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GCN Home > 08/18/03 issue

Presidential panel questions postal IT efforts

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The Postal Service should focus its resources more on technology that would make mail delivery smarter and less on initiatives that compete with industry, the President’s Commission on the Postal Service has concluded in a new report.

The report, Embracing the Future: Making the Tough Choices to Preserve Universal Mail Service, released this month, said USPS should drop its e-commerce initiatives because the ventures have produced largely disappointing results and “drained time and resources that could have been spent improving traditional postal services.”

President Bush created the commission in December through an executive order and asked it to recommend legislative and administrative postal reforms.

“We largely concluded that USPS was getting out of their area of expertise,” said Harry Pearce, co-chairman of the commission and chairman of Hughes Electronics Corp. of El Segundo, Calif. “Our sense was the Postal Service needs to get back to its core business of delivering mail.”

Outsourcing, perhaps?

Its core business does not include managing IT or other high-cost functions, the commission said. The Postal Service should consider outsourcing its IT management along with other functions, such as real estate management and vehicle maintenance, the report concluded.

“This has been a trend in industry, and Postal Service executives must ask if these types of functions can be done better and at a lower cost by the private sector,” Pearce said. “We are challenging USPS to make this assessment.”

The White House is studying the commission’s findings, as is the Postal Service. The commission was made up of mostly industry executives, except for one postal union official and one academic.

“We will be reviewing the commission’s recommendations and look forward to continuing to work with the administration and Congress as we evaluate the commission’s proposals,” USPS spokesman Mark Saunders said.

Mark Amtower, a partner in consultant Amtower & Co. of Ashton, Md., who has followed government mailing policies for more than 18 years, said the report was thorough and on the mark, but there isn’t much new in it.