 |
|
|
|
Government Leader home > March 2005 issue
March 2005; Vol. 1 No. 1
Chief of Chiefs: The Emerging Need for a COO
By Richard W. Walker
Another story on Chief of Chiefs is OMB’s Clay Johnson: A COO by any name can get the job done.
Piece by piece, the government has created CXOs to drive reform. But the need to collaborate raises the question, who will make sure the pieces fit together?
All across the government, “chief ” titles are turning up nearly as fast as agencies can print the nameplates.
Think of a management discipline and you’re
likely to find a chief you-name-it officer in charge.
Chief acquisition officer. Chief financial officer.
Chief human capital officer. Chief information
officer. Chief knowledge officer. Chief security offi-
cer. The list grows.
They’ve become known, for short, as CXOs, or
sometimes C-level executives. Their roles, however,
are changing. The mandate to improve performance
within their operating areas is giving
way to new demands to collaborate across functions—
to become, in management parlance,
transformational leaders.
 | |
| | “The biggest change is the role and function of the CHCO as compared to the historical role and function of the CFO, the CIO or the chief acquisition officer.” —Comptroller general David Walker | |
|
The CXO evolution in turn is breeding demands
for yet another chief, a chief operating
officer, to oversee the CXOs and keep them focused on reform. It’s an idea that has gained support, along with some qualified criticism, but
which hasn’t taken hold yet at many agencies.
“It’s like the stagecoach driver who has six
stronghorses,” said Roger Baker, vice president
and general manager of civil solutions for General
Dynamics Corp.’s network systems unit
and a former Commerce Department CIO.
“It takes somebody to keep them all pulling
in the same direction. The COO has to make
sure the team is focused on the right things,”
Baker said. “And what the COO needs is a
great CIO, a great CFO, a great chief human
capital officer. If you can make people who are
individually great in their jobs all work
together as a team, then the organization is
going places.”
To date, that hasn’t happened, said Jonathan
Bruel, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for
the Business of Government in Washington.
“In terms of overall mission-related transformation,
all these chiefs collectively have not
been able to muster that kind of continuity
and attention,” he said. “They’ve done a nice
job within their sphere, but collectively they’re
not all together.”
In 2001, when Bruel was at the Office of Management
and Budget, he drafted a memo to the
heads of executive departments and agencies
ordering them to establish COOs, the equivalent
of deputy secretaries, expressly to oversee
the administration’s government reform efforts.
Who’s your COO?
None of the executive agencies has a designated
COO. Whether other officials, such as deputy
secretaries, perform that function is part of
the debate, as are other aspects such as whether
a COO appointment should have a fixed term.
(The Government Printing Office, a congressional
agency, has created a corporatestyle
management structure, to good effect.
See story, Page 20. )
Meanwhile, the changing roles of the CXOs
reflects an effort to fine-tune accountability
and concentrate critical management areas under
succinctly descriptive titles.
But a title isn’t enough. For comptroller general
David Walker it’s a matter of substance
over form.
“It’s fine to be able to name the chief of something
in order to affix responsibility and accountability
for critical management operations,
but doing so in and of itself will not get
the job done,” said Walker, head of the Government
Accountability Office. “More substantive
changes are necessary in order achieve
success in the transformation effort.”
The operative word is transformation.
Upper-echelon managers must be more
than expert in their own disciplines; they have
to assume leadership roles to meet the objectives
of the President’s Management Agenda.
“Their roles are more significant than
they’ve ever been,” said Clay Johnson III,
OMB deputy director for management. (See
interview, next page.)
CXO involvement in government reform initiatives
isn’t new. Chief financial officers and
chief information officers, for example, have
been on the front lines of government reform
efforts since the early 1990s.
More recently, the PMA has added chief
human capital and chief acquisition officers to
the mix. The PMA’s prescription for transformation
neatly touches all four upper-level CXOs, encompassing major initiatives in the
strategic management of personnel, competitive
sourcing, financial performance, e-government,
and the integration of budget and performance.
Their respective roles have been evolving for
the past 15 years.
CFOs were first on the scene. The Chief
Financial Officers Act of 1990 established
senior-level CFO positions at 24 executive
agencies, required annual financial audits and
set expectations for modern systems to support
integrated management of budget, accounting
and program information.
The act also created the position of deputy
director for management at OMB with
the intention of focusing greater attention on
management reform in the executive branch.
Thus, with the stroke of a pen, the CFO Act
turned the former accounting drudge into an
agency executive with clout.
“The first appointments were usually a re-
flagging of somebody who was already on
board,” Bruel said. “The former finance guy
was relabeled CFO. It wasn’t until the second
or third appointment that you started to get
people of more competence, stature, breadth
and presence.”
CFOs became the big gorillas on the reform
management front, especially as more agencies
embarked on business systems modernization
projects.
But that began to change after the Clinger-
Cohen Act of 1996 required agencies to appoint
CIOs.
Lawmakers’ objective
“I would argue that in passing the CIO act,
[Congress and the Clinton administration]
thought they were providing a change management
leader,” said Bruel, who was a senior
adviser to the deputy director for management
at the time.
Mark Forman, who helped write Clinger-
Cohen when he worked for former Sen.
William Roth (R-Del.) on the Senate Governmental
Affairs Committee, agreed.
“We wanted somebody who understood how
to take advantage of IT and modernization,
and not just automate business processes,” said
Forman, former associate director of IT and
e-government at OMB and now executive vice
president for Cassatt Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif.
In the late 1990s, the looming year 2000
computing crisis, which required agencies to
race to renovate mission-critical systems, and
the proliferation of e-government and other
IT projects across government turned the
leadership spotlight from CFOs to CIOs.
“Everyone started to look to the CIOs for
leadership on change,” said Bruel. “The CFOs
felt that someone else was getting the nod first
for questions and influence.”
Added Baker: “The CIOs’ influence greatly
accelerated in that time frame. The CFOs had
more than they could handle. There’s no way
a CFO can get a good, programwide view of a
multimillion-dollar IT budget along with
everything else the CFO does.
“The CIOs added more horsepower to the
team and started doing things that the CFO
might have had responsibility for when there
wasn’t somebody else there to do it.”
Baker isn’t so sure that the CFO role diminished as the CIOs rose. “It just allowed the CFOs to focus on what they’re good at—the
budget and how well the dollars are spent—
and let the CIOs focus on the IT and program
side of things.”
But CIOs can’t simply be IT directors,
Forman said. “They really have to be business
transformation leaders. In government, and
in any information-intensive organization as
well, IT is the fundamental underpinning of
modern management practice,” he said. “So
the CIO has to be at the table when there’s a
transformation issue.”
Forman, in effect the government’s chief
CIO during his OMB tenure, further buttressed
the concept of CIO as visionary in
2002, when he hired a chief technology officer
to be his deputy.
“I needed to focus on business transformation
issues,” he said. “We didn’t have the technology
knowledge that we needed at OMB, so I hired
a deputy who was much more of a technologist.”
But CIOs, other observers say, can’t drive the
transformation train alone.
“Any transformation involves people, process
and technology. You’ve got to address all
three of them,” said David McClure, research
director for the global public sector group at
Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn.
“I think the shortcoming for the CIO assuming
solo responsibility is that they don’t own the
processes and they don’t own the people,” said
McClure, who was director for IT management
issues at GAO until August 2002 and, until
recently, vice president of the Council for Excellence
in Government in Washington.
Bruel thinks CIOs could soon begin to feel
some crowding at the transformation table,
just as the CFOs did.
“They are no longer feeling like the No. 1 kid
on the block,” he said. “They are worried that
the CHCOs may be the popular new kid.”
Critical factor
Indeed, he may have a point. GAO’s Walker
sees the human capital chiefs as big players in
government reform.
“I believe the people strategy is probably the
single most important element [in] a successful
transformation effort,” he said. “All of these
[CXOs] are important, but the biggest change
is the role and function of the CHCO as compared
to the historical role and function of the
CFO, the CIO or the chief acquisition officer.”
“Those have always been important functions,
and their roles have been pretty well de-
fined over the years,” he said. “While they’ve
evolved to become more important over time,
probably the biggest change is in conjunction
with the CHCO.”
Congress created the CHCO title in the
Homeland Security Act of 2002, intending to
place CHCOs squarely in the leadership ranks
and dramatically elevate the importance of
personnel policy.
“When the CHCO designation was created,
it was a recognition that the whole nature of
the people dimension needed to be changed,”
Walker said. “It recognized that human capital
policies and strategies needed to be an
integral part of strategic planning and the
government transformation effort.”
With its new standing, the CHCO position
requires high-level skills, he said.
New skills on tap
“In some cases, you might have a person who
was performing human resources or personnel
type activities. That person may not have
the right type of skills and abilities to effectively
perform at the CHCO level,” Walker said.
“Success in the transformational effort involves
things like strategic planning and organizational
alignment and being able to link
institutional unit and individual performance-
measurement reward systems with desired
outcomes,” he said.
Procurement officers got their own boost in
status from Congress when the Services Acquisition
Reform Act, passed as part of the fiscal
2004 Defense authorization bill, mandated
the Chief Acquisition Officers Council, which
replaced the Federal Acquisition Council.
Furthermore, the council’s chairman is Johnson,
the government’s top management offi-
cial. The idea was to put the CAO Council on a
plane with the other CXO councils, OMB offi-
cials said.
And the acquisition chiefs must be critical
partners on the transformation front, Walker
said. “The CAO is dealing with more than typical
contracting and procurement issues.”
In fact, all four of the high-level CXOs have
to be critical partners in transformation.
“The fact of the matter is that all of these
players need to work together as partners to
help transform how government does business,”
Walker said.
The fundamental question has become, who
is really in charge?
“There is a danger in having [CXOs] siloed
into their various areas of responsibility,” he
said. “All [the CXOs] need to work together as
partners and you need a point person who is
responsible and accountable for the strategy
and integrating the activities of a variety of key
players.”
Which leads back to the need for a chief operating
officer—even if it involves merely
changing a title on the door.
“We have COOs in some capacity in some of
the agencies now,” McClure said. “They may
not be titled that way, but many times the
deputy secretary serves in that capacity.”
At some agencies, the deputy secretary can
handle the role of point person on reform,
Walker said.
But at other agencies, “the job is just too big
and too complex, and it’s not realistic to expect
the deputy secretary to do it,” he said.
The Defense Department is a case in point,
Walker said. It needs a specifically titled COO
or chief management officer to take charge.
“At DOD you don’t have a single person who
is responsible, accountable and focused on a
day-to-day basis on making business transformation
a reality,” he said.
Term limit
Walker is pushing the notion of term appointments,
ideally for seven years, of COOs at
agencies where business transformation efforts
are in danger of languishing.
A seven-year COO position would have to be
legislated by Congress and would require
Senate confirmation.
Walker—who is in the sixth year of a 15-year
term as comptroller general—realizes that
there are risks involved in such appointments.
At DOD, “you’ve got a lot of good people there
who could see this as the potential diminution
of their own control and authority,” he said.
Other observers noted further possible hurdles
for term COOs.
“Walker’s preference is for someone with
expertise and tenure who can provide consistency
of attention to these issues. By default,
that takes you into the career category,” Bruel
said. “But if you want someone with real juice
who sits at the table, then you need someone
who is a political official.”
But a potential pitfall for a political appointee
is that each is vulnerable to shifts in
power and the whims of the cabinet secretary—
which could disrupt the continuity of
leadership provided by a term COO.
Another continuity disrupter is the lengthy
appointment process.
“It takes forever,” John Kamensky, senior
research fellow at the IBM Center for the
Business of Government, pointed out.
“A political appointment that is confirmed
by the Senate takes about a year,” said Kamensky,
a government reform expert who
spent eight years as deputy director of Vice
President Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing
Government. “You’re not just losing
the continuity of one person over a period of
time, but you have a year’s gap in continuity.”
Another concern is that appointment of
long-term COOs may ultimately have an
effect opposite the one intended, McClure
said.
“The longer the [COOs] are tenured, the
more they may be removed from the real business
of the organization and become totally
focused on process compliance and controls,”
he said. “The person might lose perspective on
mission, priorities and outcomes.”
Whatever the possible pitfalls, the trend is
favoring the eventual rise of COOs in government.
“I think it’s a natural evolution,” Forman
said.
Another story on Chief of Chiefs is OMB’s Clay Johnson: A COO by any name can get the job done.
|
|
| |
 |
| Evolution of the CXOs | 1990
THE CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICERS ACT establishes
senior-level CFO positions at 24 executive
agencies, sets new financial requirements and
creates the deputy director for management
post at OMB to oversee management reform.
CFOs become the lead agents for change.
1996
THE CLINGER-COHEN ACT requires agencies to name CIOs. The IT chiefs gain clout with
the proliferation of the Web, the rise of e-government and the focus on the year 2000 computing crisis.
2002
THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT creates the CHCO job at DHS, underscoring the
increasing importance to transformation of personnel issue. In the next phases of government transformation, some say, the personnel chiefs could be the most important leaders.
2004
THE SERVICES ACQUISITION REFORM ACT creates the Chief Acquisition Officers
Council—to replace the Federal Acquisition Council—putting CAOs on a level with financial, information and human capital officers.
| |
| | | | |
|
![Government Leader[valor]](/images/govleader_smlogo.gif "Government Leader [valor]"){kind=small}
