPM as the Executive Director of this Council?

Mr. Salamone: Sure. As the Executive Director, I think my primary responsibility really is to advise and coordinate the Council business and the activities for the Chair and for the members on the Council. I also coordinate OPM's staff participation with all the Council activities. I really viewed my role coming in to this job that I am not the subject matter expert on any of these issue areas. I am learning quite a bit, and it's a tremendous opportunity. But I want to make sure that I bring the right people from OPM, the right staff from OPM to meetings with me so we can lend support to the Council activities.

I've also helped facilitate the development of the Chief Human Capital Officers 2007 strategic plan with our six subcommittee chairs. And the listeners can actually go to our website, which is www.chcoc.gov, and there, they will be able to find our strategic plan for the subcommittees. But my role also includes providing briefings to various human capital stakeholders, including the media. So I am happy to participate in today's event, and I'm hoping that your listeners will learn quite a bit about the Council and will help us raise awareness for the activities that we have going on.

Mr. Morales: Great. We'll certainly have some more questions for you coming up in a little bit.

But first, we obviously talked a little bit about your tenure with Senator Voinovich, but could you describe for our listeners your career path? We're always interested in how people got started in their current roles, especially within the public sector. And more specifically, how has your previous experience, including the work on the Hill, influenced your current leadership style?

Mr. Salamone: That's great. I am really happy to, and actually, I'm very excited because in March I will have reached the 15-year mark with federal service. So I will be accruing leave at the 8-hour milestone, I guess. But my career began in the office of Senator D'Amato in my hometown of Rochester, New York. I worked for Senator D'Amato on a part-time basis as a district representative in his Rochester, New York office, handling issues like case work and constituent relations. I mean, it was really an excellent experience for me personally to get started with federal service. It was very exciting, very energizing. And after about a year and a half, I moved to Washington to serve as Senator D'Amato's assistant personnel director, a position that I was actually promoted to in November 1994.

So I've always had an interest in government service and in personnel, and I think I had a very good solid foundation in Senator D'Amato's office. While I was working in his office, I started my master's degree in public administration at George Mason University, and I was happy to have Mark Abramson as one of my professors there.

Senator D'Amato actually lost in 1998, but that was the year I finished my graduate program, so I was very fortunate enough to apply into and be accepted into the Presidential Management intern program. So I left Senator D'Amato's office in November -- December of 1998 and went right to the Office of Personnel Management , where I served as a Presidential Management intern, finished my two-year tenure there, stayed on for an additional year, and went back to the Senate in January of 2002, where I began working for Senator Voinovich on his Oversight of Government Management subcommittee.

When I went to work for Senator Voinovich, my roles and responsibilities included human capital, but they weren't limited to human capital. I had a much broader portfolio, actually, and the way that the subcommittee was broken down was the Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia. And I handled the Oversight of Government Management portfolio for the Senator, which included such things as the Social Security disability process, DOD supply chain management issues, the GAO high risk areas, federal law enforcement reform, which was a personnel issue. I also handled trade-related issues, the human capital issues related to the trade agencies.

But I really think that my previous experiences have prepared me well for the position that I am in right now. I believe that I have an open and collaborative approach to accomplishing the tasks at hand. Director Springer has given me a great deal of autonomy for managing the Council, and I think that's really been extremely helpful for me both personally and professionally to grow, to develop and cultivate relationships with the Council members, with OPM staff, and really piggybacking on the skills and competencies and the things that I learned while I was at George Mason, and kind of the things that I have been working on professionally as well.

Mr. Morales: Great.

How is the Chief Human Capital Officers Council structured? We will ask John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the Office of Personnel Management, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the Office of Personnel Management.

Also joining us in our conversation is John Kamensky, senior fellow at The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

John, we want to talk about some of the changes you and Director Springer have put in place to enhance the effectiveness of the CHCO Council. I believe this past year, OPM established the Deputy CHCO position. Why were these positions established, and what are you looking to accomplish through these new roles?

Mr. Salamone: Sure. Actually, the Deputy Chief Human Capital Officers I think are extremely important. And prior to my coming on board, the Director talked about adding the Deputy Chief Human Capital Officers at the Council meeting last March. And we really see the Deputies playing three very important roles for the Council. First and foremost, they will help us serve as the links to the federal human resources directors. We've heard through GAO reports, through interviews that I actually conducted with the Chief Human Capital Officers and Deputy Chief Human Capital Officers when I first came on board -- I went around and met with all of the Chief Human Capital Officers and the Deputies. It took me about two months. And we heard that, you know, what was happening at the Council level wasn't necessarily filtering down to the federal human resource directors.

So, most if not all of the Deputy Chief Human Capital Officers are either HR directors themselves or they have HR directors that report to them. So we're hoping that the Deputies will serve as another set of eyes and ears to come to the Council meetings and filter information to the HR community.

Second, I think the Deputies will also help us identify and share best practices. We have a lot of goals in our strategic plan dealing with finding and sharing best practices. And really with their subject matter expertise, we're hoping that the Deputies will identify and help us share those best practices and find the right forums to share those best practices.

And finally, really the Deputies will help us ensure continuity when there are changes in leadership at the Council level. Most if not all of the Deputies are career civil servants, so when there are changes in administration or changes at the individual Chief Human Capital Officer level in an agency, the Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer will be able to step in and say here are the things that the Council's been working on, here's the direction that the Council is going, here's what's working, here's what's not working, and really just helping us ensure that there is continuity when we have that leadership change.

Mr. Morales: Certainly helps broaden the reach of the Council across the agencies.

Mr. Salamone: Most definitely. Most definitely.

Mr. Morales: Also recently, OPM made some additional changes to the subcommittee structure of the Council. Can you describe these changes as well as the rationale behind the new structure?

Mr. Salamone: Sure, I'd be happy to. And again, this was something that the Director was working on right around the same time, about the March Council meeting, right before I came on board. We have six new subcommittees. The structure includes Emergency Preparedness, Hiring and Succession Planning, the Human Capital Workforce, the HR Line of Business, Learning and Development, and Performance Management.

The six subcommittees -- really the Director looked at the structure that we had previously, and some of the subcommittees are the same, some of them are split up and combined in different ways. But really, the current structure is intended to ensure that we focus on the most pressing human capital issues facing the government.

And we've been very, very active with all of the subcommittees. Each of the subcommittees meets on a monthly basis, and we've been working very diligently toward meeting the goals and objectives that we've outlined in the FY 2007 strategic plan for the subcommittees.

Mr. Morales: Now, on the same topic, the subcommittees released their new mission statements and operational goals, which are obviously sponsored by the CHCO Council. Can you talk about how and why this document was developed, and more specifically, how the subcommittees plan to accomplish their goals?

Mr. Salamone: Sure, absolutely. The subcommittee's strategic plans were really born out of a conversation that Director Springer had, and she thought that the best way to get the Chief Human Capital Officers engaged and have the subcommittees work on things that are meaningful is to give the subcommittees and the subcommittee chairs the autonomy to develop their own strategic plans and things that they want to work on to accomplish the goals for the Council.

We've really taken a bottom-up approach. The Council members and the subcommittees had a great deal of autonomy to draft their own mission statements and their own goals. I will say that I played a role in that to the extent that I provided each of the subcommittees with a draft mission statement, because I felt that it was better to give them something to react to rather than starting from scratch. But when it comes down to the goals and objectives that they've put together, really, those were conversations that happened at the subcommittee meetings to really drive the agenda for each of the subcommittees.

Let me add to this and talk a little bit about how the subcommittees plan to accomplish their goals, to get back to your original question, Al. Each of the subcommittees, as I'd indicated, meets on a monthly basis. And I bring the OPM staff with me to the relevant subcommittee meetings. The listeners can go on the website -- as I indicated, it's www.chcoc.gov -- to pull up our strategic plan. And you will see that, you know, the goals -- for example, the Emergency Preparedness subcommittee, one of their goals was to assist OPM in the development of a communication plan for pandemic influenza. This subcommittee was extremely active with OPM when we were developing our guidance last summer from May to August. They helped us develop our guidance, and they helped us pre-clear our guidance before we went through the OMB clearance process.

So we're working very collaboratively between OPM and their subcommittees to accomplish the goals and objectives that they've put forward.

Mr. Kamensky: John, in 2006, the Office of Personnel Management issued its strategic and operational plan, so that's separate from what the Council's plan is. But it includes outcome and goals that are focused on human capital results that agencies have to implement. What role does the Council play in helping OPM achieve those kinds of goals?

Mr. Salamone: That's a great question, John. Actually, if the listeners look in the back of our strategic plan, the Council strategic plan, they will see that we have linked OPM's operational goals and objectives, the relevant operational goals and objectives, to the subcommittees as well.

So not only do we have OPM staff that go to the Council meetings or subcommittee meetings to talk about the goals and objectives that the subcommittees have put together, but we have staff that goes to the subcommittee meetings to talk about OPM's goals and objectives so we can partner and collaborate with the Council to accomplish the goals and objectives that OPM has set forward.

We've had some very good successes. As I mentioned, the Emergency Preparedness subcommittee, working with OPM on the pandemic influenza guidance. But we've also had the Hiring and Succession Planning subcommittee work very closely with OPM to develop more targeted job fairs for college students for our job fairs.

Mr. Kamensky: The Council and its members seem to operate maybe a bit as a federation of independent agencies. They obviously have diverse views and stuff because they come in from different programmatic areas. But what's the biggest challenge for OPM and the Council to work together on achieving common goals?

Mr. Salamone: That's a really good question. And yes, I think operating as a federation of independent agencies is probably a good descriptor. But I think we really do, fortunately, have a very open and collaborative working relationship with the Council and the Council members. And I think we're very pleased with the progress that we've been making so far.

But to really answer your question, John, I think we'll continue to find ways to strengthen and enhance those relationships so that we can work together to secure a positive legacy for the Council so that the next set of leaders coming into their CHCO roles will have a solid foundation for working with OPM, and building on what we've been able to put in place for the Council.

Mr. Morales: John, one of the other elements of the CHCO Act was the establishment of the CHCO Academy. Can you talk a little bit about this academy, as well as why it was established, and what role does it play in relation to the Council and the agencies?

Mr. Salamone: I'd be happy to. And actually, the academy was originally intended to serve as a way for the Chief Human Capital Officers to learn about and share best practices. With Director Springer opening up the Council meetings to Deputies as well, we now have Deputies come to the meetings. But I've worked on several training academy sessions. I serve, I guess, as the dean of the training academy. But when I came on board, the training academy sessions were relatively low turnouts. Six -- maybe five, six, seven Chief Human Capital Officers would show up.

My first meeting, we had Deputies on board, so I think we had close to 17, 18 members. But I took a look at the training academy sessions and felt that we may actually be missing an opportunity. In getting back to the link to the federal human resources community and the practitioners, I thought it was a good idea really to open up the academy sessions to allow each Chief Human Capital Officer to bring three staff members with them to the training academy sessions.

And in the last couple of sessions that we've had, we've had between 60 and 70 attendees. And that is 10 times what we were originally having when the Council first set up the training academy sessions. And in this year alone, we had in January a training academy session on the SES Pay-for-Performance System, where we had 70 agency representatives attend and hear best practices. OPM kicked off the meeting, talked about the system, talked about the requirements, talked about the certification process. And then we had the Department of Labor, the USDA, Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Treasury share best practices with those 70 attendees on things that they've done to help improve their SES Pay-for-Performance System.

And in February, we had a training academy session on Telework. And we talked to some agency -- some agencies brought some agencies in to talk about things that they are doing in their agency to enhance and promote Telework, which is obviously extremely important to the federal workforce, and quite frankly, an area where I think we need to focus a little bit more attention on. But really the training academy sessions I think is one of our biggest successes.

I am going to look to possibly webcasting the training academy sessions as a way to reach an even wider audience, something that I'm talking to the OPM staff about and will be talking to the Council members about as well. It may not make sense to webcast every single training academy session. But certainly there are some that we could webcast, and if the issue was hot enough, we really could reach a very, very wide audience.

I'm going to have to give credit to a DHS staffer, Department of Homeland Security staff member. I was talking about the training academy sessions at a recent presentation I gave at the National Academy of Public Administration. And they actually suggested that we webcast the training academy sessions. So it was an excellent suggestion. And one of the benefits I think about getting out there and talking about the mission and the successes of the Council is to hear from the community on what we're working on and how we can make improvements.

So certainly that was a worthwhile suggestion. And I'm hoping that we're going to be able to pull that off.

Mr. Morales: That's a fantastic forum for sharing best practices across a wide variety of agencies. That's great. Are they typically run by Council members?

Mr. Salamone: Actually, I work with the Council members to pull together the training academy sessions, the topics -- sometimes the Director, Linda Springer, will suggest topics. And she actually suggested the SES topic, and I thought that Telework was the next logical thing for us to be working on, or the next logical issue area for us to highlight. But we're open. And I talk to the Deputy Chief Human Capital Officers, I talk to the subcommittee members, and I talk to the members of the Council, about what future topics would be relevant and timely for the Council to showcase as an academy session.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What are the some of the key human capital challenges facing the federal government? We will ask John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the Office of Personnel Management, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the Office of Personnel Management.

Also joining us in our conversation is John Kamensky, senior fellow at The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

John, what are some of the biggest human capital challenges facing the federal government? And mind you, we only have an hour to discuss this. And what are OPM and the Council doing to address these challenges?

Mr. Salamone: I think, Al, you know, one of the biggest challenges that we have facing the federal agencies today is hiring. The federal government must continually look for ways to recruit, hire, and retain top talent. You know, as I indicated, we do have a Hiring and Succession Planning subcommittee. The subcommittee has several goals. But really where we need to start is federal agencies have to take a look at the processes that they have in place for hiring their employees, and make sure that they are utilizing to the fullest extent possible all of the flexibilities available to them.

The Chief Human Capital Officers Act included several flexibilities such as category rating instead of having agencies use the Rule of Three. And OPM actually is working and positioning themselves to help the federal community to streamline the hiring process as well. For our listeners that are interested in the federal hiring process, they can go on the OPM website, www.opm.gov, and there, they'll find OPM's Hiring Toolkit.

The Hiring Toolkit is an excellent, excellent resource for federal human resource professionals, and it's really intended to help the federal human resource community and the managers navigate the hiring process and identify any bottlenecks that they have within their agency. Human resource professionals go on the Hiring Toolkit, they'll see that we've mapped out the 45-day hiring process, and we identify how long it should take in each step of the process. And then agencies can map that against how long it takes them to identify or hire an employee.

And what the Toolkit will do is identify where there may be very large gaps, and it will give the agencies helpful hints on how they can close those gaps to streamline the hiring process. In addition to hiring, I think the federal government must also focus on succession planning initiatives to ensure that we have the right talent to fill in for the loss of institutional knowledge when our federal employees retire. OPM has a plan to help agencies fill mission-critical occupations through our Federal Career Day job fairs.

And as I indicated, our Hiring and Succession Planning subcommittee on the Council has been working very, very closely with OPM on targeting those job fairs for mission-critical occupations. So that's another I think very big challenge that we have for the federal government. And as long as I am serving as the Executive Director of the Council, I'll really do my best to ensure that we have OPM and the Council working together to solve the biggest and most pressing challenges that we have in the human capital world and facing our federal government.

Mr. Morales: John, I'm sure that these challenges of hiring and succession planning are further exacerbated by projections on the retirement wave and the loss of talented and skilled individuals. What's the Council doing to recruit and retain the next generation of federal workers? And specifically, I'm interested in what is the Council doing to attract the younger generation, those that are perhaps still in college today, and may have some interest in working for the federal government?

Mr. Salamone: I think the first thing obviously is the Federal Career Day job fairs, but that's certainly something that the Council is looking at. And actually in our January meeting, full Council meeting, we had a briefing from the Gallup Organization and the Council for Excellence in Government, talking about their study that they had released earlier in the year: Understanding the Workforce of the Future. And they surveyed the general public and got some feedback from the general public on what were the perceptions of working for the federal government.

And I think that there is some really good news in that report, that they identified that we have an opportunity to go after and recruit Generation Y, the 18-to 29-year olds. There are specific findings. They said 34 percent of the Generation Y cohort are interested in working for the federal government. I think that is extremely promising. So the federal government has not done in the past 10 years or so a lot of recruiting. Recruitment has been ramped up in the past couple of years.

But we really need to see how we can target the Generation Y through colleges and university visits, through certain intern programs, to recruit and get some talent in the door, get some excitement about federal work and having the younger generation answer the call to serve. So I think there are some good new stories out there, and there are some opportunities for us to go after and recruit that Generation Y.

Mr. Morales: That's a surprising statistic. 34 percent is a very large number.

Mr. Salamone: Yeah, it is extremely large and something we're very very excited about.

Mr. Kamensky: Last year, OPM and the Council actually conducted a couple of hiring satisfaction surveys to try to improve the federal hiring process. Can you tell us a little bit about what these surveys were and the kind of results you saw, and what agencies plan to do to address the issues that surfaced?

Mr. Salamone: Very good question, John. And actually, the surveys were implemented prior to my coming onboard. But I will say that OPM staff did brief the Council on these issues during our November 2006 Chief Human Capital Officers Council meeting. The goal of the survey really is to improve the hiring process and assess management applicant satisfaction with the agency's hiring process in key areas. On the management side, the surveys look at things like job announcements, r�sum� contents, applicant quality and quantity, and hiring flexibilities.

For the applicant survey, we look at things like job announcements, r�sum� building, applicant storage and retrieval, job search, and just overall satisfaction. The findings that we discussed at the November meeting included on the management side, we're finding very high percentages of managers -- 90 percent to be exact -- believe that the vacancy announcements that they write for their agencies and for positions in their agencies accurately reflect the jobs at hand. So I think that was a very good statistic.

However, only 34 percent feel that they have the flexibility to use pay-setting flexibilities. And that's something that we want to take a look at and work with the agencies on to try and get that number up a little bit. But agencies are setting targets to date, and they've chosen to focus on improvements in several areas. And I'll just name some of those areas.

Things like hiring satisfaction; the appropriate number of applicants on the certificate; job announcements; the quality of the applicants; receiving certificates in a timely manner, again streamlining that hiring process to make sure that we are getting the certificates in the hands of the hiring manager fast enough so we don't lose that talent when we're competing against someone that may be interested in the government but we lose them to the private sector.

Again, just working on the job announcements and the application process, really making the job announcements more appealing to the applicants, putting catchy language in there, getting away from things that say "the incumbent will serve in this capacity," and just kind of improving the way that we write vacancy announcements.

Mr. Kamensky: In addition to hiring, another challenge that seems to be facing a lot of agencies is performance management; in particular, pay-for-performance. That's been a hot topic in the public sector, as agencies are looking to link individual and organizational performance. What's the Council doing to make sure agencies have the systems in place to support strong performance management programs, and that the agencies and the managers have the skills to manage them?

Mr. Salamone: That's an excellent question, John. And if you look at the recent survey results from the Federal Human Capital Survey, this was one of the -- and I think the lowest scoring result that we had for the federal government -- that employees felt that their pay raises were based on performance. And it's something that our subcommittee on Performance Management is looking at. I mentioned the academy session on the SES pay-for-performance system. That's one component.

But what we really need to do a better job of in the federal government is linking the agency's mission and driving that down to the goals and objectives that we set forward for the employees, that line of sight -- creating a line of sight that employees know what they're working on contributes to the mission of their agency or the mission of their organization, and that they are paid based on that performance, and based on how well they contribute to the mission of the agency.

If you look at the goals and objectives of the subcommittee, they're looking at identifying best practices for performance management. And I'm going to be working with the subcommittee to identify those agencies that have done a good job, those departments and agencies that are doing a good job, finding those best practices and showcasing those best practices in a document that we'll be putting together at the end of the year. So there's a lot going on. It certainly is a hot topic for the federal government. GAO recently issued their 2007 High-Risk Report, and it did include human capital as a high-risk area.

There's been a lot of work that's been done on human capital. But they mentioned as a first step toward human capital improvement that Congress must pass a pay-for-performance system for the federal government. So it's not only incumbent upon the agencies, but we can't do it alone. We need some help from Congress, and I don't know how likely it's going to be that that's going to happen. But it's certainly something that we will be looking at and hoping will happen to give us the flexibility to create a system that levels the playing field for the agencies.

Mr. Kamensky: That's interesting, as performance management has obviously been an enduring topic for a lot of things. There's a initiative this administration has taken up in the past couple of years called the HR Line of Business, the Human Resources Line of Business. And you have one of your subcommittees devoted to that. Could you explain a little bit about what is a Line of Business, and sort of what is the subcommittee doing, and how are they going to help move this initiative along?

Mr. Salamone: Sure. Actually, the mission of the Human Resources Line of Business is to support the governmentwide effort to ensure that the line of business meets the needs of the agency in their strategic management of human capital. The Human Resources Line of Business was established to really take a more central approach for some of the backroom day-to-day paperwork processes of the agencies, and consolidate those and centralize those into certain lines of business.

And really what we're trying to get to for the federal government is moving away in human resources -- moving away from just the day-to-day paperwork processing of the Standard Form 52s, the paperwork that you need to process, federal applicants, and the paperwork that you need to process for individual personnel files, and really move human capital or human resources in the direction of being more strategic partners, more strategic consultants in the agencies, so that an HR professional in the government can go and work with the manager and say here's how we can help you streamline the hiring process, here's how we think you would benefit from a different vacancy announcement, or using different language in your vacancy announcement.

So the Lines of Business will actually free up our HR professionals and help us develop the skills and competencies we need to make the human capital professionals in the government be more strategic. Now, we did not have a Human Resources Line of Business subcommittee in the Council. This was something that was new that the Director added. And really their first goal and most important goal is to provide more visibility of the Human Resource Line of Business to the Chief Human Capital Officers Council.

Gail Lovelace, from the General Services Administration, serves as our subcommittee chair. And the subcommittee is working extremely close with Norm Enger, who is the program manager at OPM for the Human Resources Line of Business. So we have a very good working relationship between the subcommittee and Norm Enger's office.

Mr. Morales: John, we only have about 60 seconds left. But over 90 percent of the federal employees are actually located outside of the Washington, D.C. area. What role does the Council play in reaching out to these employees that are beyond the immediate reach?

Mr. Salamone: That's a great question. And, you know, I think one way that we are looking to improve that coordination out to the field is to work through the federal executive boards and push information out through that infrastructure. But we're also hoping that the Chief Human Capital Officers and Deputy Chief Human Capital Officers will take what they learn and take what we discuss at the Council meetings and push that information out to their human resources professionals in the field.

I've made a pledge and offer to the Chief Human Capital Officers that I'd be happy to come and speak to their human resources team, whether they have an all-hands meeting here in D.C. that's broadcast out to the field -- to just introduce the Council to them, talk about what we have going on, talk about the things that we're working on in the Council. So I think I can play a role in that. But really, we're looking at working with the FEBs, working with the Chief Human Capital Officers and then seeing what role I can play in filtering information out to the field as well.

Mr. Morales: Great. What does the future hold for the Council?

We will ask John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the Office of Personnel Management, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the Office of Personnel Management.

Also joining us in our conversation is John Kamensky, senior fellow at The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

John, can you talk a little bit about the role the Council plays in the area of emergency planning? You alluded to this a bit earlier. Specifically in the areas of preparing for the pandemic threats, or responding to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Salamone: I'd be happy to. And actually as I'd indicated, the subcommittee was extremely instrumental to OPM when we were working on our human capital guidance for pandemic influenza. And listeners can go to www.opm.gov/pandemic to pull up our human capital guidance. And they'll see what OPM has been working on and the guidance that we've delivered to the community.

But I'll say that not only with the human capital guidance for pandemic influenza, the Council was extremely helpful during Hurricane Katrina. Now, that was prior to my tenure on the staff of the Council, but OPM Director Springer held several conference calls immediately following Hurricane Katrina to discuss with the Council members existing personnel flexibilities to help the employees out in the Gulf region. And actually, there's a summary of those conference calls and what was discussed on the Council's website on our documents page; it will detail what the Council members talked about and things that we were working on to really help the employees in that region.

Mr. Kamensky: John, the Council's been in existence for, what, four years now. What challenges did OPM and the agencies face to get it off the ground? And how has the Council evolved to respond to those challenges?

Mr. Salamone: I think, John, that's a great question. And with your background in government, you know that whenever you start anything new in government, it's always difficult to start from the ground up. My predecessor, Mike Dovilla, who was the Executive Director prior to my tenure, really did an outstanding job setting up the Council, starting from scratch, and getting a very solid foundation in place.

My goal really when I came on board looked at my roles and responsibilities as the Executive Director, set some short-term and long-term goals for myself. And really my long-term goal is to make sure that I'm doing everything that I can to build on that foundation, work with the Director of OPM, work with the Council members, work with our stakeholders, to raise awareness and secure that positive legacy for the Council so that the next generation of Chief Human Capital Officers that come in have a good solid foundation and know that they're coming into a Council that serves a wonderful purpose for the human resources community, and has done some very good and innovative things for the community, and they can take it and build upon our successes.

Mr. Kamensky: In doing that and looking out to the future, how does the Council stay current on human capital issues? And what role do you guys play in anticipating or planning for future trends?

Mr. Salamone: That's a very good question. And actually, to Director Springer's credit, she's changed the structure of the Council meetings to make sure that we have more engagement and more involvement from the Chief Human Capital Officers. And beginning with the January meeting this year, we are breaking the meetings -- they're two-hour meetings, and they happen -- we have six meetings a year; they occur every other month. The first hour of the meetings really is to focus on the business of the Council. OPM will give briefings on cutting-edge issues that are coming up or things that we're working on at OPM. The subcommittees will conduct briefings. But that last hour is really for the Chief Human Capital Officers to volunteer and discuss cutting-edge topics that they have going on in their agency.

For example, our March meeting, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, Dr. Reginald Wells from the Social Security Administration is going to talk about Social Security's distance learning process, and how they've implemented strong distance learning procedures for the Social Security Administration, something that we can share as a best practice at the Council, something that fits in very well with the mission of our Learning and Development subcommittee, something that we hopefully will be able to showcase at the end of the year in a best practices document.

Mr. Morales: John, along the same lines, one of the trends that we're seeing is this transformation of the human resource workforce from what was traditionally a transactionally based organization to a more strategic business partner. Can you talk a little bit about what the Council is doing to address this transformation? But more importantly, to ensure that the HR workforce has the necessary competencies.

Mr. Salamone: Al, that's a great question, and I alluded to it a little bit before with the Human Resources Line of Business dialogue that we were having. And actually this particular issue dovetails very well with the HR Line of Business. Our human capital subcommittee is working on this very problem. And, you know, their mission is to make sure that we have the skills and competencies in the human resources community to serve as a strategic consultant for federal agencies, and making sure that we're hiring a new generation of human resources professionals that have those competencies to service as a consultant.

Mr. Morales: John, we started this show talking a little bit about your background and your experience on the Hill and at OPM, which shows a real commitment to public service. What advice would you give to a person perhaps still in college who is interested in a career in public service?

Mr. Salamone: Al, I'm happy you asked that. And I will have to say that I have been extremely fortunate, very lucky, and I am extremely honored to have served in all of the positions that I have had. You know, starting in Senator D'Amato's office part-time three days a week making $9,000 a year, I know I was not going to get rich, but I knew that it was a wonderful experience. I would not trade one day of my 15 years of federal service for anything.

I'm sitting here with you today; I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that I would be on the radio talking about very important human capital issues that are facing the federal government. I would say to college students out there, give the federal government a chance. You could rise up very quickly, make an impact, and really do a great service to your nation by serving as a federal employee.

I'm going to work as hard as I can to continue my federal service, and we'll see where this job takes me. But I'm very excited about the future. And I think all the college students that are out there -- really think about it, because federal service is a noble profession, and you'll have an opportunity to do great things for the United States.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic. And with that, we hope that the next Gallup poll shows a couple of more points increase in that 34 percent population.

Mr. Salamone: Hope so.

Mr. Morales: John, we have unfortunately reached the end of our time. I do want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule. But more importantly, John Kamensky and I would like to thank you for your 15 years of dedicated service to our country.

Mr. Salamone: I appreciate that Al, John. Thank you very much for the opportunity to come here today. If any of your listeners are looking for information on the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, they can visit our website at www.chcoc.gov. And in addition, too, they can go to the OPM website if they're interested in the Office of Personnel Management, at www.opm.gov. And finally, for those college students or those of you in the audience that are interested in federal employment, please visit our website, www.usajobs.gov. And there, you will find vacancy announcements and job opportunities that are available to you in the federal government.

Mr. Morales: Fantastic. Thank you.

This has been The Business Of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with John Salamone, Executive Director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

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

For The Business Of Government Hour, I am Albert Morales.

Thank you for listening.

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

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