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Government Leader home > November 2005 issue
November 2005; Vol. 1 No. 4
The E-government payoff: Where finance, acquisition and HR converge, e-gov projects deliver
By Trudy Walsh
Other stories on the E-Government Payoff are:
E-government, the electronic kiss that is transforming government from a wart-covered frog trapped in a stovepipe into a handsome, service-delivering prince, is no fairy tale.
Considered a bold vision three years ago, with the launch of the 25 Quicksilver initiatives, e-government may have lost some of its visibility and luster. But the fruits of more than three years of the Quicksilver init
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| | "If this initiative has a flaw, it’s that there are lots and lots of moving parts. But one piece at a time, I think IAE is making some significant changes." —Interior’s CAO/CHCO Scott Cameron
(Image: Drake Sorey) | |
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iatives have been very real: reduced costs, better service delivery and improved cooperation among agencies, experts in and outside of government say.
Initiatives where the core disciplines of finance, acquisition and human resources came together have wrought measurable, though sometimes hard-won, gains—and some clear management lessons.
A review of the more successful e-government initiatives found that they share at least four characteristics:
Stability of leadership. Successful e-government projects don’t hire a new director every six months.
Focused collaboration and communication. For e-government to work, a project needs to get people at all levels—leadership, mid-level management, technical—to believe the payoff will come. “You can’t do too much communication to win support,” said Norm Enger, director of the human resources Lines of Business at the Office of Personnel Management.
Up-front planning. Government executives agreed that the success of an e-government project correlated closely with the degree of careful planning performed early on. For example, doing the homework up-front helped agencies ease the transition to the Integrated Acquisition Environment, said Scott Cameron, the Interior Department’s deputy assistant secretary for performance, accountability and human resources as well as the department’s chief acquisition officer.
Clarity of mission. Initiatives in these areas had definable goals involving money, supplies or people. Initiatives that had less tangible goals, such as the Safecom and Disaster Management projects—which attempted to plan for future events—sometimes found it harder to measure success.
Of all the initiatives in these three areas, E-Payroll was most often cited by federal officials as the pumpkin that e-government is transforming into a golden carriage.
Payroll was an obvious target for transformation. Each federal agency may have a unique mission, but they all have to pay their employees. The government’s payroll systems were already in place and functional. All they needed was the transforming power of consolidation.
E-government requires demonstrable metrics and true “transformational change, not a patching of an old system,” said Enger, who as OPM’s e-government director is one of the top federal e-gov leaders. OPM is overseeing five of the 25 initiatives. “E-Payroll was something that was talked about for three decades.” When government decided to consolidate its payroll systems from 26 to four, there was “no bad press,” he said. “When people get paid wrong, they call their congressman. That didn’t happen with the E-Payroll migration.”
OPM officials estimate that E-Payroll will save the government more than $1 billion over 10 years in greater efficiency and reduced costs. The cost of processing a W-2 wage form decreased from $176 in 2001 to an estimated $125 in 2006, a decrease of almost 30 percent, said Joe Campbell, OPM’s E-Payroll project manager. Multiply that by 1.4 million federal employees currently enrolled in E-Payroll, and the savings are indeed dramatic.
Procurement’s progress. Also scoring high marks for meeting its objectives is the Integrated Acquisition Environment, a secure business environment that supports agencies’ acquisition of goods and services. Currently, eight systems comprise the IAE, including the Central Contractor Registration—the government’s database of contractors—and FedBizOpps. In her March 2004 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Technology, Infor-mation Policy, Intergovernmental Re-lations and the Census, Linda Koontz, the director of information management for the Gov-ernment Accountability Office, cited IAE as an example of effective collaboration among agencies and also with the private sector.
Much like E-Payroll, IAE pulled together an assortment of acquisition systems from dozens of federal agencies, including the Central Contractor Registration, the Past Performance Information Retrieval System and the Electronic Subcontract Reporting System.
One of the reasons IAE is making strides is that “procurement people, in my experience, work together pretty well,” said Richard Hopf, director of the Office of Procurement at the Energy Department. “It may just be that procurement is a tough business, and there’s always a lot of change associated with it.”
Historically, the procurement community has been at the vanguard of new processes and technologies before other areas of government, Hopf said. “Procurement people are the ones that march out first with the big changes,” such as the Clinton administration’s National Performance Review in the 1990s.
And IAE has kept its leadership fairly stable, especially considering that the normal “migration of technical personnel is huge,” Hopf said. “We don’t have someone we put on a particular project, then yank them off a month later and put somebody else on.”
The IAE also has gotten considerable buy-in from people in the acquisition community because they know they or their staff are going to be users of the system, said Doug Baptist, acting director of Energy’s information management systems division.
Early planning also played an important role in the IAE story. Mike Sade, director for acquisition management at the Commerce Department, said everyone involved in the federal acquisition process was invited to the IAE planning process. “We literally took an inventory of what people were developing in the acquisition process,” Sade said.
During the planning stages of IAE, Sade met with 60 people involved in the federal acquisition process for a full day. The group came to a consensus on which systems were common to all agencies and which would be relatively easy to develop.
“I think there was great benefit to taking the time up-front to really rate and rank the projects,” he said.
Mark Krzysko, director of supply chain systems transformation for the Defense Department, said e-government in general and IAE in particular could be a catalyst for breaking down stovepipes in two ways.
“One, it’s finding the key enabling points we can all take advantage of,” Krzysko said. “Two, it’s teaching us to act as an entity, with agencies working together for a common goal.”
Perhaps more than other functional areas, acquisition has had to rely on other areas of government, Krysko said. “We rely on the financial community and they rely on us,” he said.
Defense has had some special acquisition challenges. “In some ways, DOD probably deals more with the private sector,” said Domenic Cipicchio, DOD’s acting director for defense procurement and acquisition policy. “We knew we had to transform ourselves. We had to stay up with industry and make sure we wouldn’t get behind the eight ball. We had that looming over our head more than the financial community did or the human capital community.”
But the complexity of the federal acquisition process is still at times overwhelming. Few doubt that IAE is helping to transform government, but it’s doing it in bits and pieces, Interior’s Cameron said. “If this initiative has a flaw, it’s that there are lots and lots of moving parts. But one piece at a time, I think IAE is making some significant changes.”
Human side. Money and supplies are important, for sure, but there is no government, electronic or otherwise, without people. Human capital is the government’s most important resource and its raison d’etre.
The e-government initiatives that frame the government employee’s lifecycle from rosy-cheeked GS-4 clerk to grizzled Senior Executive Service sage looking toward retirement require the same kind of collaboration and tracking of results as the initiatives that deal with supplies or money.
Human resources has historically been a paper-intensive government activity. “If somebody had been with the government for 10 years, they had a 7-inch-thick paper folder full of personnel actions” and other records, Enger said.
The Enterprise Human Resources Integration, an attempt to electronically consolidate these personnel records, has been one of the most misunderstood initiatives, said June Huber, director of information management in the General Services Administration’s Office of the Chief People Officer. A centralized database will contain an electronic personnel folder on each employee, so agencies will be able to toss the thick paper folders.
“Things happen to paper records,” Huber said. “When you have good continuity of service, things don’t happen to electronic records.”
Among human capital systems, Interior’s Cameron, who is also the department’s chief human capital officer, is most excited about the E-Training initiative, a system that is providing 4,000 online courses to more than 1.3 million federal employees throughout the world.
Cameron envisions an integrated training and management system that would let an agency official “push a bunch of buttons and find out who had CPR training, who were procurement officers and who were French speakers.” This could have been helpful in formulating the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, for instance, Cameron said.
Recruiting power. Agencies also are using the power of e-government to reach out and attract new hires who otherwise might not consider a federal career. Recruitment One Stop, the portal for finding a federal job, has become the primary site for finding a federal job, Enger said.
Prior to Recruitment One Stop, OPM had a site that was “full of federal acronyms nobody could understand,” Enger said. College students would walk away from the site after five minutes at the computer.
As a result, the agency ran surveys of the old site and revamped job postings, translating the bureaucratic language into plain English. The new site has made it easier to attract to federal employment new college graduates and people from the private sector who were turned off by the old site.
The old site averaged about 20,000 visitors per day. Recruitment One Stop attracted 200,000 visitors on its first day, and now averages about 300,000 per day, Enger said.
“Everyone thinks they’re unique,” Enger said. “It’s human nature that people build silos. I think e-gov is about silo smashing. We’re moving away from isolated silos, toward a shared environment where you’re modernizing and standardizing business operations.”
The “happily ever after” for e-government is yet to come.
The 25 initiatives are laying the foundation for the future. What follows the initiatives “is the really important piece,” said Christopher Baum, research vice president of Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn.: a government that devotes fewer of its resources to red tape and more to its true mission.
e-payoffs
IRS
IRS cost to process a tax return:
paper: $2.71
electronic: $.56
Number of e-filers 2005:
total: 68,000,000
Over 5 million taxpayers used IRS’ FreeFile tax software in 2005.
Source: IRS
OPM
OPM cost per year to process an employee’s W-2 information:
2001: $176
2006: $125
After consolidating 20 payroll systems into four.
Source: OPM
GPO
GPO cost of paper consumption:
2002: $16.8 million
2004: $12.3 million
$4.5 million savings resulting from making more documents available electronically.
Source: GPO
Other stories on the E-Government Payoff are:
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| "You can’t do too much communication to win support." — OPM’s Norm Enger
(Image: Drake Sorey) |
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