Ms. Evans: Good morning.

Ms. Evans: Well, my office in particular, within the Office of Management and Budget is responsible for managing and overseeing what the government does with its resources for Information Technology. So it is really ensuring that we leverage our capabilities, and that we are making prudent use of the taxpayers' dollars, while we are meeting the President's priorities.

Ms. Evans: Well, I have very specific responsibilities, which is overseeing the information technology throughout the federal government, working on activities that are specifically called for within the E-Government Act of 2002. I direct the activities of the Chief Information Officer's Council, which is a government-wide forum in which we can exchange ideas and best practices. I'm also responsible for capital planning and investment, cyber security, privacy, and ensuring access and dissemination of information.

Ms. Evans: Well, I have a lot of previous positions. I actually started out as a park interpreter, with the National Park Service, while I was in college, and came to Washington, D.C. over 24 years ago as a clerk typist at the Office of Personal Management. I have worked my way through there, I have worked at several different departments and agencies, and my most recent position coming into my current role was the Chief Information Officer at Department of Energy.

Ms. Evans: Actually that's a really fun job, we are called park interpreters, and what we do is, we interpret history at this particular park.

Ms. Evans: So I worked at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and had to give a lot of walking tours and things like that, so it was a lot of fun.

Ms. Evans: You have different roles when you are specifically within an agency, like when I worked at Department of Justice. Working down in a component organization versus working at a department-wide position, you bring different points of reference on what you are looking at. The problems and the challenges are always the same, what I think you find different is the scope. The scope always gets larger, so in this particular job, my scope is huge, and you have to take into consideration the multiple missions going across the agencies. But the challenges in how you go about implementing a project, how you analyze it, how you analyze a program, how you would go about managing an IT project are the same.

Ms. Evans: That's a fascinating question, and I have been asked this often, and I have to really reflect a lot on this. Again, a lot of it has to do with your point of reference and where you are in your career. I don't think that you necessarily have to have a title to be a leader. I think a lot of times, if you have a really good idea that it is going to meet a requirement, and you have the ability to be able to communicate that idea and people understand the value of what you want to achieve, a person who is a GS-5 working on an interagency taskforce can become the leader of that taskforce. So when you ask my own development of what changed, I think a lot of it is awareness of being able to use your communication skills, develop those, and also be able to articulate from an Information Technology standpoint, the business value.

If I always talked in terms of technology, and a lot of times within my own department and agency, OMB, we talk about this, I could sit there and talk about cyber security, Federal Enterprise Architecture, all the business models, all the matrices. And a lot of the budget examiners would not necessarily understand why they would want to embrace the use of these things. But when I talk to them about, "Hey, did you know that HHS is doing the same type of project that Department of Justice is," and for the mere value of maybe getting them together in a meeting, they could work together and get done sooner.

That comes through the analysis if using all the Information Technology tools, but articulating it in a way that a budget examiner says, "Oh, gosh, there is something in this for me, and I can really get my program done, and I can help meet that objective and that priority." So I think it's your communication skills, and then being able to apply them to what we could call "what's in it for me."

Ms. Evans: So this is not going to be a really exciting story. What drew me to public service is my father, he is a retired civil servant as well, and I, this is not very glamorous, needed to get insurance, and I was not married yet, and my father said, "Look, for a little while, why don't you just come down to Washington, D.C. and take a job at the Office of Personal Management, take the clerk typist test," and I said, "Okay, sure I can do that for a while." And 25 years later, this September it will be 25 years later, I'm still here. So what kept me here is really cool assignments. Every time I would think "oh, gosh, I'm going to go back home," I would get assigned to a new project that was just really very fascinating, and to work with the people and the caliber of people that I had the opportunity to work with, and being able to make a difference, makes it very exciting work, and it is fun, it is a lot of fun, that's why I staid.

Ms. Evans: Sure, I'd be happy to talk about those. In 2001, the President proposed 24 common solutions in his budget which we called the E-Government initiatives. They are broken off into four portfolios, we have a government to citizen portfolio, a government to government, government to business and an internal efficiency portfolio. So those initiatives are broken out within those and then we also have one cross cutting initiative that deals with authentication.

Some of the highlights that we have here are things such as govbenefits.gov, on which Shawn had the opportunity to work during Katrina, he might want to talk a little bit about that. And right now, the way that works is that all our federal benefits are located at one site. And we also now are working with state and local governments and having their benefits available there too, and we just celebrated the fourth anniversary of that particular initiative where we opened up a new tool there where case workers can go on and see what's available to a citizen, to people that they need to help service. And so the intent is that you don't have to know how the government is structured. But then you have to know what kind of services, so to speak, that you want, so if you want benefits, you would go to govbenefits.gov, you would put in certain criteria about yourself, and then it will come up and tell you all the different federal programs that potentially you could be eligible for.

We also have another initiative called e-rulemaking. That particular initiative really allows the public to interact with the federal government on proposed rules. So, as you know, we have several rules that we would have out there, we normally publish to the federal register, and you have to really know how the whole process of the federal government works. Well, in this particular case now, what you can do is just go to regulations.gov, and then you can see all the proposed regulations that are out there, and if you choose to comment you can comment, and then you can see the status of where they are.

We have another one which is very popular called grants.gov. Again, this does not involve having to know how the federal government is structured, but it only involves knowing that you want to see what kind of grand opportunities are available that you could potentially apply for. So all our grant opportunities are located at grants.gov, and we are now working with the agencies to ensure that their applications are also posted there. So we have 63 percent of the applications now also available. So you can see what's available and then apply for the grant at that same location. And we have several more. I could go on. All 24 of these have very specific goals and milestones to increase usage, so that we are improving the citizen services.

Ms. Evans: Well, this is a very exciting tool, this is actually a framework for us to use and for all the agencies to use. It's composed of five models. It has five supporting models, the performance model, business, service, technical and data. Now, we use this framework, OMB uses this framework itself to be able to analyze across the federal government as a whole. So what we try to do is come up with potential areas where we can ensure that there is collaboration. What we can do is gain efficiencies from looking at these models. We can see what all the agencies think that they should be doing to support the President's priorities.

And then the other thing that's really very exciting is we can reduce redundancies that help the agencies implement services faster. All of this we're doing across the government, but then the agencies all do their own analysis internally with their enterprise architectures that align to the federal enterprise architecture.

Ms. Evans: Well, we also have profiles that overlay on to these models, so we have a security profile and a privacy profile. The thought behind that, before I get into capital planning and some of other activities, is one of the big debates as we were going forward with this, which is, should you have a separate model that deals just specifically with security or privacy. What we decided was; you have to think about each of those through everything that you do. So from the inception of a particular service all the way through implementation, you want to take into consideration the security and the privacy of that information and that investment.

So from a capital planning perspective, what we do is we work with the agencies to ensure that they have a good robust planning process in place, using these tools, and what we do is we assess their enterprise architecture efforts and the process that they have in place that they are using that dovetails into what we call traditional capital planning. So you would look at that, we try to get all our guidance and all our feedback out to the agencies before they actually start their own cycle. So we can't do it on our time, we actually are on what we would call agency time. And so the agencies really go through right now preparing for the '07 cycle, they are working on that right now. And so if we want to affect that as they are making their decisions we have to get all our information out to them in, like, the March time frame, which is what we do.

Then my team and myself included we go out and individually visit the agencies and talk to them directly about what they are doing, in order to help them prepare as they do their own analysis through the summer because that's the agency's cycle time. They would do their analysis, look at their enterprise architecture, look at their investments coming out from their field structure, and then make recommendations to their secretary, all in preparation to submit that budget to us in September. That's really where we get to say, Gosh, did we do a good job. In giving the agencies the instruction, the feedback, those types of things, we see what comes into us, so that then we start the cycle of analysis and preparation for the President's '07 budget.

Ms. Evans: Well, one of my responsibilities is also the Federal Information Security Management Act, or what we finally call FISMA, so I'm going to start using FISMA through this conversation. But we had several activities that we are doing. That law was also passed along with the E-Government Act, and so I do an annual report where we analyze all this information coming forward. What we also do is we track this information on the President's management agenda. There is an expanded E-Government criteria initiative on the scorecard. It's one of five on the scorecard going forward. And what that really is about, is how an agency manages overall the internal management of which you use information technology to enable this.

So I'm going to step back before I specifically answer your question and talk a little bit about how the President's management agenda works. There are five elements; we have the human capital element, financial improvement, competitive sourcing, expanding E-Government, and budget and performance integration. So I view my area as an enabler to really get to the ultimate of budget and performance integration, which is talking about achieving results for the taxpayers' dollars. So what would be success for us in the IT world is program success. So to get to your question about security and privacy, you have to make sure that people have confidence and trust in that information and in what you're doing.

So we have put into place several different things going forward, measuring systems, certifications and accreditations of systems, we have several criteria matrices that we measure through the implementation of the FISMA Act. But then what we also did was, as we got all this data in, we noticed that there were a lot of things that agencies do in common. So we launched what we call a line of business activities. So now we are coming full circle back to the federal enterprise architecture. There are several lines of business, if you look at the business reference model, and the one that actually goes across all of them is the security, so we launched a cyber security line of business. And that was looking at all the different activities that agencies are doing, and then the way a line of business works is, we try to come up with what is common across all the agencies, how can we leverage our requirements, how can we ensure a certain level of commonality and standardization, and then also enhance the mission that the agency is doing at the same cost, if not lower. I would have to be a true OMB person here and say at the same cost, if not lower.

So with the cyber security in line of business what that did was, say, gosh, there are basic things that we all have to do that the law requires like training and user awareness. So does it really make sense that every agency come up with its own training program? And what we also saw was there was a variance between one agency just sending out an annual e-mail and saying, "Are you aware of these things? Click here," to another agency requiring their employees to take 40 hours worth of training. So we wanted to raise security, we wanted to raise awareness, and that's an area where we think there is a lot of commonality. So we are moving forward defining what that means. We are going to use initiatives that we have already talked about through the President's 24 initiatives. There is a go learn, an e-learning initiative where we can leverage those resources and ensure that there is a standardization, a minimum level of security across the Board here. So there are several things that we are doing in those areas. We are continuing to look at those. There are four common areas that this inter-agency taskforce identified; training, reporting, incident response, and then the ability to analyze the data. So, common tools.

So it's not necessarily bringing everybody together in what we would call a "shared service center approach," but giving people the ability to manage the risk of their investments and ensuring the security of their data.

Ms. Evans: I view it as our job to facilitate what the agencies need to accomplish their mission. And if we do it right, then we would be ahead of the game and be very proactive. Oversight kind of comes at the very end, and I look at it as us looking to see how well did we actually listen to the requirements coming from the agencies. If you look at what the President's management agenda is about and what my boss Clay Johnson is about, you see we are successful when the agencies are successful. And so it's making sure that the agencies have what they need in order to accomplish the priorities and the missions for those agencies.

Ms. Evans: Okay. Well, that is actually dealing with specifically, I'm going to give you another acronym which is Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, and what that is, is dealing specifically with our identification cards. In that model is the ability to use these identification cards and validate that people are who they say they are, and to make sure that the cards are actually interoperated, and that they work. So what we are doing through this initiative is not just within the capital region but all over. Actually what HSPD12, and that's what it is finally called with all the federal agencies, does is it makes sure that security is enhanced for all federal agencies.

On this particular directive, the President was very clear about what he would like for us to do, what he wanted us to accomplish in the time period that he did. It's a very simple concept, but what it's about is, if I am a federal government employee at Agency A, and they have validated that I am, that that same information should be applicable when I go to Agency B, instead of Agency B having to revalidate everything.

So what we have done under this is we have established a minimum standard of what that security validation is for federal government employees and contractors. And the second phase of this is issuing the credential associated with that, or what you would call, you know, a building access pass, which is probably the easiest way for people to really visualize this, so that my Government ID works at Agency A, and if I am authorized to have access at Agency B, that same card will work.

So again, this is coming up with a common solution, you know, implementing it across the government leveraging those resources and gaining efficiencies from those, instead of having to have six cards issued.

Ms. Evans: Yes, it is hard, execution is hard, but I will tell you that the agencies are on track for this and our due date is October of this year for the first HSPD12 complying cards to be issued by the agencies, and right now I'm happy to say we are on track, and we are meeting our plans.

Ms. Evans: This is going into really what things are common, how can we help the agencies achieve their objective, so you specifically talked about financial management systems, so let's use that as an example because we actually have five that are very mature, we have announced three more. We have one that is moving along, which we have already briefly talked about, which is the information security one. So if we talked about financial management, every agency has requirements to manage their financial management information. So we have to always keep in context what the goal is.

The goal is not really about the information system, the goal is really to have the ability to manage financial management information and achieve a clean audit opinion, that's really what we are working toward and that's a service that the IT people are helping to provide to CFOs. So what we do is try to make sure that we keep focused on that, and we try to keep the discussion along those lines. And we decide what the best way for the federal government to be able to do that is.

So if you look at our performance, our past performance, you can see that we probably have not done it the best that we could with what we would call "go it alone," where you look at each agency differently. We have 26 major departments, they all have this requirement. Again, they are measured on this on the President's management agenda, and then IT is just the enabler of how they are going to manage all the information. So if you look at it you see all the Inspector General reports, you see the General Accountability Office reports about our ability to manage information technology projects. So what we're trying to do is get agencies focused on what their core business is. Is their core business really to implement a financial management system, or is their core business to manage information about xyz?

And so we work with the agencies through their business case process or capital planning process and say, "Okay, here is a common solution of how we're going to manage these financial management systems overall. It doesn't make sense that 26 agencies should be building these all out separately. The people who do it well should be able to continue to do it well. And the people who need to get the services should just buy the services, and not necessarily deal with the risk of implementation." So that's really what our lines of business activities are, the financial management systems are moving toward centers of excellence, is what we would call them.

We have named some public centers of excellence for which we said, "Okay, these people have the capability to compete for the work," and then as agencies moved through this they see that there is a minimum requirement here, for example, for hosting IT services. And then what ever else they need to better manage their financial management information. And then they're putting together their request for proposals going forward, and then they contract for those services. And then they enter into a service level agreement with their provider. So is it hard? Not really if you can articulate again, what's the business value, what does the agency achieve? And if we keep it on, what is the result and the goal? And we don't necessarily drill down into the technology associated with that service. And now, that's really what we try to do on the government-wide solutions.

Ms. Evans: Yes, I do agree with that statement because the technology now these days; that's not the hard part. The technology has actually become the easy part. There is usually technology solution for anything that we want to do. The hard part is articulating what you want to do, and when you want to accomplish it. If you look at any of the large government contracts, and these are the things that we see constantly across all the agencies, is that we start into a project or a program without a clear definition of success. And that's really what you'll hear in different variations. While the government didn't define their requirements fully, but what it really comes down to is, everybody has to know what the goal is and what the milestones are in achieving those goals.

And so there are several tools that we're putting in place working with those. And so the lines of business have defined what that goal is, what the common solution is, what the environment should look like. But what the agency now has to do and what we work with them on is a transition plan of how to get themselves from where they are today to that common solution using things like their enterprise architecture, using tools that we have in place like the Smart Buy Initiative, which is how we leverage our requirements with industry to get good commodity types of buys.

And then really looking at things like service level agreements, and what was intended with performance-based contracts. But what that all comes back to is we have to know what we want to buy. We just can't say, "Hey, we have some money and we need to meet this. We want to buy financial services, but we're not really sure what that all means."

Ms. Evans: Right.

Ms. Evans: And meeting attendance -- now, I'm going to go all the way back to the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, which is breaking it off into small enough manageable pieces so that you know exactly, "Okay, I can do this in a year. I'm going to do this in the next 18 months. I'm going to do this in the next 24 months," always moving toward that goal; that result that you want to achieve. And breaking it off into small enough manageable pieces so that you can measure your success.

Ms. Evans: So the duplication issue is always a challenge. There are several things that we have done from a policy perspective as well as from an oversight follow-up perspective. So we have issued policies where, on a quarterly basis the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Acquisition Officer sends in a letter to us that says, "Hey, none of our activities that we're doing within our department duplicate any of the e-government initiatives." And that also includes what we call the Smart Buy program, which is the second part of your question. But also what we've done, we've spent a lot of time in this last year working on individual agency implementation plans for the 25 initiatives. And the key to those implementation plans is shutting down the duplicative systems that they have. We can't run the new and also maintain the old.

The intent of the 25 initiatives in the lines of business activities are to really get rid of the duplication in the back end as well. And so what we're really are working on with the agencies and tracking are the actual shutdown of those duplication systems because that makes the environment more complex for them to manage. And so we really have worked through this because the key to that is ensuring that they can continue the operations in the maintenance of their businesses, not necessarily of those systems. They have a business that they're in, and they have a mission they need to meet. And we don't want to jeopardize that, so we want to do this through the lifecycle of their investments and retire the old ones and build up the new ones.

Now, how else do we also do that is by taking requirements and looking at their contracting vehicles, and I worked very closely with my sister office; the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. And how we leverage those requirements, what our commodity types buy and what are big things that agencies are doing across the board. So we have a Smart Buy office that is managed by GSA. And what we've done now is we've established these government-wide contracts that the agencies could have. So that way each agency doesn't have to become a procurement, great negotiator of software. And that's done for us on behalf of GSA.

So who do we have relationships with? We have one with Oracle. We have one with ESRI, Novell, ProCite, and these are things that we could pick up, I mean, just six or seven of them, that we could pick up, and that agency suggests we all use these. The key to these contracts though, because they're mandatory, I want to make sure that everybody realizes the key to these are that there are special terms and conditions in these that keep us from competing with one another.

Now, I know that what happens periodically is that an agency or a vendor would do a better price than what is on the Smart Buy contract. What happens in this particular case is because of the terms and conditions, if an agency gets a better price, once these contracts are mandatory, that new price becomes the new Smart Buy contract. And every vendor that is under this program agrees to that. So what it really does is that it gets us focused on providing solutions, and kind of added the negotiation over and over again a price points for our services or software.

Ms. Evans: Well, our approach to this is just that we really believe that competition is going to drive innovation. And what we really want to do is make sure that we have a market-based solution going forward. There are agencies that appear to demonstrate and have the capabilities to be able to compete, but then private sector also can do this. We have a very complex environment in the federal government dealing with our cyber security rules, our privacy rules, our acquisition rules, all those types of things. But that doesn't mean that private sector can't compete for those services.

So what we really want is what is best for the taxpayer and what is best for the agency to meet their mission. And we believe by allowing the private sector to compete as well, there are things that they have done or things that they will do that may be better for us than what we're currently doing right now in the areas of human resources and financial management. Many of our private sector companies have done the consolidation. They have improved business processes. They have done more innovative ways of managing human resources or identifying the ability to close gaps. And so what we don't want to do is get all caught up in what is the technology. We really want to do the business. And so we're viewing these lines of business activities, the back office types of activities and the ability for everybody to compete for the work. That is really going to give us the best result of what we need in order to be able to provide these services.

Ms. Evans: We are working through with each of the initiatives matrix to measure success. So, for example, on E-Training, we know exactly how many federal employees have registered there, how many are taking courses like, for example, there are 1.3 million courses that had been offered to date that had been provided through there. But what we're also looking at, initially what's very easy for us to do is measure efficiency matrix like reducing cycle time, reducing the cost associated with processing a voucher. For example, we have an E-Travel initiative and we've decreased the price of that from $62 to $24. Okay, so we're dealing with our efficiencies.

What we're really now working on is a matrix to show outcomes, are we achieving outcomes? And what we're doing is working through with our other partner initiative, which is Budget and Performance Integration. They have an assessment tool called the Program Assessment Rating Tool that looks at the program. So you have to look at IT investments. You could have several IT investments that are in one program. And so what are the matrix that you were using to achieve the outcome and the result for that program. That's the harder nut for us to crack right now. That's what we're hoping will mature more through the Federal Enterprise Architecture model of performance, our performance matrix there. And so we'll continue to have a lot of the efficiency matrix, but we're really now focused more on what the performance matrix are.

Ms. Evans: Well, we're going to continue working on lines of business activities. I feel we have only scratched the surface of the analysis that we could do, and the common solutions that we could come up with for the government as a whole. When you ask me 5 to 10 years from now, what would I see; I really would see that the federal government truly is acting as a single enterprise, and that you will see common services across the board just like you do in a corporation for human resources, for financial management, for those types of activities. And I think it's a very exciting time to be in the government right now because we're in the process of implementing those.

Ms. Evans: Well, we have the CIO council, which is there as a forum for the -- to give OMB a government-wide perspective, but also to allow the agencies to have a forum where they can exchange information issues, best practices. In particular, we do have a Best Practices Committee that takes up issues across the board, and what they do is they go and they find the best way that we can handle certain things. They handle workshops, they put those on outside of our regular meetings, which really does help facilitate a dialogue going forward.

We also, on the individual initiatives themselves, the 24 initiatives, we have a program manager's meeting. And what that does is that gives them the ability to share like experiences, challenges that they may face and be able to learn from one another across the board about how best to do certain things. And then of course we're always asked to speak at the agencies as well as publicly so that we can make sure that private industry knows how they should be pursuing and working with the individual agencies and the government as a whole.

Ms. Evans: Well, I figure it's really important that agencies, and I think agencies have picked up on this, realize that their participation is vital. This is their opportunity to say how they think the solution should be. First is the traditional way OMB is going to say it's a certain way because they really have to implement this. And so we really want to make sure that they're participating and that they bought into a solution that's going to do what they need for it to do.

And the other key piece is making sure that the industry is aware that we're using the procurement policies and procedures that are in place, and that their participation comes through what we call the request for information phase of this process. And that they actively participate in the industry days that we have set up so that they can get all their questions answered. And then they can tell us through this process the way that they think we should be addressing the situation.

Ms. Evans: Well, we talked about this earlier and that really is as having a clear definition of success that then leads to your ability to be able to clearly articulate what service level agreements you're willing to live with. And being able to define what those performance targets are going to be, and again, I really want to talk about the competition piece because I really believe that competition is going drive the innovation for the solutions that we need to have.

Ms. Evans: I think that coming into the federal government is a wonderful opportunity for anybody new coming out of college. All our opportunities now are posted on USAJOBS, but you really have an opportunity to come in, do a service, work in a broad series of issues, be able to influence policy, and then turn around and see what the direct effects are in your hometown. I mean, everyday when I do certain things I get to see and I get to think of the difference that I'm making for the nation and for my kids and for my grandkids, that I'm improving services for the future. If you ever wanted to make a difference, I think public service is really the place to be. That doesn't mean that private sector is not a good place. So don't get me wrong. I just think that public service and the ability to affect the future and the services that the government provides for your family. When you look at it from your family's perspective, then it really becomes an exciting service that you can do.

Ms. Evans: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. And if you want to keep up on everything that we're doing in my office, all this information is located on egov.gov.