Originally Broadcast August 4, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness.

You can find out more about the Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

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

As the United States Air Force continues to transform its capabilities to meet emerging national security challenges, it has sought to ensure the effective and efficient integration of technology, people, and processes to provide the warfighter and decisionmakers with timely and actionable information shared across a worldwide platform.

With us this morning to discuss efforts in this area is our special guest, Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force, Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer.

Good morning, General.

LTG Peterson: Good morning, Al. Glad to be here.

Mr. Morales: Also joining is our conversation is Dave Hathaway, partner in IBM's defense industry practice.

Good morning, Dave.

Mr. Hathaway: Good morning.

Mr. Morales: General, perhaps you could set some context for us by describing the mission of your office and how it supports the overall mission of the Department of Defense.

LTG Peterson: Well, you started off really well in the opening paragraph: integrating processes, people, and systems to deliver information. But if you look at the history of the U.S. Air Force over the last dozen years or so as we really got into the Information Age, we had built exquisite systems but they were independent systems. So my job, and the job of my office, is to go back to our legacy systems, make them interoperate to deliver fused information to anyone who needs it, whether it's a commander or warfighter, an executive in our business and support systems, but deliver that information for the legacy context, but at the same time point a roadmap for the future, so that as we build out future systems, we don't go down the same path of independent non-interoperable capability.

Mr. Morales: General, could you give us a sense of the scale of your operations? How are you organized? What's the size of your budget and your staff, and is this a worldwide footprint that you have with this mission?

LTG Peterson: It is absolutely worldwide, and it touches every aspect of the Air Force's mission, and much of the work that the Air Force does as the joint interdependent partner with the other services. But in terms of scale, we manage an annual budget or portfolio of about $7 billion. Beyond that, there are about $17 billion in systems that are out there operating today. When I say portfolio, that is to set the policy, to set the rules, to build an enterprise architecture that shows us where we're going and how we'll operate today.

Mr. Hathaway: Sir, would you please describe your specific responsibilities and duties as the Air Force's Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer?

LTG Peterson: Sure. And the reason that it's set aside as not just Chief Information Officer, it was clear to our leadership that it wasn't just business systems or support systems. This was the entire arena of command and control, intelligence, surveillance reconnaissance, and all of the business and support systems that make our Air Force run. So warfighting integration included data links, it included the command and control systems. It included the communications networks on which they all ride. So that's why it was Warfighting Integration, and then all of the -- what was passed down in the Clinger-Cohen Act and the Federal Information Systems Management Act later on for the chief information officer responsibilities for the Department. So those two tied together, we put in one office, because everything we do is interrelated.

Mr. Hathaway: Sir, regarding your responsibilities and duties, what would you say are the top three challenges you face in your position, and how have you addressed those challenges?

LTG Peterson: Well, the number one challenge is in this arena of information technology, this audience knows how quickly that moves, and how rapid the turnover is in terms of technology and what opportunities are out there. So my number one challenge is educating the Air Force on what the potential is for information technology -- to allow those people to operate more effectively and more efficiently. So that's the number one challenge.

Number two is that is not the way we operated for years. For years, we operated in mission areas or functional areas, and each of those were able to independently develop and build systems that met their requirements. That gave great capability but it didn't give great interoperability. So my number two challenge was to bring all of those different functional entities together so we can be interoperable across functional areas, across command lines, and especially in the joint arena.

And the final challenge has to do with security of the information -- information assurance, on a broader scale -- to ensure that the capabilities we provide are consistent, that they are safe from losing information or from people treading upon our networks or capabilities that we don't want to be there. So it's the education, breaking down those cultural barriers, and then securing our networks.

Mr. Morales: It sounds like a very broad mission for just one individual, General. Now, you've been in the Air Force for some 30-plus years. Could you give us a sense of how you started your career within the Air Force?

LTG Peterson: I attended the University of Southern Mississippi. And right away, I'm not kidding you, it was "I guess I better find a job." So I joined Air Force ROTC, with a degree that was in the sciences: math, and minor in general sciences. The Air Force looked exciting. I joined the Air Force and they put me in the communications electronics maintenance arena.

After that first dozen years with hands-on kind of work, I moved into the space operations business; at first managing communication satellites, and later commanding space operations units, squadrons and groups.

At that time, literally, the Internet had emerged as the powerful capability we all respect it for today -- that was the middle 1990s -- where I came back to the command and control business and was building air and space operations centers in places like Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and later on throughout Southwest Asia, where we operate today. That gets into a part of the career where it was more about management and leadership and less about hands-on technical direction, which is where I find myself now after a series of staff jobs with our major commands and our combatant commanders, and now here in the Pentagon.

Mr. Morales: So, General, with the various roles and commands that you've held, how have these experiences prepared you for your current leadership role and informed your leadership style and management approach?

LTG Peterson: Well, you said just a moment ago, Al, that that must be a big job for one person. And as you can imagine, I have lots of help, and very talented help. Early on in my career, it became so apparent that I wasn't going to be able to invent all the great answers. And if you just put out a vision that was understandable that people could resonate with and then step back and listen for the feedback, ask for advice, ask for people to take ownership of an initiative, of a problem, of an opportunity, they would. And that describes my leadership style, or what I think has helped in my success today. Be very clear in what you think we ought to do, but also understand that there are smart people everywhere, and you don't understand their job as well as they do. So ask for advice, give them the freedom to take charge, occasionally make a mistake, and we will all learn from that and be successful from that.

Mr. Morales: What are the U.S. Air Force's IT transformation efforts?

We will ask Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer.

Also joining us in our conversation is Dave Hathaway, partner in IBM's defense industry practice.

General, the Air Force has stealthy precise weapons systems and the best airmen in the world; and by adding IT to that mix, the service has been able to make its assets more efficient and powerful.

To that end, could you elaborate on your warfighter integration vision?

LTG Peterson: It was during Kosovo, and we knew that we had to roll back the integrated air defense system around Pristina so we could fly our non-stealthy aircraft in and strike the Serbian ground forces -- without a ground force to flush them, that's a difficult task. There was one SA-6 guarding the capital of Pristina. We've surveyed the area now to bring in a surveillance reconnaissance asset to look at those hide sites, one of them has the SA-6 on it. No, the mission is not done. You don't know exactly where that hide site is until you've sent the image back to another computer, stretched it to fit the grid coordinates on a map. Okay, now we do know where it is, but the clock keeps ticking.

Now it's time to find out if you have an asset to strike the SA-6 surface-to-air missile battery. Sort through available platforms, start to do mission planning, line that strike platform up with the support package -- by that I mean the tankers that will refuel it on the way, the electronic warfare assets that will support it, and to complete that mission in that instance took 4-1/2 hours, and as we like to say, 17 consecutive miracles.

Anyone that looked at the details of what we had done -- this was the 1999 time frame -- that understood information technology would have said, why haven't you modernized, why haven't you linked these warfighting systems together so that critical pieces of information, once you understand the process, will flow machine to machine, it's not someone shuffling papers, it's knowledge that is fused and put together so a decisionmaker, a commander, a pilot, can make a decision and take action and not pass information around?

And that was the genesis of warfighting integration. Today, that same action in Iraq or Afghanistan is down to tens of minutes -- certainly less than 30 minutes that we would be able to go strike any what we call time-sensitive target, because we've planned for it. So plenty of work left to do to make us more lethal, more effective, and certainly more efficient.

The good news is with what industry has been able to offer us, it's quite often more efficient and less costly to pursue the modernized capability than to stick and sustain the legacy systems.

Mr. Morales: So to what extent does your warfighting integration plan deliver a roadmap to the future and ensure that the right investments are made to optimize decision superiority to the warfighter? And what are some of the key benefits and critical challenges to this implementation?

LTG Peterson: That is a great question. The key to all of this, and I'm glad you said roadmap -- the key to all of this is an architecture, an enterprise architecture. And that starts with, as I said earlier, policies, rules, processes, and eventually, it gets down to a roadmap and a technology description of where we need to go so you can make investment decisions.

The Air Force started down this architecture journey in earnest about five years ago, and at first, it was little more than drawings of boxes and linking them together. It was not rich in its description of policy or the rules by which we operate. It has certainly matured. When OMB came to visit six months ago and asked about our architectural work, I could point to the work that we had done in 2006 alone. I could tell them how much money we had spent on building out the architecture, and then show them definitively that we have been able to make decisions about future systems in terms of retiring them in lieu of new capability, in terms of investment, where for every dollar we had spent on architecture, there was $10 of cost avoidance in the outyears.

And so the cost avoidance money that we didn't have but were going to have to find ended up over the next five years $77 million -- that we didn't have to spend those dollars because we made an early good decision based on architecture.

Mr. Hathaway: Sir, DoD is transforming from platform and organization centric to a netcentric operation, and the Armed Services CIOs are providing the leadership to meet this netcentric vision. Would you elaborate on this netcentric vision for the Air Force, and what exactly is netcentricity?

LTG Peterson: Netcentricity, and we throw that term around, everyone wants it to be a technical solution. Certainly technology underpins it, but it starts with understanding of a process. So if I am a joint force commander -- for instance, Gen. Petraeus, he should have access to every single piece of information that we have -- he needs a fused real-time picture of what's happening. He needs to understand the impact of a capability that the Air Force might bring to the fight versus what it would take for other services to create the same effect.

Netcentricity is exposing that information or that data, allowing it to maneuver the network under a framework or a set of processes that we have prescribed so that that commander has exactly the information he or she requires to get their job and their mission done. And it's not just up the chain, it's down the chain. It's so the air component and the land component can exchange information seamlessly and in real time without having to go through 16 different translators.

So the netcentricity comes from understand the process, understand the flow of information, understand the data and then put the technical rules in place so that information can flow. As simple as what is the service that you use to send messages across your network? Is that the same message service that another component uses? If it's not, how do we account for that? Do I describe this type of data one way and you describe it another? That's the reason the CIOs of the services are perfectly poised to really lead this effort. Now, I'm not going to name data, I'm going to find that functional expert and build a team around him or her that can identify the data, create the taxonomy, describe the process, and then we'll provide the technical expertise so when it's time to build an application or a service on this broader network, we all can use it and benefit from it.

Mr. Hathaway: Last year, the Air Force added cyberspace as a mission area, in addition to the traditional air and space operations. What challenges have you faced in creating the cyber command and integrating it with existing Air Force operations?

LTG Peterson: The first challenge is always, so what is that? And I say that tongue in cheek, but it is not simply IT networks, it is also the RF spectrum. It is also -- in the future, it would include directed energy weapons. Cyberspace is a domain in which we operate. Cyberspace is a man-made environment. So anything in a electromagnetic spectrum, in a man-made environment, that would be cyberspace.

So the second challenge is our leadership understanding the important of cyberspace in the future, for us to be able to operate freely in that domain, to know that that domain will always be available for our use. So to operate it, to protect it, defend against attackers. Why would we ever want an adversary to have that same freedom of movement in a similar domain? So to think about ways that we could take that capability away from a potential adversary.

And why did we start now? Certainly, the Air Force, all of the services, do a lot of work in the cyberspace domain today. But we do it for the most part in functional stovepipes, so we have our intelligence surveillance reconnaissance community that does some work in the cyber domain; but they do it separately. What we really must develop is a professional force that is steeped in all of those elements of the cyberspace mission.

And so how do I grow that expert with that breadth of knowledge? Well, it will probably take a decade or more to start to grow. So it's not about Mike Peterson, it's about the captains and the staff sergeants that are out there as well as our civilians that we want to bring into this culture and to train them across the breadth of cyberspace missions.

Mr. Hathaway: Sir, you mentioned the importance of data before. What is the Air Force's data strategy for the new digital era, and how does the strategy seek to make data identifiable, assessable, and understandable throughout the enterprise?

LTG Peterson: Our Secretary of the Air Force, Sec. Michael Wynne, brought some great experience from industry with him, and part of that had to do with exposing data and information. Industry viewing information as an asset, as you would any other item on your tally sheet. And it was really his emphasis that got us moving in the direction of our Air Force data strategy. He asked us as a staff to be able to conduct a clean audit, where we understood the rules, we could expose the information, and then we could repeat the process time and again.

And we're well on our road with the first deliverable of a set of pathfinders that take us on the clean audit. I understood full well that he knew that the Department would operate more effectively, both on the warfighting aspect and on the business aspect, if we could discover data, expose data, share data, and we understood when we spoke about data, what we were talking about: the taxonomy, the vocabulary.

He took us on this journey where each functional community, each mission area has been charged with the responsibility of understanding the data, understanding the processes through which they employ that data to come up with answers. So it's building communities of interest that would go out and do the definitional work, understand the process so you can map out the data flow, the ontology, and then build a vocabulary.

Now that we've done that, the Department of Defense can leverage any work that we've already done. We're leveraging work that the other services have done, and eventually have this very rich vocabulary -- understand the processes, the ontology.

Several seemingly small but very important examples: one I'll quickly highlight. At Patrick Air Force Base, one of our satellite launch facilities near Cape Canaveral, Florida -- but at Patrick, before you could launch a satellite, you had to understand that all of the range systems were ready or what the stage of readiness before we could launch a satellite. And of course, you know what we did; we threw an army of people at it. Instead of going to each of those systems, exposing the data, building a real-time runtime metadata environment, so you simply go to the website, type in the mission number, and all of the supporting systems on the range that are required to launch that mission number -- immediately the database is populated and you get the status.

But that describes our data strategy, finding out where the authoritative data is, describing it and making it available for everyone to use.

Mr. Morales: General, we've used terms such as architecture; we've used terms such as netcentricity. I'm going to add one more to the mix here, and that's service-oriented architecture.

Now I'm going to try to phrase a question that uses all three of these terms. What role does service-oriented architecture play in making your data strategy as well as your overall netcentric vision a reality?

LTG Peterson: The importance of a service-oriented architecture is that services -- what we used to refer to as embedded applications or capabilities or tools -- those services are now able to be shared across the enterprise. So if I built a service that kept track of who is supposed to be on the network, and could certify that yep, it's Mike Peterson on the network, if I built that service, in the past, it would be embedded in a system. And only that system could benefit from the service.

In a service-oriented architecture, I can build that service, I can publish it and expose it for everyone's use. Now, that saves -- because we all know what service we're going to use, there's built-in interoperability. Because we can all share that service, we don't have to reinvent another service. So service-oriented architecture allows you to publish the service, share it.

Now, you are into the issue of identifying which piece of data is authoritative, and because I can always go get it, then I don't have to build data warehouses, because I know what protocols and services to count on, so now I have interoperability.

So the benefits of a service-oriented architecture are huge in terms of access to information, interoperability and cost of sustainment. It's not really easy. And that's why, as I said, we're undertaking a number of pilots or pathfinders, small steps, where we can understand how to expose data, build a metadata environment, build out the communities of interest, working with our acquisition teams, what are those services out there that we think, based on industry advice, are most likely to stand the test of time so we don't replace that service in a few years.

The other big piece of service-oriented architecture is configuration management. Understanding who is providing a service, hosting it on their server or what framework, understanding who the authoritative data sources are and making certain they understand it; and keeping our vendor teams knowledgeable and integrated so that we can continue to build and not repair. We are absolutely excited about service-oriented architecture. It's not necessarily something that you have to take in one entire bite.

But I really do envision that in a dozen years or more that it will be much more a pure service-oriented architecture than it is today, but it will be one bite at a time as we move forward, and allow us to spend our dollars more efficiently.

Mr. Morales: What about the U.S. Air Force's IT innovation?

We will ask Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force, Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force, Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer.

Also joining us in our conversation is Dave Hathaway, partner in IBM's defense industry practice.

General, the cost of sustaining about 19,000 legacy applications must be absolutely staggering. I understand that you save approximately $1 million for every legacy application retired or moved onto the Air Force portal or the Global Combat Support System.

Could you elaborate on the development of the Global Combat Support System and the Air Force's portal? How does it enable your force to achieve a broader netcentric data-transparent capability, and are there plans to migrate to a single DoD portal?

LTG Peterson: Al, thanks for the question because it's an important issue. Yes, the legacy platforms are very expensive to sustain. The sustainment is mostly about keeping those legacy platforms or systems talking to or interoperating with sister systems. That's where about 80 percent of the sustainment dollars go. And this is not modernizing, this is just keeping them running.

The Global Combat Support System was built as a framework for our support systems. There's always a fuzzy gray line between what's a support system and what's an operational system. When the Air Force went down the road of a portal, that portal was simply a presentation layer of information that was on our integration framework. So we looked across the Air Force at lines of business -- logistics, human resources, financials, and as we looked at the multitude of systems, you are correct, 19,000 different applications out there that the Air Force sustains every year. But as we looked at those lines of business, we recognize that if we took those lines of business and started building them with common protocols, common standards, common services embedded in them, then the cost in that line of business, sustaining those systems, would go down dramatically.

So GCSS Air Force -- that's the acronym we use for the Global Combat Support System -- was not so much a portal, it was the integration framework on which we were going to host services. So when I ask you to build the next munitions tracking system, you only had to build the piece to track munitions, not the messaging software, not the database administrator. All of those services were already available on the integration framework, and you were automatically interoperable with.

That vision has continued to grow across the Air Force. Today, as we build out GCSS Air Force, the other thing it gives us is a way to put information where it belongs. Example: when we originally built capability in the Air Force, it's wherever that information was created was generally where we plopped down the server that would do business with all of our partners.

So to come in and to access that information, you were able to traverse much of the Air Force network. So now with GCSS Air Force, where we are able to host those systems, those applications, at the edge of our network so you can get to that information without traversing the network -- security, you don't have to run a single server for a single application; efficiency, it's made that network much tighter and much more efficient in terms of running it.

The integration aspect of the framework has made it easier to build systems. The portal, on the other hand, still remains simply a user interface or a presentation layer to that information for different lines of business.

Now, you asked what about eventually a DoD framework and portal. You compare the Air Force portal to today's Army portal, Defense Knowledge Online, which is a joint perspective -- their portal and their presentation layer offers much more service and capability than the Air Force portal. It is a wonderful tool for a unit to manage a deployment of soldiers and to keep them engaged with families back home, for families to be able to understand what the unit's doing. It's a very rich capability.

The Army, on the other hand, has not made the investment on the integration framework. It's not that they don't intend to, it's just where they are in the program. So yes, I would very much like us to come together out there in the future as the contracts for DKO, Defense Knowledge Online, and the contracts for GCSS Air Force, when the timelines come together, I'd very much like to have a single offering. Should that not be possible, there is still the opportunity to have a federation.

What do I mean by that? The real reason you want to be under a single framework is so if I'm the joint force commander and I need information about an Air Force line of business that is hosted on the Air Force portal, the integration framework GCSS Air Force, then somehow I've got to get to that information. The system won't let me get to the information unless it knows who I am.

The way you work around that is you share a common identity management service, you exchange certificates. And you can do those. The technique is called federation; you just have to decide what are those core services that have to be common -- doesn't matter what the look and feel is, it best suits your line of business or your operational need.

Mr. Morales: So it's really about driving interoperability across the DoD as opposed to within the various line of service?

LTG Peterson: Right, because we don't fight as services, we fight as a team. And that is the test of whether or not we will be successful is if some deployed soldier, sailor, airman, marine can get the information that he or she needs exactly when they need it without 15 phone calls and having somebody else log into the computer for you.

Mr. Morales: General, as a component of the Air Force's larger communications and information strategic transformation, would you discuss your efforts to implement an Integrated Network Operations and Security Center, or the INOSC, and how does the INOSC initiative reduce your footprint and increase process and personnel efficiencies?

LTG Peterson: Briefly, I told you how we built our networks. We built them one room at a time, one building at a time, one group of buildings at a time, one base at a time. That's how our networks grew up. Industry brought tools along for consolidation, so you reduce the overhead cost of operating a network. One of the reasons that we did not immediately follow that was we wanted each air wing, space wing to be complete, to have its own embedded capability.

So what we have done is stepped back from our network and said we will operate this as an enterprise. When we started, we had 17 separate network operations and security centers, and well over 120 network control centers. You don't need that many, even as a network as large as ours. Today, we have two integrated network operations and security centers divide up the work and have a continuity of operations plan where one could back up the other, and that's a standard business practice. But to do that, we had to make investments in modern network management tools.

On a side note, when I first arrived on the job, I was very concerned of course about network security, and so we went down the path of a standard desktop configuration, a standard server configuration for purposes of security. Well now, we've implemented a standard desktop solution and we're well along on a standard server solution so that we can do all of the patching remotely, and now, we no longer require touch maintenance.

Today, it's hours to patch the network. And it's because of the tools that we've adopted. We did that for the purposes of security. I didn't understand until later that my goodness, all of the workload we took off the shoulders of those systems administrators.

I was at the Pentagon just a couple of months ago, and a staff sergeant, Air Force staff sergeant got on the bus and he walked by me up the aisle and he stopped and he said, sir,

I'm a systems administrator, I just arrived here from Hill Air Force Base. He said we were working 65 hours a week, me and my team, and we were getting farther and farther behind on patches. We could not keep the systems patched until standard desktop came along. He said, when I left, we already had cut our workload down to just under 50 hours a week.

He says, I think by the time we're done, we'll be working less than 40 hours a week. That's when the actual other shoe dropped. He said, that's really a good news story because you know we're going to reduce the number of systems administrators we have next year.

Mr. Morales: Right.

LTG Peterson: You know, we're reducing the manpower in the U.S. Air Force, but leveraging information technology, whether it's in the IT arena or the human resources or finances or logistics, has played a huge role in being able to reduce the required manpower and still be very effective in an operational environment.

Mr. Hathaway: Sir, you mentioned the personnel cuts being experienced by the Air Force. The Air Force is experiencing these reductions as a result of PBD-720. How are you successfully meeting your mission requirements while at the same time absorbing these reductions?

LTG Peterson: Well, that's a timely question. We knew that if we embraced industry best practices, moved on to next generation software and tools, that we could be much more efficient across the Air Force. And as I said, it's not just IT, it's logistics, it's human resources, it's finance, it's every single thing we do, we could become more efficient.

Understanding that, the Secretary of the Air Force and our Chief were faced with a dilemma. Our Air Force really had not recapitalized its capability through the '90s and into the first five years of this decade. We are flying aircraft whose average age is 24 years. In fact, Navy ships on average aren't that old. We had to get started on recapitalizing, and you've seen what we've done with our next generation tanker, combat search and rescue platform, where we need to go with aging fighter and bomber aircraft. And you've seen that in the news, but the problem is so huge that you have to start now. It will take us 25 years to recapitalize the tanker force alone.

Well, in the middle of a War on Terror, the resources for recapitalization simply are not going to be there from external sources. There's a fight going on in the desert; there's a fight going on globally, and that's where our attention is focused. So to find dollars for recapitalization, what could we do internally? And that's when the Chief and the Secretary realized that we could embrace, as I said, industry best practices and tools and become a process-based organization, and we could create our own recapitalization capital. This was not about taking away warfighting capability. In fact, if you do this correctly, you increase your warfighting effectiveness, at the same time reducing the manpower requirements for the mission support arena, and that's that we've done.

The example of standard desktop, the example of INOSCs, those and some others have allowed us to take the first 6,000 personnel out of network services delivery. We need to do more. If you look at my common operational picture that I spoke about earlier, I can map initiative after initiative to the manpower that it will reduce, and it's already begun to reduce, in the Air Force-IT arena.

For instance, no one in industry would have a help desk at every Air Force base. We do. We're consolidating help desks. No one would have a server farm at every Air Force base, given the modern network paths that are available to us, but we do. Those are the examples of the other -- and there are 13 initiatives that -- every single one was looking over the hedge at industry and asking so how are you doing this? And we're getting great partnership, because we're finally getting some unsolicited proposals for how we might better conduct telephone operations across the Air Force. Companies that have investment dollars and great ideas that I think you'll see us implement.

While at the same time we've done that, I can go back to our air expeditionary force -- that's how we build our packages to deploy and how we go to war -- and I can map all the capability required in each AEF package back to capability that still exists that's not going away.

Now, what do I mean by that? We would have tanker aircraft go into depot for their maintenance cycle that comes every few years, and they would be there so long that aircraft would just pile up in the depots as we worked them through the process line.

But today, they're coming out so much more rapidly, it equates to more than a squadron of airplanes back on the ramp available to fly missions. Those are the kind of efficiencies, and if you can do it quicker, you can do it with less manpower, that's the kind of example. So PBD-720 -- it is difficult because it's something you have to do quickly and move out. The dollars that we would have spent, we will invest in the recapitalization of the Air Force.

Mr. Morales: General, changing topics a bit here, could you tell us little bit about something called ROVER, the Remote Operations Video Enhanced Receiver? How has the ROVER technology tightened the seams in the so-called kill-train in increasing the speed and lethality of air power? And could you illustrate this with a real-life example?

LTG Peterson: Sure. And the ROVER is a great example. In the airborne environment, we have -- it's rich with information, data links, imagery from targeting pods, access to the images that a Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle, would provide. But as we got into the desert initially, that information wasn't immediately available to the soldier, the marine, the battlefield airman on the ground. Yes, they could get a radio call, but they couldn't see moving imagery or the picture of what was over the hill or what was in the compound that they were focused on as the target.

ROVER came from initially the Predator -- the AC-130 gunship wanted to know if, gee, if Predator imagery can be sent all around the world, why can't I see it? So for the Predator, we put together a very simple receiver in a laptop computer, and so if there is a Predator in your area, you tune to that frequency and you take the downlink to the Predator and you see exactly what the Predator sees. Now we're on version 3 of ROVER, and it's much more capable now in terms of that feedback loop of how I ask for information and provide feedback to the operator. And it's not just Predator, it's many of the targeting pods that are on our fighter and strike aircraft also have a transmitter now embedded in them that allows them to go direct to the ROVER.

Lots of battlefield examples, but one that's a little closer to home, is after Hurricane Katrina, we took 10 ROVER sets, which was a little tiny hand-launched Styrofoam UAV with a camera and transmitter -- that was the picture piece -- and then the ROVER itself was the receiver unit on the ground, and we took them to New Orleans to help with the recovery effort. And initially the thought was these will help with search and rescue as we find those victims that are stranded on rooftops or need assistance across the city.

But with all of the helicopter traffic, it didn't look wise to be flying more UAVs. And since they were Styrofoam airplanes, we cut the wings off and strapped them to the struts of helicopters, and gave great situational awareness to the commanders back at the op centers to see what was going on with the helicopters.

Now, the helicopters were busy doing real search and rescue, so they weren't busy pointing the ROVER around where the commander might want to see something else, so that became a signal of opportunity. You know, watch it, but I'm not going to try to steal the helicopter time from what they're doing. So what we did is on one of the taller buildings there in the city, we went up and put four of the Styrofoam bodies and taped the cameras on an antenna tower on top of a hotel in town, so you had a 360 degree panoramic view of the city.

And that's where we got warning when you saw the fires, where you saw -- and you could steer the camera -- where we had other activities going on on the ground where you could alert law enforcement or search and rescue, that became the eyes of the commander in the op center, and extremely valuable. Today, there are over 3,000 ROVER units over in the theater. More are on the way. As I said, incredibly valuable, but just literally one of dozens and dozens of innovations that were out there that industry has helped us put together that we get to put to use every single day in the fight on terror.

Mr. Morales: That's a great piece of technology.

What does the future hold for the Air Force's IT efforts?

We will ask Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force, Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer.

Also joining us in our conversation is Dave Hathaway, partner in IBM's defense industry practice.

General, as a CIO, a big portion of your job is to put in place the policies, the cultural change strategies, the educational outreach to help staff recognize that they are part of a much broader enterprise. To this end, what are some of the common pushbacks that you encounter as a CIO?

LTG Peterson: The common pushbacks, it's never really pushback; it's lack of understanding of what the teaming relationship needs to be. I am not going to own the process; I am not going to take over the mission set.

But the common pushbacks are, wait a minute, you don't know anything about my business. And I don't claim to. I claim to be very good at listening, helping plot out the processes; helping those owners of the information understand their data, understand why it is important to name and describe that data, and then we can help with what is the art of the possible with turning on the vendors that are out there that are ready to come and help.

I mean, most recently, our training command came, and their need is absolutely genuine, they do not have a single capability to manage students across the spectrum of training as they flow from recruiting to basic training to those first technical or operational schools and then out to the Air Force. We have multiple systems that don't talk to each other, that you end up what we call thumping data back into them. The need is exactly correct. But they did not have the expertise to understand how to expose their data, build and publish services and capability. Instead, they were on the path of building another monolithic system that would talk to no one else. So after the -- and the good news is we're all friends. But it really took several sessions before everyone understood the right path, and we are going to deliver capability in the same time frame. In fact, better capability, for about 10 percent of the cost. So it's exciting.

The pushback is no longer there in the Air Force. And really, I will point to our Secretary, Michael Wynne, because he didn't point to me and say, Mike, you're going to run data transparency. He said Mike, you're going to support data transparency, and he looked at all the other mission owners across the Air Force and said, you're going to own data transparency. And so the pushback, it started with why are you interested, and it's more into, I'm sure glad you're here, and I'm sincere about that.

Mr. Hathaway: Sir, with the evolving global threat environment, there are many new challenges associated with it. How do you envision DoD and its information technology efforts evolving in the next five years to meet these challenges?

LTG Peterson: The next five years will really be important to us. We talked about one of those areas, the portal, Defense Knowledge Online, Air Force portal, where we have to go to share information. The next five years are critical, because today, it is too hard for someone in the joint arena to access all the information they require to do their mission. So the decisions we make about netcentric enterprise, the decisions we make about data strategy, about protocols, will be very important. But I will tell you that the forums that we work together -- and not just Department of Defense, but the entire federal government -- OMB does a very good job of sharing across the federal government, and they are very quick to identify a best practice and share that with all of the other federal agencies that are out there. We've done that in a number of areas.

So I think the important things will be moving out on the service-oriented architecture, moving out on that technical framework that underpins the portals, deciding what services will be available and who will provide them, how will we build them.

Now, that's all on the producing information and getting at their side. The other most important pieces will be on network security. We face some very talented adversaries on our networks. And you will see us continue to build out that -- some people call it the moat in the castle wall -- of course, we will still continue to do that, because you can't even be susceptible to that weekend hacker, so you build the moat and the castle wall to keep out your average hacker.

But then you have to go beyond that with really redesigning our network, where do we allow people to transit our network? How do we handle identity management? What are the tools so we can do business within the government and with our partners outside the government, but not allow people inside our networks? So network security is an area that once you build that castle wall and the moat, now you can get on with the business and put your real talent, your people, against the threats that are a little tougher to uncover -- where malware has been installed on a system, where you have a disgruntled insider that is willing to push information out.

And those tools that help you understand where data is, where it's moving to -- you know, what appropriate behavior is on the network, those tools are emerging in industry as well, and you'll see us implement those as we not only generate the capability to deliver information to everyone that needs it, but lock down any information that shouldn't be exfiltrated or moving outside the network.

Mr. Hathaway: We mentioned transformation earlier, and transformation creates new and competitive areas and competencies that are needed. What qualities will be needed in the warfighter of the future, and those IT staff who provide support? And to that end, what steps are being taken to attract and maintain a high quality technical and professional workforce?

LTG Peterson: Attracting the high quality workforce, we've been very good at that. And I know that in the news you see concerns about meeting recruiting goals. But I will tell you, the only reason it's difficult is because the standards are so high. I am just thrilled by the airmen and the officers that I see emerging from our basic training in our tech schools. So the challenge is we've got the workforce, there is no question about that.

The challenge is two parts. Number one, we will always have to partner with industry. Anywhere we're delivering network services, you are going to find a complete team, you'll find people in uniform, you will find government civilians and you will find industry partners that quite often bring the latest and most up-to-date technology or the individual with the deepest knowledge base.

On the training side, that is a challenge, it is to ensure that our schoolhouses, number one, are current and they're teaching the most modern technology. The next challenge though is how do we build the forums or the interest amongst our workforce. That is a bigger challenge for us, is to keep the workforce current.

Mr. Morales: General, you've had just a fascinating and very successful career of serving our country. What has been the most rewarding aspect of your Air Force career, and what advice would you give to someone who perhaps is thinking about a career in public service, and let's say is thinking about the Air Force?

LTG Peterson: When I was a First Lieutenant, I was stationed at -- Second Lieutenant and First Lieutenant, three year point, I was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, at the time, Headquarters Strategic Air Command. And until that point, I had never thought about making the Air Force a career. And I'd been working in some projects with two large companies that -- they're still in business today, so they're successful, and I was their Air Force counterpart, and we were putting in a system that in 1977 you would describe as a cell phone network for the commander so he could travel around the greater Omaha area and still be in contact with the national command authorities.

Well, they came to me and said, well, Mike, what are you going to do when you get out of the Air Force? And that's the first time I was forced to answer the question. And so I sat down to talk with the representatives of the two companies, and they offered me, in those years, a whole lot more money than I was making in the Air Force. And I said no, I said I think I'm going to stay in for another assignment. But that was the point when I figured out why.

It was the people you got to go to work with every day. It was the trust relationship, that it didn't matter who you were if you were in an Air Force uniform, you could pick up the phone, ask for a bit of information, ask for help, and you would get a response. Later on, the second half of why I think it was so important to stay in the Air Force -- and this is true in some elements of the business -- industry -- but in the Air Force, your boss wants you to succeed; he doesn't want anyone to fail. I don't care who you are, he wants you to be a success. Because in the Air Force, we all have a plan, someday we're going to retire.

And you can't go hire your replacement off the street, you've got to develop your replacement. So I have served for or worked for dozens of bosses, and every single one of them wanted me to be a success story. Occasionally there was the good feedback, like maybe you wouldn't do it that way again. But most of the time it was open doors, provide really good advice, include me in decisions and conversations, so later on I would know how to tackle that same kind of problem.

So those two things, of great people and bosses that want you to succeed and move ahead in your Air Force career. And I know you don't expect anything else, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I've had a great time.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic, General.

Unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time together. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule, but more importantly, Dave and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our country and your leadership in the U.S. Air Force.

LTG Peterson: Well, Al and Dave, great session here today. So often you want information technology turned into the 30-second sound byte, and that's hard. And so allowing me to go over this in a little more depth, certainly helpful for me, and hopefully for your audience out there. But as I said earlier, it's not me, there is a huge team behind me, both here in the Washington, D.C. area as well as out across the rest of the Air Force that puts this together.

And if you want to dig a little deeper or if you're out there in industry and you've got that new idea that is going to help us be more effective and more efficient, we do need to hear from you. The easiest way to get hold of us is simply going to www.af.mil.

Mr. Morales: Thank you very much for your time.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Lt. Gen. Michael Peterson, U.S. Air Force, Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer.

My co-host this morning has been Dave Hathaway, partner in IBM's defense industry 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.

Originally Broadcast Saturday, April 28, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness.

You can find out more about the Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

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

A secure homeland depends on the integrity of its immigration system. Since its inception, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, otherwise known as USCIS, has sought to strengthen the security and integrity of the nation's immigration system. With much discussion surrounding the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform, much of its execution and success will rest on the shoulders of the Citizenship and Immigration Services.

With us this morning to discuss these challenges is our special guest, Jonathan (Jock) Scharfen, Deputy Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Good morning, Jock.

Mr. Scharfen: Good morning, Al. How are you?

Mr. Morales: Great, thank you.

Also joining us in our conversation is Dave Abel, director of Homeland Security Services at IBM.

Good morning, Dave.

Mr. Abel: Good morning, Al.

Mr. Morales: Let's start off by setting some context for our listeners.

Can you tell us about the mission and the evolution of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services? Give us a sense of its history and the programs it runs.

Mr. Scharfen: Yes. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was originally the INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was part of the Department of Justice. But after 9/11 and after March 2003, it was broken out -- "it" being the old INS -- was broken out from the Department of Justice and placed in the Department of Homeland Security. And then in turn, the old immigration service was broken into three parts.

One part was the Customs and Border Protection. Another part was the Immigration Customs Enforcement. And the third part was my organization, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Immigration Services has to be focused on national security throughout all of its missions. And we work in conjunction with the other organizations. We work with CBP and ICE almost in -- if you think of it in terms of concentric circles -- CBP protects the borders. ICE does internal enforcement, and we run the immigration services. We provide the benefits when people apply for citizenship or a green card or for some type of immigration status.

To give you a sense of the scale of our operations, Al, we end up processing about 6 to 8 million applications a year. We have 250 offices throughout the country and the world. The scale of it gives you an indication that the management -- you started off talking about the management of Immigration Services -- is a real struggle. It's a challenge for any good manager to be able to manage just the daily operations.

For instance, we conduct 135,000 security background checks a day. We have 135,000 visitors visit our internet site a day. We have 82,000 calls, phone inquires, to our phone lines. We take 8,000 sets of fingerprints. We welcome about 2,000 new citizens every day and swear them in. You can see that the management side of immigration services alone is a serious challenge.

Mr. Morales: In support of that broad and complex mission, can you give us a sense of the budget and the employees involved in your organization?

Mr. Scharfen: Our budget is approximately $2 billion a year. Most of that is derived from fees, and so it's not from appropriated monies, Al, but rather fees that the applicants for immigration benefit when they make an application -- they also have to pay a fee, and we collect those fees, and it comes to about $2 billion, and we run our enterprise based on that.

In terms of our employees, we have 15,000 employees. 10,000 of them are full-time employees, and then we have on top of that 5,000 term or contract employees, for a total of 15,000 employees.

Mr. Abel: Jock, let's narrow in a little bit. We're talking about CIS broadly. I'd like to get a better understanding of your role as Deputy Director. What do you do on a regular basis?

Mr. Scharfen: Dave, I serve as the Chief Operating Officer. The Director, Dr. Emilio Gonzalez, sets the goals and emphasizes strategic direction of the organization. I work with him closely with that, but I'm in charge and responsible as a Chief Operating Officer to implement that, to operationalize, if you will, those strategic directions. And I work with the Domestic Operations Director, our Refugee Asylum and International Operations Directorate, and our National Security and Records Verification Directorate. Those are three major directorates the way our organization is broken down.

We have a chief financial officer; we have an information technology officer; and then we have a few offices that are peculiar to the Immigration Services. For instance, we have an administrative appeals office that works on appeals, on decisions in different immigration benefits.

Mr. Abel: How many people support you directly? How many people are on your direct team?

Mr. Scharfen: Well, in my direct team, it's rather small. I have just a handful of people that support me directly. But what I do is I reach out to the directorates, and then that's my mode of operation is I work with the associate directors of the organization, and then those organizations in turn provide anything I need.

Mr. Abel: So with such a small group of people supporting you directly, and the numbers you're running through are astonishing in how large they are as far as how many benefits are processed -- phone calls, contacts, things of that nature -- what are the top challenges that you and your team face on a regular basis?

Mr. Scharfen: After 9/11, clearly, we always start off in answering this is that it's national security. Well, no one needs to be reminded, of course, is that the hijackers, many of them had abused different aspects of our immigration system. We know that terrorists continue to want to take advantage of our immigration laws, and so we have to remain vigilant to ensure that our people are trained and that they understand the threats that are out there.

For instance, just last fiscal year, we stood up the National Security and Records Verification Directorate. Its sole mission is to ensure that national security is kept to the forefront in our organization.

A second challenge, I would say, would be public integrity. Recently, unfortunately, there have been some stories just here in the region about fraudulent behavior of some of our CIS employees, and that's of major concern to us. We want to make sure that our employees are honest as well as efficient. And just recently, we announced the creation of an Office of Security and Integrity, to ensure that we have good management systems in place.

Finally, one of our major challenges would be the efficient delivery of immigration services. Just recently, we cleared a 3.4 million application backlog. We were augmented by the Congress with appropriations; half a billion dollars to pay what it took, extra manpower, to work back that backlog.

Moving forward, we have to ensure that we are performing our mission as efficiently as we can so that we don't end up creating backlogs like that again, and that's going to have to end up in the necessity of a fee role in a transformation program.

Mr. Morales: Jock, we had an opportunity before the show to talk about your career as a Marine and as a lawyer, which I find to be a very potent and dangerous combination.

Could you describe for our listeners your career path? How did you get started?

Mr. Scharfen: My dad was a career Marine, and I knew -- gee, since I could remember -- I always wanted to be a marine. So I went to the University of Virginia on a Marine option scholarship, joined the Marine Corps and became an infantry officer.

The Marines have a great program, as do all the Services, and it's a funded law program, and then sent me to law school at the University of Notre Dame. And then later on, the Marine Corps sent me to get a master's of law in environmental law at the University of San Diego.

My assignments were varied in the Marine Corps. I had some great command both as an infantry officer and then as a lawyer. And I had a command as a lieutenant colonel in Frankfurt, Germany, where I commanded Marine security detachments at different embassies.

I was able to serve as a prosecutor at Camp Pendleton. I had three tours at the National Security Council, where I got to see national security policy made and managed.

And then when I finished with the Marine Corps, I retired after 25 years. I then went to work on Capitol Hill. My mother influenced my second career choice. My mom had worked for Senator Warner for 20 years, and I had always admired my mom's work on Capitol Hill. She was a caseworker for Senator Warner, and one of her responsibilities was immigration. I was chief counsel for the House International Relations Committee for three years before assuming my current duties as Deputy Director.

Mr. Morales: That's just a fascinating story and fascinating career. So tell me, how has this broad set of experiences prepared you for your current role at USCIS, and how has it shaped your management approach and leadership style?

Mr. Scharfen: Good question, Al. I would say that the Marine Corps is known for many things, but one of the things that they inculcate in all of its Marines when they train us is the importance of values. So I've taken those leadership traits and values that were taught by the Marine Corps, and I tried to live by those in my current job.

The emphasis on mission, and to try to do the best you can in terms of achieving your mission. Finally, I think in terms of background as being a lawyer, that respect for the law has to be throughout the organization, and so those two things, I try to bring: values and the respect for law, and then finally, the respect for people throughout my management.

Mr. Morales: That's great.

How will USCIS handle the passage of comprehensive immigration reform?

We will Jock Scharfen, Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 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 Jock Scharfen, Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Also joining us in our conversation is Dave Abel, Director of Homeland Security Services at IBM.

Jock, as a result of a comprehensive fee review, which we began to talk about in our first segment, USCIS has sought to adjust the immigration benefit application and petition fees of the examinations fee account. What prompted this comprehensive fee review, and what are some of the examples of fees that applicants will be paying under this proposed structure, and when will they become effective?

Mr. Scharfen: Al, this has been the subject of some intense public debate, and we've gone up to Capitol Hill and testified before some House committees on this. The fee review was prompted by a number of things. First of all, the President, in his FY 2007 budget request, directed that the USCIS reform its fee structure.

A second reason was that the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, had done a report for both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees that indicated and concluded that the fee structure that we currently are operating under was insufficient to fund our operations. In other words, we were operating in the red every year because the fee was inadequate to cover our operations, and the GAO recommended that we do a new fee study to make sure that the fees covered operational costs.

And then, finally, there's a legal requirement under the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, which in 2004 began to apply to the DHS, that requires that fee-based agencies have a fee review every two years. But really what's driving this, the reality of this is that we are not covering our current costs. We fall short hundreds of millions of dollars over actual costs.

The backlog numbered up to 3.4 million just back in 2004. That backlog was building because we did not have the fees coming in to be able to pay for both the processes and the manpower to work out those applications in a timely fashion.

Another reason why we need to do the fee rule is that all the new security steps that we're taking, the different integrity measures that we're taking, have not been funded. Those were all new requirements that we placed on ourselves that are not being funded, because the last major fee study was back in 1998. So in between the last major study, we had 9/11 and the requirement of all these national security measures, and they're unfunded. And this leaves us short hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Morales: Can you expand a little bit more on the details of the overall impact of this fee increase? And you referenced a statute, so will USCIS then be conducting these fee reviews on a more regular basis?

Mr. Scharfen: That's correct. Every two years, we're committed and we're required by law to do a new fee study, to ensure that the fees are either meeting the costs of our current operations. We have a new staffing model, we have a new fee model that we're using that's a more nimble and now analytical tool, and we'll be able to, we think, as we go forward here, have fee adjustments that will reflect the actual costs of our doing business, and it will be better for the public.

But to give you some examples of what we're talking about here, to give our listeners a little bit of a context of what this means, I'll just start with the average increases here. Right now, we have an average increase -- if you take the weighted average of the application -- and that's the way you get that is you take the volume, the mass volume of applications, and we'll call that about 4.7 million -- and then divide that by the total projected costs of processing those, which would be roughly $2 billion -- that comes out to a weighted average of about $491 per application. Compare that with the current one, which is $264. That's the average fee for an application. You get an increase of $227.

But when you start taking a look at that in the individual applications, it's not always that great. And if you indulge me here, I'm going throw out a few more numbers, and I'll run through what's a highly-used application. A guess a big, if you will, a business line of USCIS are the I-485s, which is the Adjustment of Status Application.

Today, an individual, an applicant when they file an I-485, or a Application to Adjust Status, they would apply or make an application using this form. They pay $325 to do that. However, in the course of their waiting, they will frequently end up having to apply for an Employment Authorization, which is called an I-765. Or they'll apply to travel -- they need a travel document -- and that would be an I-131.

When they apply for these other benefits, Al, they have to also pay a fee. When you add that up, it comes to about $800. What we plan on doing is charging one fee at the beginning, so when you apply for an I-485, when you want to adjust your status in the United States, in the future, if the rule goes through, and as we propose it, you would make one application, and you'd make one fee. You'd pay one time, and that would be $905.

But what I would like to add here, Al, is that we're not insensitive to the fact that no matter how you slice this, these are significant fee increases. And we realize and we don't take lightly our proposal on this, and that these are not insignificant fee increases, and we are receiving our public comments as we get through this, and we've gotten some very good ones. We realize that we have a responsibility to the public to make sure that we look at those comments carefully and that we have the fee schedule down properly.

And then the flipside of that is that when we go forward, and we hope that we will be able to go forward with the final fee regulation, that we provide better services to the public.

Mr. Morales: So just as a quick clarification, the $905 that you reference is sort of like a projected lifecycle cost, and so you're sort of providing a convenience by bundling that together?

Mr. Scharfen: Al, I think that's exactly the way to think of it, and I'll start using that now. "Lifecycle cost."

Mr. Abel: Jock, when you were talking about the fees, you mentioned that one of the purposes of increasing the fees was to make sure that CIS has sufficient resources in order to be able to meet its mission going forward.

There's a big debate going on right now about immigration reform. Is CIS ready today to be able to accept the impact that will be created by immigration reform if a temporary worker program does come into existence?

Mr. Scharfen: I would say yes. We've been planning for this day for some time. However, much of what we have to do will be dependent on what type of bill we get. We are working carefully -- the Administration and USCIS -- is working very carefully with the different committees on the Hill to make sure that we're communicating what's operationally feasible, so that whatever bill comes out of the Congress, we hope it'll be something that will be feasible in terms of the operational side of it, and we're working very well and cooperatively with the Congress to try to get those parts of it as right as we can.

But it will be a big lift. We're talking about 12.5 million applications. And if you take a look at our current annual business, we do about 7 million applications on average a year. On top of that, Dave, we'll go from 7 to 12.5 million. It will not be an insignificant management and leadership challenge.

Mr. Abel: I would imagine one of the things that makes growth of demand like that so difficult to be able to meet is the manual paper-based environment in which you currently operate.

Can you tell us a little bit about CIS's integrated digitization document management program?

Mr. Scharfen: Yes. This is part of our effort to move from a old paper-based system. To give our listeners a mental image maybe of what we're dealing with here, we have approximately 100 million paper records in our systems, Dave, and we have different record facilities around the country. Some of them are quite large -- there's just boxes and boxes -- we have records facilities, that you look on it and they go on forever.

That's fraught with extra expenses and dangers: the misfiling of a record, and the trying to manage those, and it's very labor-intensive and it's just not efficient, and it's not congruent with our current capabilities. We should be electronically adjudicating cases. That's what this program is designed to do. It's made up of two parts.

The first part, we have a records digitization facility, and that exists to scan or convert our paper-based A files -- those are Alien files -- into a digitized format. And then with that, we have a management system that will store, manage, and provide access to the digitized files to our organization. And the benefits of this will be we hope to have just-in-time electronic file delivery operation. It'll make it easier to share information with the Department of Homeland Security with our components.

For instance, you can understand ICE, and enforcement actions, need to have access to our files. It'll be faster. We'll get rid of shipping costs as well. And then finally, it reduces significantly the danger of misplaced files.

Mr. Abel: It sounds like a lot of the results of this particular program will help folks within CIS and within the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively manage a case or manage a file.

Are there activities that you're doing electronically that focus on the immigrant or those that are applying for benefits as well, such as online applications or telephone support? Are there customer-facing activities that you're enabling as well?

Mr. Scharfen: Yes. We want to expand our e-filing capabilities significantly. Among our users of the immigration system, we get different requests. For instance, our business users really want us to increase e-filing because they're comfortable with making a computer-based electronic application. Some of the immigration community-based organizations are less enthusiastic about it -- we're trying to do two things. We're trying to be sensitive to both needs there. We want to increase our electronic filing, but in the interim as we move forward with increasing electronic filing opportunities for immigrants making applications, we want to tie this into also including with that the ability to make a paper-based application until people get more comfortable.

We'd like to do this in a number of ways. One, we're working with the Treasury Department, and they have a great system called the lockbox operations. And they specialize in taking in large numbers of applications, taking in the money, as well as setting up electronic filing systems, because the banks that work with the Treasury Department that takes in the money, it's in their business interests to make it as easy as possible to take in the application forms. And they'll set up -- they're expert at it -- new e-filing application forms for us. And so we get to leverage that and perhaps save some money and keep costs down for the immigrants making applications by using these different lockbox contracts to have expansion of our e-filing systems.

Mr. Morales: Jock, we opened the show with you describing one of the greatest challenges is the support of our nation's security.

Could you elaborate on improvements USCIS has pursued in such areas such as background checks, fraud detection, and worksite inspections to meet current and emerging threats to the integrity of the immigration system?

Mr. Scharfen: Yes. We've done a number of things, Al, to try to improve our ability to ensure that we meet our obligations to the American public on national security.

I believe under the Director Gonzalez's leadership is that he set the right tone. I think the principles and the missions emphasis that are made by the Director are very important, and people pick up on that. They want to do what the Director has laid out, and he has made it very clear that national security is the central goal of his. He likes to say there's a reason that USCIS is in the Department of Homeland Security, and that's because of national security.

We've emphasized to our employees that national security is important, and I think that that can't be overemphasized, the importance of that.

The other thing though is what we've organized for national security. We've created just this last fiscal year a new National Security Directorate, and part of that -- also one of the sub-offices of that is a Fraud Detection Office. They are dedicated to looking at the different areas of national security and fraud, both to study our vulnerabilities and then to seek out enhancements. And I'll give you just a couple of examples.

We have been authorized to hire an additional 400 immigration officers. We are in the process of already doing that and deploying them out into the field, who will concentrate on the research and analysis and other aspects of detecting fraud throughout our application pool.

They, for instance, do benefit fraud assessments. They did an assessment on religious worker fraud. And we took some of the statistics from that, which were very telling, and then we've made some policy changes and operational changes in order to try to preempt some of the fraud that we saw with the religious workers.

We have increased our site visits where we go out and we make sure that if someone is making an application as a religious worker, that the person sponsoring that applicant, that the church actually exists, that it's not a fraudulent storefront, and that it's not just a front. We hope to get out a proposed rule that will tighten down some of these processes even further.

On the national security side, we have been careful to ensure that we do fingerprint checks and national security checks. We take 10 fingerprints; we run it through the FBI and run it through the FBI fingerprint checks. We also do name checks, and we run it through the FBI databases to ensure that the individual isn't on, for instance, a terrorist watch list. We have procedures to make sure that we handle that appropriately.

Mr. Morales: Great.

What are USCIS's efforts to build an immigration service for the 21st century?

We will ask Jock Scharfen, Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 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 Jock Scharfen, Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Also joining us in our conversation is Dave Abel, Director of Homeland Security Services at IBM.

Jock, in your efforts to build an immigration service for the 21st century, USCIS continues to pursue an organizational and business transformation program.

Could you elaborate on this transformation initiative? To what extent does your recently developed strategic acquisition plan inform the underlying transformation strategy? And if I may, what are some of the critical challenges facing your organization as it pursues this transformation initiative?

Mr. Scharfen: Thanks, Al. One of the ways we hope to avoid future backlogs, especially of the extent that we had built up in the past where we had millions in the backlog -- we also want to improve the quality of our services that we give to the different applicants. And the way we're going to do that is to transform our business processes of USCIS, and that involves both organizing how we do go about our business of giving benefit applications, or granting them, and also, it feeds into our technology, so it's both the business side or the process side and the technology.

And right now, the different pieces of our transformation initiative involve the digitization, moving from a paper-based system a computer-based system. It also involves moving to a person-centric process from a form-centric process.

The way we look at our immigration applications right now, we do it by application type. When you come in about your application, Al, I wouldn't put your name in. I would have to try to get the A file number and try to match you up with your application file number. I would be able to do a name search for you, but it wouldn't necessarily identify all the different applications that you had submitted. And what we want to do in the future is have a person-centric system where we would be able to get all of the applications up and to get your history there.

That's more efficient for you, for the applicant, and it's more efficient for us to be able to see your record all in one keystroke. The other thing is, that's also better for national security. Because then we can see whether or not you're being consistent in the story you're telling.

Another thing that we want to do with this transformation program is that we want to have our records and our applications put into electronic form. We have electronic filing, we have paper filing and we scan in the paper into an electronic system and then we get rid of the paper and we just keep that electronic file.

We want to manage that case then from beginning to end electronically. And that requires a sophisticated, nimble system, both hardware and software, to manage the case electronically. How are we doing that? We're starting off with a pilot, the International Adoption Pilot, and we're trying to put all of these different pieces together with that pilot and taking some lessons learned from that and moving on.

We have a spend plan, and it's for $100 million this year. $43 million of that were from appropriated funds, and then we matched it with -- or a little bit more -- $57 million of our fee money to come up with $100 million, and this is moving forward to the next increment of the transformation program.

We'll take our experience there -- and that's if this is approved, of course, by the Department, but it's there and we're talking with the Hill on this, and this has to go through, by law on the transformation program, the Hill is taking great interest in this. And we are working carefully with the committees, and GAO will have to take a look at it, too. But working cooperatively with the Department, with the Congress, we hope to have a robust stage two of this -- increment one, we're calling it -- where we then start taking the lessons we've learned from this initial pilot program and moving it into the naturalization. We have about 11 different applications that fall under the naturalization rubric, and we'll then start seeing whether or not we can have this transformation system work on a larger scale.

Again, we'll work with the Treasury Department as much as we can to set up lockbox operations where the applications will come into these processing centers for the case intake, and it'll either be electronically or it'll be by paper and then it'll be scanned. We're looking then to have biometrics. Those are the 10 fingerprints and the photograph. We want to make this easier so that when you first come in, you have to do that just one time, and we hope to include that into our transform system.

Finally, working on the electronic adjudication piece of it, and that would include having electronic or by computer scheduling for the applicant, as well as notices.

In our fee rule, we would be looking to put $139 million roughly a year going forward, making a very large investment as we move forward in this transformation system.

Mr. Morales: You know, it sounds like this individual-centric single view of data would serve as a great model for the health care industry, who I think is struggling with the same issues around how do you consolidate large amounts of data around a single individual as opposed to having it in disparate systems.

Transformation is often described as an alignment of people, process, and technology with robust investment management.

How has USCIS strengthened its investment management review process to better ensure that programs and initiatives align with the overall strategy, business, and IT initiatives?

Mr. Scharfen: We have hired about a year or so ago a very good Chief Financial Officer, and he is just superb. Rendell Jones has really provided great management organizational skills, as well as just leadership in this area. And what we've done is we have started a strategic resource board where we review the enterprise investment decisions, and the transformation office feeds into -- for instance, its proposed expenditure plans -- go before the Strategic Resource Board, and all of those are reviewed by the senior leadership of the organization.

We put those into the larger context of USCIS's large strategic plan, we put the transformation piece in there and we make sure that it's integrated, and that the different leaders within the organization are first fully advised about the transformation expenditure plans, and then that everyone has a chance to vote on it. We work in a collaborative, collegial fashion there, and we have quarterly reviews then to go back and take a look at -- to make sure that we are getting feedback in to make sure that the expenditures are resulting in the things that we expected.

We also have a review process of these annual expenditure plans. We work with the Department carefully, and we also work closely with OMB, which has a longstanding and continuing interest in our transformation program, and with GAO and Congress.

Mr. Abel: Jock, one of the risk areas in a transformation program like this is being able to work effectively with stakeholders. The stakeholder community for CIS is large, it's complex, and it's diverse.

What are some of the activities that you're doing to make sure that the redesigned processes, systems and IT services meet just not the needs of folks in CIS, but those in the community as well?

Mr. Scharfen: That's a good question, Dave, and my transformation project officer was really spending a lot of time on the road personally going out and meeting with stakeholders. His name's Dan Renault, and he's a very good manager -- I sat down with Dan and I said, Dan, what's going on here? And he explained it to me, and I have to be honest with you, at first, I was a little dubious about the value of that much outreach. Well, I am now a convert, and I understand the value and importance of that.

Number one, we don't have all of the answers, and it's important to reach out to them. And the type of people we've reached out to, for instance, is on the adoption pilot. If I could use that as an example. We have really invested a lot in reaching out to those different adoption agencies, and in fact, right up to the eleventh hour, we've been making changes to our pilot program to reflect some of that input, and I expect as we move forward, as we roll this out this summer, that we'll continue to make some of those changes.

Finally, we expect to get some of our smart people who really know process and who know IT, information technology, kind of brainstorm this thing. Dan has done this on his own, really took the initiative to doing this, and this is one aspect of it that I think we've done well.

Mr. Abel: Jock, a bit earlier, you mentioned that one of the benefits of modernization, of transformation, was an increased ability to be able to share information with other components within DHS and other organizations within the federal government. Can you elaborate a bit on CIS's efforts with other DHS subcomponents to share information, and what your role and responsibility is there?

Mr. Scharfen: Yes, Dave. I think we all can remember that post-9/11, when you had the Commission's report; one of the big failings is is that the government failed to share information. And when it did share information, it didn't share it in the right manner or it didn't share it in an efficient way. And so we're all reminded of that frequently by the Department, and the Department's direction to us has been very clear, that we are to take the initiative and reach out within the Department to share information, and also outside of the Department. For instance, with the State Department.

And our orders on that are very clear from headquarters, and so that's our challenge and that's what we're trying to do. And I'll give you a couple of examples where I think we're being successful on that.

First, within the Department, we are improving our timely sharing of information with US-VISIT, and those would be our fingerprints and our photographs that we include in that database that the US-VISIT then manages for the entire Department, and, for instance, State Department feeds information into US-VISIT and can then tap into that and make checks from abroad on that database.

I met with ICE and CDP representatives to make sure that our digitizing of files are being done in a way that is going to meet their needs. Our mission and our requirement as USCIS was to make sure that we met their needs, that it was given to them using the proper standards and in a way that they could use it efficiently.

We also collaborate with the different departments in that regard, and I think that our big challenge, though, is that we need to digitize our entire operation. We have to go electronically. Until we do that, until we transform into an electronic system, our ability to share information quickly and efficiently will be impeded.

To give you an example of that, if we were subject to another attack, a terrorist attack, one of the first things that are done is that you want to identify who the terrorists were, and if they are immigrants, whether they've touched the immigration system at all, and whether there are any records there. And obviously, the law enforcement agencies would be very interested in getting those files immediately.

It would be much easier just to share that information with multiple investigating law enforcement agencies electronically with just a keypunch. If you're paper, you've got to copy it, you've got to send it, you might be able to scan it, but it's still not as efficient.

The other part of it is, until it's digitized, Dave, we can't datamine it, and I'm careful of how I use that word. We're always advised by our lawyers and our privacy offices, and when we speak about datamining, all of those issues are, I believe, managed aggressively and well by USCIS, but the fact remains is that datamining is important, so that when you want to identify, for instance, other people who have associated perhaps with a terrorist, you're better able to do that when you take a look at the data electronically. You can't do that with a paper file as easily.

Mr. Abel: Jock, nobody can replace CIS's responsibility for adjudicating a benefit decision, but there are lots of industries -- Al mentioned health care previously, and if you look at banking, finance, insurance, there's a lot of industries that have been moving towards a person-centric case management system.

To what extent do you anticipate opportunities for public and private partnerships in the execution of your transformation program going forward?

Mr. Scharfen: Dave, that's a good point, and I think that it's one that we've been talking about extensively with the Department, and we are looking to take advantage of all the opportunities that are out there for a public-private type partnership.

We've been working with our procurement division to ensure that as we go forward with future contracts, particularly some of these major contracts, whether it's if we do get a TWP program, for instance, or our Transformation program, when you take a look that we might be spending $100 million in the upcoming fiscal year, and $100 million going to $139 million in the years as we go forward, that's a significant investment.

We have a responsibility that we spend that money in the wisest, smartest way so that we leverage that to the best of our ability, and that means we have to be open to doing things not just the old way, but that we're open to new ideas, and that we make sure that we have contract provisions that will be designed in such a way that we can get those type of different proposals.

We're going to ask those who make a bid on our contracts is that they include their alternate financing mechanisms, those things where you could just contract out by the transaction, for instance, where the government would own none of the infrastructure, and it would just be a contract for services, just as an example, that they would be able to do 12.5 million transactions of a certain type, and they would deliver that and we would set out the standards, and the way they do that would be a matter of contract and all.

But what we would do is that we would invite those type of different alternate scenarios for the provision of these contracting services, or we could go out, alternatively -- it may prove to be better to go out and buy the system for the government, where you buy all the hardware, you buy all the software. But what we want to do is make sure that those options are put into the contracting mechanisms so that we can take a look at that and we do have those type of choices.

Well, we may see what they have to offer in that regard and make business choices based on what we see from there, but we are very interested in trying to get as many different types of offers that we can get so that we can evaluate them and pick those choices that do two things: leverage our money, our investment, the best we can, and provide the very best services, both maybe in the short-term and in the long-term.

Mr. Morales: That's great. That's really going to the marketplace with a limited set of constraints to really get as many ideas as you can. That's fantastic.

What does the future hold for USCIS? We will ask Jock Scharfen, Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within DHS, 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 Jock Scharfen, Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Also joining us in our conversation is Dave Abel, Director of Homeland Security Services at IBM.

Jock, what trends will have the largest impact on USCIS in the next 10 years, and how will the organization need to adapt to these changes?

Mr. Scharfen: Well, I think that as we've been talking about the transformation of this organization is that we're clearly in the world of electronic and IT transformation is that as we move into this transformed business process where we go from paper-based to electronic-based, is that that will never end. We will continually have to go back and reassess where we are, and I think that on information technology and re-looking at our processes, that this is not just a one-time effort, but that we'll have to continue to look at that and improve upon that.

And I think in the next decade, the challenge will be first to make sure that we move from a paper-based to an electronic-based, person-centric, modern system, and then to ensure that that system works efficiently and it continues to be improved as it moves on.

I think that we'll also continue to have challenges with managing large numbers of immigrants, and that a subset of that issue of just sheer numbers is also the type of immigrants.

It's important, and we hear from our different stakeholders, is the importance of getting students into our universities, foreign students into our universities, and also getting high-tech immigrants and non-immigrants into our economy. And that is I think an issue that will persist, and that will be one that we'll have to manage going forward in the years ahead.

Mr. Morales: Jock, there's a lot of discussion these days around the pending government employee retirement wave.

I'm curious, how is your organization handling this phenomenon, and what are you doing to ensure that you have the right staff mix to meet the demands of these transformation efforts?

Mr. Scharfen: Al, I can't tell you today we have the answers to that. I can tell you that we've got in place a strategic workforce plan. And that strategic workforce plan for USCIS will profile our workforce, give us the demographics, and give us things like the age profile, fit in the retirement aspects to that. It'll also tell us about our diversity profile, which, by the way, looking at our EEO, our diversity numbers, we're happy with those, but we're going to work hard to make our organization reflect our country as much as it can.

Although the strategic workforce plan will have many parts to it, one of the key parts to that will be the future workforce, and we hope to identify where we're going to have gaps in the future. And that was one of the key things we asked them to do so that we can start planning, that we can identify those gaps, whether it's retirement gaps, whether it's skill gaps, whether it's diversity profile gaps, whether it's education gaps, whether it's our recruitment on the front end, whether we're getting the quality-type people we want.

Question here is right now, we do not require a college degree. That will be addressed there. All of those type questions -- we hope to put them into gap-type language so that we can then not just analyze it, but come up with some type of practical action plan.

Mr. Abel: So as you look at those gaps, to that end, what steps are you taking to attract and maintain a high-quality technical and professional workforce?

Mr. Scharfen: Director Gonzalez has a lot of experience in this area. First of all, he has a Ph.D. and he is committed to education, and he's a thoughtful guy. And he is also in the Army. He has worked in education -- he taught at West Point, and he was also in the personnel leadership management area within the Army, which is a huge organization to manage, and so he's an experienced personnel manager. And he's looked at this and he has come to a number of conclusions, and one way to attract and maintain our high quality of workforce is to offer first-rate world-rate education and training.

This year, we moved $2 million in the short-term into increasing our education and training for our employees from both the most junior employee to our most senior leadership. We also though, looking under the fee rule -- a big part of the fee rule would go towards better training of our employees, and also educational opportunities. And we're talking about investing tens of millions of dollars into the training of our employees and education of our employees. And we believe that that will help attract and maintain that high quality we need. We'll also take a look at the intake process there of how we recruit people. The Army has a saying that the Director is fond of saying, and that is that everyone is a recruiter. He's encouraged the organization, and I've seen that, where people are going out and recruiting.

For instance, we're going to Walter Reed, and we're trying to recruit disabled combat veterans from Iraq, and we're finding a very high-quality group of people there: our veterans, our disabled veterans. But that kind of personal touch that Director Gonzalez is out there setting an example recruiting himself, and he comes back and he has names of individuals who happen to be very good, for instance, in computers. And it's a good thing both to recognize the needs of our disabled vets, and it's also good for our organization.

Mr. Morales: Jock, along a similar theme, you've obviously had a fascinating and a very highly successful career as a Marine and as a lawyer, all in the service of our country.

So what advice would you give to someone who is perhaps thinking about a career in public service? What do you tell that young individual at Walter Reed?

Mr. Scharfen: First of all, I would encourage it. I've really enjoyed public service. And one of the things I mention is that those people I know, for instance, in private practice, when you speak to them, many times, they get the greatest personal and professional satisfaction when they somehow volunteer or get involved in public service.

For instance, I have a friend who's a partner in a law firm here in Washington, D.C., and he volunteers his time as a lawyer to our disabled vets, and he gets great satisfaction out of that. He's a very successful lawyer here in Washington, but when I see him on the soccer field or somewhere else, what he wants to talk about is that service that he's been able to provide, and he gets great personal and professional satisfaction out of that.

So first of all, I'd just encourage them in general and tell them they're going to enjoy it. But that there's a lot of responsibility that goes with that, and that if you do go into public service, that you go into it with the right attitude, and that it is about service. You go in with the right attitude, and if you go in with the goal to serve the public, it has its own rewards. You may not have the largest paycheck and you may be able to get a larger paycheck elsewhere, but you get paid in a different coin, and it's that coin of going home knowing that you've served the public well.

So first of all, I would encourage them to do it. Next, I'd tell them they should take chances, and they should do what they're interested in doing, and that if they see a job, they should not be hesitant to apply for it.

But I'd add a quick caveat to that, that the most important thing you can do, though, is to do the job you're doing currently well, and be enthusiastic about it, and do the best job you possibly can and work well with others, because the government is all about working well with others. You've got to be a team player. But first do the job you're doing well, but then don't be shy about reaching out and trying to apply for a job that may be a little bit out of the ordinary, but you never know unless you apply. And don't be discouraged the first time you've applied and you've been told no. When you reach my age, you can take a no better than when you're younger. And I've been told no many times and you get over it, but that shouldn't stop you from reaching for that job that you're interested in.

Mr. Morales: I think that's fantastic advice for all of us. Unfortunately, we have reached the end of our hour this morning. I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule, but more importantly, Dave and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to our government in protecting the homeland, and we most definitely want to have you back in September to hear about the results of your strategic workforce plan.

Mr. Scharfen: Thank you very much, Al and Dave, and if I could just close off by making reference so that our listeners can visit us, USCIS, on our Web site. It's uscis.gov, and it's the new Web site that we have there. It was put together by our IT guru, Jeff Conklin, and our communications guru, Jose Montero. I think it's pretty good. We're working hard to make it better, so we encourage the listeners to come visit at uscis.gov.

If you've got some suggestions to make that even better, don't hesitate to give us some ideas. I know those two fellows are working hard to make it the very best they can.

Mr. Morales: Fantastic.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Jock Scharfen, Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

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.

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.

Originally Broadcast Saturday, June 16, 2007

Washington, D.C.

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business.

The Business of Government Hour is produced by the IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about the Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

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

As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration approaches its 50th year, it retains one of the most complex and exciting missions in the federal government.

With the Shuttle Program, the International Space Station, and its cutting-edge research in aeronautics, space science, and earth science, NASA expands our knowledge of the universe and applies these insights to our daily lives.

A few years ago, President George Bush gave NASA a defining challenge for the 21st Century, to expand human presence in space. The success of this ambitious vision rests on NASA's pursuits of an effective workforce strategy.

With us this morning to discuss NASA's critical effort in this regard is Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

Good morning, Toni.

Ms. Dawsey: Good morning.

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, Toni.

Ms. Dawsey: Good morning, Solly.

Mr. Morales: Toni, many of our listeners are generally familiar with NASA as an organization, and certainly given its public recognition.

But can you give us an overview of NASA's history and its mission today?

Ms. Dawsey: Congress sent the legislation creating NASA to President Eisenhower less than one year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. October 1, 1958 was the official start of NASA, and almost immediately, NASA began working on options for human space flight.

Between 1961 and 1975, NASA completed the Mercury; Gemini; the Moon Landing Program, Apollo; Skylab; and Apollo-Soyuz Programs. After the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz test projects for the early and mid-1970s, NASA's human space flights efforts again resumed in 1981 with the Space Shuttle Program that continues today to help build the International Space Station.

NASA also has continued to conduct cutting-edge aeronautics research; launched a number of significant scientific probes that have explored the Moon, the planets, and other areas of our solar system; and sent several spacecraft to investigate Mars.

The Hubble Space Telescope is very popular, and other space science spacecraft have enabled science to make a number of significant astronomical discoveries about our universe. NASA has helped bring about new generations of communications satellites, and NASA's earth science efforts have also literally changed the way we view our home planet.

NASA technology has resulted in numerous spin-offs, also in wide-ranging scientific, technical, and commercial fields.

And then, as you said, in January 2004, President Bush gave us a new vision, and that is to go back to the Moon and then on to Mars and beyond. That vision changed our mission. We are planning to retire the Shuttle in 2010 and launch the new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2015, and hopefully return to the Moon in 2020.

Our New Crew Exploration Program is referred to as the Constellation Program.

Mr. Morales: Now, Toni, these are very, very broad and complex missions. Could you give us a sense of the scale of the organization? Can you tell us a little bit about how NASA is organized, the overall budget, a sense of the number of full-time employees and contractors, and its geographic footprint?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. NASA's organization is comprised of NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. and 10 principal field centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and many smaller facilities located around the country.

In addition, NASA has a wide variety of partnership agreements with academia, the private sector, state and local governments, and other federal agencies, and a number of international organizations.

NASA's appropriation for fiscal year 2007 is $16.2 billion, and we have about 16,400 permanent employees and over 18,000 civil service employees of all types. We also have over 38,000 on or near-site contractors.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, now that you've provided us with a sense of scale of the larger organization, could you tell us more about your specific role? What are your responsibilities and duties as NASA's Chief Human Capital Officer? And could you tell us more about the areas under your purview, such as how the office is organized, as well as the size of the staff?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. I have responsibility for NASA's civil service workforce. I'm responsible for setting the workforce strategy, assessing workforce characteristics and future needs based on mission and strategic plan; aligning the human resources policies and programs with organizational mission, strategic goals, and performance outcomes; developing and advocating a culture of continuous learning to attract and retain employees with superior abilities; identifying best practices and benchmarking studies; and serving as a member of the Office of Personnel Management-led Chief Human Capital Officer Council.

Mr. Thomas: And regarding your responsibilities and duties as the agency's Chief Human Capital Officer, what are the top three challenges that you face in your position, and how have you addressed these challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, as I've said, we're going to continue Shuttle flights to complete the International Space Station, and then retire the Shuttle by 2010, and in the meantime, prepare to launch a new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2015. This is going to cause major workforce transitions.

So the top three challenges that we in Human Capital face are developing good workforce planning processes and tools; ensuring workforce skills stay aligned with changing mission requirements; and providing HR systems that ensure timely, reliable, and authoritative data for agency workforce decisions.

Mr. Morales: Toni, you're returning back to government, so I'm curious. Could you describe for our listeners your career path? Many probably don't know that you came back first as Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer and now serve as the Chief Human Capital Officer.

What brought you back to NASA?

Ms. Dawsey: In brief, my career as an HR specialist started at the Federal Trade Commission, back where we started as functional specialists. So I started as a staffing specialist and then moved on to classification.

And I left FTC to join NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center to broaden my experience, and there, I became a personnel management specialist, which not only incorporated the first two functions, but broadened them into employee relations, and I was an HR advisor on all programs to the head of the Engineering Directorate.

From Goddard, I went to the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service and became a team lead and then a supervisor. From there, I moved on to the Department of Transportation's Office of the Secretary to work on the policy and program development side of HR, and later to manage their HR Operations Branch.

I left the Office of the Secretary to become the Personnel Officer for Transportation's Office of Inspector General, and then two years later, I left HR altogether to serve as the Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Inspections and Evaluations. And there, I directed headquarters and regional staff in providing independent and objective inspections and evaluations of Transportation's programs and operations.

I retired from that position, and then after nine years of retirement, I rejoined NASA in 2004 to serve as the Director of the agency Human Resources Division, and then in December of '05, I was appointed to my current position.

When I was offered the opportunity to work for NASA, I was honored. NASA had just received an award for being the first human capital office to go Green on the President's Management Agenda, and the agency was working hard to return to flight, and I wanted to be working in this agency that was so progressive, had employees dedicated to a terrific mission, and had many exciting challenges ahead of it.

Mr. Morales: That's a great set of broad experiences. So I'm curious: how have your previous roles prepared you for your current leadership role and shaped your management approach and your leadership style?

Ms. Dawsey: First, as I said, I started out as a specialist in two of the major HR areas -- staffing and classification. And that gave me a very important and thorough grounding in those two functional areas.

I then accepted other positions earlier in my career, with the intent of building a well-rounded HR portfolio, and then later, working to build a leadership portfolio, which gave me both credibility within the HR community and confidence.

Second, I was greatly influenced by the director of the Engineering Directorate at the Goddard Space Flight Center. As I also mentioned earlier, I served as his Personnel Management Specialist and advisor. And very importantly, he included me at his table, along with his management team, and he treated me accordingly.

He told me the same thing he told them: I want to hear how we can get things done, not how we can't, and I want to hear solutions for problems, not just problems. It would require that we think outside the box, and I never got back in that box.

Lastly, just moving across different occupations, working with different leaders, and in different types of agencies was very developmental, and it went a long way in building my knowledge base and my confidence level.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What is NASA's human resource strategy? We will ask Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA, 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 Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

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

Mr. Morales: Toni, according to the 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey, NASA ranked in the top three agencies in job satisfaction, leadership, and workplace performance. Why do you think your co-workers think so highly of NASA as a place to work, and what do you think the secret is?

Ms. Dawsey: The secret really isn't a secret. It's our mission.

NASA is filled with employees at all levels who love what they are doing. They're inspired by supervisors and managers who love what they are doing. And they are surrounded by highly educated dedicated co-workers who keep the bar high and make for a challenging, exciting environment.

Mr. Morales: Toni, earlier you mentioned the PMA, so let's delve into that for a moment.

NASA was one of the first agencies to achieve a Green status in human capital management under the PMA. Could you elaborate on the challenges and your efforts to getting to Green, and what's the Department need to do to achieve and sustain a Green status rating?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA got to Green quickly because the human capital organization had tremendous support from the Administrator and his management team. They believed that the human capital agenda was an agency agenda, and we continue to operate that way. And that is not only how we got to Green, but how we have remained Green.

Mr. Morales: So pretty straightforward, then?

Ms. Dawsey: Yes.

Mr. Morales: Let me switch gears a little bit. The NASA Flexibility Act of 2004 gave your agency certain flexibilities for recruitment and retention purposes. Could you talk a little bit about some of the flexibilities you were given, and which of these has had the biggest impact on recruiting and retaining a high-quality workforce?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, we were given over a dozen flexibilities that include enhanced recruitment, relocation, and retention bonuses, expanded use of term appointments, pay authority for critical positions, and enhanced travel benefits and annual leave benefits for new hires. And what works best for us really is combining all these different flexibilities into incentive packages tailored to the needs of specific candidates.

And that's been a particularly successful strategy for us.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, earlier, you had talked about the workforce planning efforts at the agency, and I want to talk a little bit more about that, if you don't mind.

NASA's most recent workforce strategy represents a new, more centralized approach to workforce planning. Would you talk about this new approach? What are some of the central components of this new planning process, and how does it better position NASA to meet the demands of its mission?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA has a number of initiatives underway to improve workforce planning, which, as I mentioned earlier, is one of our primary goals in human capital.

We needed to go from a near-term, budget-driven process to a longer-term, scenario-based workforce planning process. And we needed to go from a center-centric planning to an agency, a corporate workforce planning process. So we established an agency workforce planning governance structure. We enhanced workforce data tools to identify people with programs, and to be able to locate expertise across the agency.

We've developed workforce capability measures so that we can identify early gaps and surpluses across the agency. And we've established a Shuttle Human Capital Council just recently that includes not only NASA HR directors, but contractor HR directors so we can work with another as we transition and learn from one another's best practices. And we've integrated -- and this is the most important -- we've integrated this workforce planning process with our budget process.

In addition, we're currently engaging with Mission Directorates and the Centers in scenario planning. We're developing a workforce planner's handbook so that we're all talking a common language across the agency, and most recently, we've started a mapping process. We're developing a process where we can map employees from the Shuttle workforce to Constellation program work.

And with a strong workforce planning capability, the agency will be able to synergize its ability to meet challenges and perform the overall mission. We're integrating workforce planning with the program, budget, and business support functions, and that will allow us to take workforce planning from the near-term that I was talking about to the longer-term process that starts as soon as program requirements are defined and as far out as they can be defined.

Mr. Thomas: And staying on the workforce planning topic, NASA's workforce strategy places very strong emphasis on the development of 10 healthy centers that are fully engaged and productive.

First, within a human capital context, what is a healthy center? And second, what are the seven key attributes that you see of a healthy center?

Ms. Dawsey: Within the human capital context, a healthy center is one that first of all can assess its overall capability of total workforce and has the ability to align that workforce to future work.

The second is to be able to surface workforce misalignments that require agency intervention; that is, solving the problem at the agency level. And the third is to be able to shape the size, composition, and the management of the center workforce over time.

The seven key attributes that we use are: one, core, clear, stable, and enduring roles and responsibilities for a center; two, clear program project management leadership roles; three, major in-house durable spaceflight responsibility; four, skilled and flexible blended workforce with sufficient depth and breadth; five, technically competent and value-centered leadership; six, capable and effectively utilize infrastructure; an seven, strong stakeholder support.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, NASA's new approach seems to reflect planning and integration at many levels of management. What are the specific benefits of this enhanced workforce planning capability, and how do you feel it better enables NASA to address the workforce challenges and issues?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, leaders will be able to identify skill gaps quickly and plan strategically to address surpluses and gaps in a targeted and deliberate way across the agency, and to quickly identify expertise and be able to use it wherever it is needed in the agency.

Mr. Morales: Toni, it's been said that NASA's workforce is not ideally aligned to the programs and projects that are being undertaken to support the vision for space exploration, and it's commonly referred to as uncovered capacity.

Could you elaborate on NASA's efforts to reduce its current uncovered capacity level?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. Two years ago, we had over 2,000 FTE that we called uncovered, and that translated to far more than 2,000 people. So we went into what we called a transformation mode, and today, there are very few what we call now "available for new work."

To solve the problem, we conducted buy-outs and early-outs. We held job fairs to place employees within and outside NASA. We used our new legislative authorities. We had hiring freezes. We set tight ceiling controls. We moved work across the agency. We reassigned staff, provided career transition assistance, and we started retraining programs.

Mr. Morales: Along those lines, could you elaborate on recent NASA initiatives to close the core competency gaps? Specifically, could you tell us about NASA's competency management system?

Ms. Dawsey: Yes. The competency management system first of all was built in-house by engineers at the Kennedy Space Flight Center, one of whom is still on my staff.

And it's an agency-wide competency inventory in a common language, populated with both an employee's position and individual competencies. And it enables NASA to know first of all what the current competencies are in the workforce, and then, as I mentioned earlier, locate expertise that's required to implement specific tasks.

And it also gives a good demographic snapshot to enable us to do more in-depth workforce data searches. It aids in the competency gap surplus problem, and it assists in assessing center readiness for new activities.

If you use it in conjunction with the workforce planning processes, which we're doing, we can help assess workforce impacts on programs and projects at a greater level of detail. And it also provides, then, information to our Office of Education so we can recruit students in those areas, and we can help employees in determining how best to expand and develop their careers.

Mr. Morales: How is NASA managing its blended workforce?

We will ask Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA, 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 Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

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

Toni, NASA has a fairly heavy reliance on contractors. I believe in earlier segments, you mentioned 38,000. 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 two core groups?

Ms. Dawsey: Just to give you some perspective, less than 15 percent of the agency's authorized funding is expended on civil service salaries and benefits. In fact, one of our most renowned installations, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, is run entirely through a contract with Cal Tech. We have approximately, as you said, 38,000 contractors working on or in close proximity to our NASA sites.

In managing our blended workforce, we have to make sure always that the government is in the driver's seat. There are, of course, numerous inherently governmental activities carried out in NASA. These are defined by the Office of Management and Budget, and they include the exercise of discretion in applying government authority or the making of value judgments and making decisions for the government. Civil servants make the plans, formulate the budgets, and decide strategy and policy.

In managing the blended workforce, we need to ensure we have a sufficient in-house knowledge base to be a smart buyer of services from industry. And that means we have to have sufficient depth among civil engineers and scientists to specify our requirements, and not only oversee the contractor efforts, but have insight into the technical issues that arise.

In the end, it is NASA personnel who make the go, no-go decisions for our programs. Additionally, it's also critical for us to have strong capabilities in systems engineering and project management, since these skills are critical not only to our mission success, but also to getting the most out our contractor workforce.

Mr. Morales: Toni, I also want to go back to one of the other topics from our previous segment, and that's around recruitment. Could you tell us what changes are you making to the recruitment process at NASA? Does the agency use flexible compensation strategies to attract and retain high-quality employees who possess these mission-critical competencies?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA is refining our recruitment process, our recruitment strategy, in several ways. We're conducting more targeted recruitment. For example, we're recruiting for mission-critical occupations and underrepresented groups in diversity.

We're increasing our collaboration with our Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity and our NASA Education Office, and we're enhancing and expanding student programs that can serve as a pipeline into our workforce. We're developing our partnerships and relationships, for example, with non-profit organizations, industry, other federal agencies, professional organizations, and educational institutions that can be beneficial in future recruitment efforts, initiatives, and strategies.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, although it's important to bring new talent into NASA, your organization's approach to strengthening competency needs also involves leveraging the talent that's already available in the current workforce. Could you elaborate a bit on NASA's retraining efforts?

Ms. Dawsey: Yes. NASA is engaged in several activities designed to realign our workforce to meet our new objectives. We have training and what we call retraining programs in support of program and project management, systems engineering, and quality of mission assurance, and we're also training technicians to be technologists.

We're developing a deliberate and systematic growth and development opportunity path through actually what we're calling a career pathing approach, and through redesigned leadership development programs.

The career pathing is providing for each discipline a transparent career progression path. Ordinarily, employees when they enter government are looking to see what duties they need to perform to be promoted to the next-higher grade level. But in NASA, we're looking to build pipelines for our journeyman level, our program project management level, senior executive service, senior technical, and senior leads.

And that requires more than just working to be better within what we consider a stovepipe of the promotion career ladder. We're trying to give employees a look at the broader goals they need to seek to be part of the technical management leadership team at NASA.

So each career path will not only show the duties they need for the next grade level, but it will show recommended and sometimes required assignments, competencies, developmental experiences, training, certifications, if needed, rotational assignments, coaching, and mentoring.

And the purpose of this is to have employees that we can select from inside who understand all of NASA, not just one center, to have employees understand the institutions and the programs side of the house, and employees who have networked and know how to network and collaborate, both internally and externally.

So we're trying to start at much lower levels in the agency to develop well-rounded professionals to take on our management positions over the next several years.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, staying on the employee development theme, could you talk a little bit more about NASA's key learning and development strategies and initiatives? And in particular, what is NASA doing to ensure continuity of leadership through succession planning and executive development?

Ms. Dawsey: Okay. I started to touch on that, but we are doing so much at NASA, I really like to talk about it, and so I'll expand on that a little.

We have a corporate integrated approach to leadership development first of all. NASA has created a leadership strategy, which is used by both agency-wide and center leadership program managers as a framework for designing and implementing leadership programs. This framework provides continuity through succession planning and executive development.

We've redesigned the agency's residential leadership programs -- that includes a program focus on the strategic alignment of leaders to the NASA vision for space exploration, as well as programs that focus on current hot leadership topics relevant to achieving mission.

We have a new program. What we've done is we realized that while we have excellent leadership training programs, those programs have been geared to employees at the journeyman level or close to. And we realize in today's world that this type of training is very important at much lower grade levels. We need to teach our professionals at -- for example, grades 11 and 12, which we started doing with a new program called NASA First.

We're teaching them about NASA, about rotating around centers to learn what centers are doing, and learning the leadership skills of collaborating, benchmarking, using best practices. And with that program, starting at grades 11 and 12, we're getting to people when they're also -- it's a lot easier to get them into training and start the culture change. And in NASA, that means learning that mobility is important, and that being called from one center to another center is something that they should expect and probably will be required to do in the future as the mission transitions to Constellation.

And they set up a network that has been really, really helpful, and that they're seeing how an engineer can help an information technology person, who can help a scientist, and just through the different kinds of tools that we have in common, for example, systems tools, and hear that exchange and see the network -- for example, of an engineer expand to include people in the chief financial office and in other business support offices -- for example, procurement, even human capital. It's very exciting.

And so the leadership development program now basically starts at a much lower grade level and then proceeds up through into our senior executive candidate development program, which is a rigorous program, and we're very proud of it. It has Office of Personnel Management approval. It is a program that they hold out as a model in government.

We also have fellowship programs that ensure that employees have the opportunity to obtain best-in-class development at the finest educational institutions. And in terms of our succession planning efforts, we've developed and implemented a succession planning framework also.

The plan centers around NASA's leadership model and includes a newly created leadership framework which is designed to articulate developmental experiences for all leadership roles within the agency. This corporate leadership succession strategy supports creating a skilled pipeline for leadership within the agency. It includes a variety of components -- workforce planning and analysis, formal leadership development programs, formal and informal coaching and mentoring programs, and leadership training -- and is supplemented by center-level developmental activities.

The plan capitalizes on the agency's long-time support of leadership development and training. It defines a leadership life cycle of development and enhances existing programs by incorporating, as I said, the entry-level leadership program NASA First, and we have created an advisory council composed of senior leaders that will oversee succession management within the organization, including participating in selections for our formal leadership development programs.

The group also will complete an annual review of the succession management framework to ensure that it stays relevant to agency needs.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, NASA is also addressing unique challenges presented by retiring the Space Shuttle. Could you talk about some of the specifics of these challenges facing the organization, and also, what is NASA doing to address these challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: Yeah, NASA is facing some unique challenges associated with Shuttle retirement, and we need to retain skills necessary to safely execute remaining Space Shuttle missions to the very last flight, and then we need to manage the transition of appropriate Shuttle workforce into Constellation; and we need to retain skills between fiscal years 2010 and fiscal year 2015 necessary to safely execute Constellation flight operations.

To address these challenges, one effort underway is what we are calling the Shuttle workforce mapping project. Many of the employees currently working on the Shuttle program will be needed to work on the Constellation program. For that reason, a team of headquarters and center representatives is developing a mapping of the Shuttle workforce to Constellation work. This plan will reflect the planned migration of our employees supporting the Shuttle program to Constellation, phased to correspond to key milestones in both programs.

And the first mapping is scheduled to be completed in mid-August. It will be iterated and refined regularly after that date, particularly as Constellation program needs and the Shuttle flight manifest schedules are updated.

In addition, we're holding agency-wide capability assessment forums to further refine our workforce planning picture. Several modeling, simulation, and analytical tools also are being evaluated in our quest to better capture system dynamics and requirements-driven workforce and skill mix forecasting.

Cumulatively, these activities and prospective tools will enhance our analytic capability in these areas.

Mr. Morales: Toni, let me switch gears for a moment now. Under its Integrated Enterprise Management Program, and sometimes it's commonly referred to as the IEMP, NASA is transforming its finances, human resources, assets, and processes through a combination of supporting technology and business infrastructure. Could you elaborate on the IEMP's human capital information environment project, and could you give us a sense of the benefits from its implementation?

Ms. Dawsey: Sure. Until just recently, we had 75 different human resource systems that were not integrated. They didn't talk to one another. So we set out two years ago to integrate them first, and that was, as I said, accomplished last month, and as of the end of this month, our HR portal, as we call it, will be open throughout the human capital community.

We are now, as part of what we're calling the human capital information environment, working with IEMP to incorporate that HR portal into the other business support systems. We intend to provide authoritative single source and timely workforce data this way.

To kind of give you an idea of what the human capital information environment will provide, we'll be able to integrate existing NASA budget data with workforce data, and we'll be able to view projected workforce information, budget actuals, and workforce planning data. And we've not been able to do that.

We'll be able to view employee-related cost information, view a collection of current and historical workforce information to support the budget planning process, and we'll understand the total workforce composition, moving from a system with compartmentalized, self-contained capabilities to a system with a better understanding of all its capabilities. We'll be able to facilitate informed decisions regarding the current and planned workforce, to view their status based on plans and actual labor charges. And we'll be able to assess full cost data and loaded rates.

Mr. Morales: Toni, we talked earlier about some of the challenges around the blended workforce. And so given the composition of NASA, how does your organization evaluate HR field performance, as well as impart the best practices to NASA's HR community? And what steps are you pursuing to ensure that these policies and procedures are documented and communicated in a timely and comprehensible manner, and that its implementation is being monitored?

Ms. Dawsey: NASA evaluates center HR performance through a comprehensive human capital accountability system designed to assess the health of human capital programs across the agency. The accountability system ensures accountability for efficient, effective, and aligned human capital programs while balancing the need to assure that human capital decisions are made based on merit.

NASA has embraced the five-pronged approach to managing the assessment activities. We do agency program studies. We do agency quality reviews. We do agency on-site reviews. We do center self-assessments, and we do external oversight audits.

We utilize several methods to evaluate center HR performance and to impart best practices to the HR community. The workforce strategy division within the Office of Human Capital conducts human resources on-site reviews on a quarterly basis at the NASA centers. The overall purpose is to focus on three specific goals: first, the review team seeks to understand how NASA's workforce implementation plan sub-goals are translated at the center level. And we haven't talked about it, but our workforce implementation plan was developed from the agency's strategic plan, and it contains approximately 150 tasks that we need to perform to meet the goals that I talked about earlier in workforce planning, workforce alignment, and systems and accountability. So that is one area of the review.

The review team is also concerned with strengthening relationships within the HR operating community, and the review team assesses NASA's compliance with human resources laws, rules, and regulations. That review focuses on the HR authorities that sustain the three key drivers of human capital management: strategic competencies, performance culture, and leadership and learning.

At the conclusion of each of the reviews, a comprehensive report is prepared which includes recommended and required actions as appropriate. The report is sent to the center human resources director and the center director, describing significant positive, for example, best practices or negative findings.

On a monthly basis, NASA headquarters conducts video teleconferences--we call them VITS -- with the HR community on a variety of subjects. The VITS affords NASA the opportunity to communicate information in an interactive format in real-time. NASA also issues personnel bulletins on a variety of HR-related issues. The personnel bulletins supplement current NASA policies and procedures, and if necessary, provide guidance to clarify any existing policies and procedures.

Mr. Morales: So, Toni, along similar lines, recently, the National Academy of Public Administration, otherwise known as NAPA, released a report entitled "NASA: Balancing a Multi-Sector Workforce to Achieve a Healthy Organization." And in this report, it recommends that NASA continue to find ways to balance its multi-sector workforce and restructure its existing civil service components.

Could you tell us briefly about this report, and to what extent is NASA planning to implement any of the human capital recommendations?

Ms. Dawsey: The NAPA report is quite far-ranging, and was done as a joint request of NASA and its appropriations committees in Congress. NAPA believes that NASA has an opportunity to lead the public sector as it manages and realigns its multi-sector workforce, the civil servants and contractors, for Constellation.

In planning and decision-making, NAPA recommends that we develop a risk-based planning strategy to deal with alternative futures, including program, budget, and schedule changes. NAPA favors scenario planning to inform decision-making, workforce plans, and strategies.

We have been thinking the same way, and, as I've explained, we are currently exploring methodologies for doing budget and workforce scenario planning.

Our administrator has set the policy that all 10 of our centers will contribute to the work required to implement Constellation. All have their own strengths and will be needed. The program work assignments have been managed in NASA to ensure all 10 centers can remain strong and healthy. NAPA proposes a health center framework and metrics with critical factors and success elements. They believe that NASA headquarters should conduct annual center health evaluations, and centers should perform ongoing assessments. This is something we are increasingly engaged in, and we will look carefully at NAPA's recommendations in this area.

Other areas covered by NAPA in its report include acquisition management, the engagement of the human capital function with agency planning and decision-making, maintaining an appropriate balance between contractors and government personnel, and between permanent and non-permanent civil service appointments, and finally, some ideas for new civil service flexibilities to enable more-rapid expanding or shrinking of the workforce. And as I've mentioned, we're already engaged in a lot of what NAPA is recommending.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What does the future hold for NASA? We will ask Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA, 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 Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

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

Toni, with the evolution of NASA's new vision for space exploration, how do you envision NASA's human capital needs evolving in, say, the next three to five years? And specifically, how do you envision your office will evolve to meet these challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: I see human capital evolving in a very positive way. I see human capital specialists becoming true partners in the strategic planning process, not only internally with our stakeholders, but externally.

And I think in terms of skills, I was talking earlier about how important it was to have the functional expertise. A lot of that is being sent to shared services centers, and what's evolving is the real true professional human capital expertise, which means looking more towards people who have some of the skills that I was talking about earlier -- workforce planning skills; that is, statistics and modeling competencies -- and skills in systems development and integration, program project management skills, because we're helping to develop and implement programs on an agency level -- and a lot of them.

And I think we need human resource specialists who have real good communication skills not only in writing and speaking, but the ability to see the way to communicate a huge amount of data that we create nowadays in a format, in a dashboard, for people at all levels in the agency. We can't give all this workforce data I'm talking about as it is to the leadership when they need to make decisions. We need the kind of HR people who are analytical enough to know what of that data is critical for the immediate decisions.

Mr. Thomas: Toni, today's broader multi-sector workforce requires the high level integration of acquisition and human capital planning, which is long overdue for the federal sector. How will NASA be at the forefront of the 21st Century governance, perhaps pointing the way for other federal agencies facing similar workforce challenges?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, we're finding it quite difficult to forecast the workforce and human capital policies we'll be needing five, 10 to 20 years out, and especially for Constellation. The decisions to what we call make or buy, meaning do work in-house or contract out -- the decisions to do that -- to decide how the work will be accomplished is a critical one, and greatly impacts the size of the civil service workforce we'll need.

What we found is that the critical make-buy decision needs to be addressed earlier in the planning process rather than later. We're making changes in our planning processes to move these decisions up and make sure the right players, including human capital, participate in the decision-making.

Mr. Thomas: There's much talk about commercial best practices in the government, in particular in service areas such as human resources. What emerging technologies do you see that hold the most promise for improving the federal management of human resources?

Ms. Dawsey: We believe that automation is key to improving the management of human resources. I've already talked about our human resources portal and our human capital information environment. And we've implemented a lot of other automated systems.

The one that we haven't so far that we're looking into is our performance management system. We want to implement a system that will not only contain electronic documents, but also route them appropriately and provide immediate notifications and feedback to employees and management officials.

Mr. Morales: Toni, I often ask my guests about the pending retirement wave in government and what type of impact it may have on their operations. What are you seeing within NASA, and what are the plans to mitigate these effects?

Ms. Dawsey: Well, right now, we have about 12 percent of the workforce that is eligible for immediate retirement, and this is normal for NASA. Fortunately, the percent of scientists and engineers that are retirement-eligible is less. They're only at about 11.3 percent.

Over the next five years, each year, about three percent of the current employees will become new retirement eligibles, and about three percent of all employees will actually retire each year.

We have forecast total expected retirements over the next five years. Some of the retirements will cause a loss in our corporate memory. Nevertheless, as NASA moves out of the Shuttle era and into a new phase of space exploration, retirement losses should be well within our capabilities to hire replacements, and retirements will give us the opportunity to bring in new talent.

Mr. Morales: Now, Toni, you've had obviously a very successful career within public service, and as we mentioned at the start of the show, you're actually returning to federal service again. What advice would you give to a person who perhaps is out there thinking about getting started in a career in public service?

Ms. Dawsey: I think there is now so much information available on a career in the federal service that we didn't have years ago. And so I recommend that those looking for employment and trying to decide between the public and private sector make sure that they do their homework about all the career possibilities across government and within each department or agency. For example, people are surprised when they hear about all the career opportunities in NASA, because they tend to think engineers, scientists, and astronauts. So do your homework.

The second is learn about the work/life benefits and flexibilities that now exist in government and which allow us to be competitive with the private sector. We have put a lot of focus on that in government, and I think it would surprise a lot of people of how important that work/life balance is in government now.

And I guess lastly, I asked a new employee whom I just hired from the private sector why he chose to go federal, and he replied that after years of working in the private sector, he did not have the feelings that he saw existing at NASA, and that is contributing on a team to fulfill a real mission for the nation, actually for the world, and so I think that's important that you look at a job in terms of what it is you're contributing to society, and the government gives you plenty of opportunity to do that.

Mr. Morales: So it's a real sense of pride and accomplishment in the role.

Ms. Dawsey: Yes.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

Toni, unfortunately, we have reached the top of the hour, and we've run out of time. I do 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.

Ms. Dawsey: The last thing I would like to say is we're very proud of NASA. There is a lot going on at NASA. And we invite you to learn about us on nasa.gov.

Thank you.

Mr. Morales: Thank you.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Toni Dawsey, Assistant Administrator for Human Capital Management, and Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA.

My co-host today 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 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