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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/07/02 issue

Where are they now...

Kathleen M. Adams

By Nancy Ferris, Special to GCN

Kathy Adams accomplished much during her 27-year federal career at the Social Security Administration and the Health Care Financing Administration, now the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But she is remembered best for her leadership of the federal effort to get systems ready for the new millennium.

As SSA’s assistant deputy commissioner for systems, she directed a program to ensure that the nation’s retirees and disabled people would receive their Social Security payments without pause, even though most SSA software did not support four-digit dates.

As SSA was becoming the first major agency to achieve Y2K compliance, Adams took on the leadership of the CIO Council’s Year 2000 Committee and shared her agency’s know-how with others.

After retiring from government in 1999, Adams became vice president and director of health systems for SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., an IT services company that primarily serves the federal government. Her customers include the Defense and Health and Human Services departments.

Adams’ thoughts: “As I think back over the trends of the last 20 years, one of the most significant has been the use of technology to improve the delivery of government services. There have been continuous initiatives over the last 20 years to reduce the size of the federal work force.

“At the same time reductions were occurring across government, workloads in many agencies were growing, and increased emphasis was placed on improving service to the citizen. This put tremendous pressure on government agencies to think of new ways to accomplish their missions and deliver services. Most agencies made significant investments in technology to make workers more productive and give them the tools and access to information they needed to be more responsive to their customers.

“I believe the result is that today the federal government provides better services to more people than it ever has in the past. This trend is continuing as agencies exploit the capabilities of the Internet to take service delivery to the next level and focus on citizen-centric delivery of services.

“Given this pervasiveness of technology and the government’s increased reliance on IT to do its job, technology came to be viewed as an important asset. The Clinger-Cohen legislation addressed deficiencies in the management of IT throughout government and established the framework for planning, acquiring and managing IT investments. Clinger-Cohen has had a major impact on how the government manages and leverages IT investments to maximize its return on those investments.”
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