E-gov progress report

GCN editorial director Wyatt Kash and assistant managing editor for news Jason Miller sat down with Evans; Young; Jeff Koch, Internal Efficiency and Effectiveness portfolio manager; Andrew Ciafardini, Government-to-Citizen portfolio manager; Wendy Liberante, Government-to-Business portfolio manager; and Carol Bales, E-Authentication portfolio manager, to discuss the progress agencies have made so far and what

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Business Gateway, unlike some of the other Lines of Businesses, is something that has never done before. Business compliance across the federal government is all in one place, and it is very unique.” Wendy Liberante

GCN: What new developments are going on in the Government-to-Citizen portfolio?
Ciafardini: One of the things we have been working on is 18 of our e-government initiatives have a performance measurement project. That is very exciting because we are really focusing on measuring three specific areas: adoption, usage and customer satisfaction (see story, Page 36).

Customers don’t just include citizens; a lot of times agencies or states can be customers. A lot of times we track two metrics, one for agencies and their customer satisfaction, and a second for the outward-facing part of the initiative that involves the service to the citizen.

GCN: What has been the challenge in getting the metrics defined?
Ciafardini: The great thing is a lot of these agencies have already been doing some of these things. All had some baseline metrics, and it was just putting them into consistent categories and separating them out to a point where we can make them more actionable. One of the great opportunities has been to share the data and some of the data we received from the Performance Assessment Rating Tool process.

GCN: What is the status of the E-Authentication project?
Bales: Of the 24 agencies that comprise the CIO Council, 19 have e-authentication-enabled applications. The remaining five are in the process of implementing e-authentication at one or more public-facing systems. We expect these implementations to be complete by the end of the second quarter 2007 (see story, Page 1).

GCN: What is the status of the Internal Efficiency and Effectiveness portfolio?
KOCH: One interesting part is because it is all internal and support systems … these are not core missions or part of their programs. They sort of are distractions from their core missions. So as agencies adopt them, it allows them to focus management resources and attention on core mission.

There is a lot of activity. Some of [the e-government initiatives], like Recruitment One-Stop, is pretty much done; it is in production and agencies are using it. E-Records management initiative owners completed their work, and agencies are building their own records management schedules.

Some of the others, Human Resources and Financial Management LOBs, are both very active and have been doing a great deal of work in enterprise architecture. They started out with 26 agencies that had their own processes for hiring someone or getting a promotion, or raise or award. The HR LOB brought those agencies together and came up with a process everyone agreed upon. That allowed us to commoditize the HR systems. You know you can use any system that complies to that architecture to meet your needs. Your requirements documents now are standard HR requirements that are published and you may have one or two small things on the side that you need. HR has become very mature in those areas—they have a Business Reference Model, Performance Reference Model that they worked with our enterprise architecture team with [OMB chief architect] Dick Burk to develop and test, they have a data model, and a technical model is coming out soon.

GCN: Is 2007 the year we will see more agencies move to a shared-services provider?
KOCH: The guidance on HR has been if an agency has a system that is working for them, then they should stay with it until the end of its lifecycle. If they have a system that needs to be upgraded, then let’s get them into a service organization. The trend is, yes, there will be more agencies looking for HR services. We have reached maturity with these enterprise architectures and agencies knowing what they are buying, and are getting better at buying it.

GCN: Discuss the latest on the Government-to-Business portfolio.
LIBERANTE: We did a great relaunch of BusinessGateway.gov in September. The unique thing about Business Gateway, unlike some of the other lines of businesses, is this is something that has never done before. Business compliance across the federal government is all in one place, and it is very unique. It has received great feedback from the business world.

GCN: Will agencies begin to shut down duplicative systems in 2007? E-Rulemaking is a perfect example of an e-government project that was supposed to replace redundant systems.
LIBERANTE: E-Rulemaking has made great strides last year. Right now, 100 percent of the rules are posted in the Federal Register or posted online at Regulations.gov. The e-docket aspects of E-Rulemaking, which is the agency side, just under 40 percent of the agencies are using it as a docket management system. We are adding close to three to four agencies a quarter to that and it is a matter of getting them trained and agencies are working out their issues.

YOUNG: The question I get asked a lot about E-Rulemaking is specifically why, when agencies migrate to one system, are they not shutting down the duplicative system. That is not the right question. The right question is why have we not done this before. Why force citizens to go to over 20 different places to look for regulations and public comments, or go to a paper-based docket on M Street SW [Washington] and look for this stuff?

The answers are all cultural in nature and not technical. Federal Docket Management System is more than a pilot project now as over 30 agencies have been converted to it. The main benefit is not the shutdown of duplicative regulatory systems, but it is a huge burden reduction to citizens and improvement in the transparency of government actions.

GCN: How many systems are still being used that are duplicative to E-Rulemaking?
LIBERANTE: Some agencies, like [the Health and Human Services Department], have a legacy system and they are working with E-Rulemaking to figure out what the gaps are and how to bridge them.

EVANS: The intent is if we follow this one, HHS would shut down their system. When we talk about e-government completion of these initiatives, completion is not just that we’ve implemented the system. But completion is when you shut down a legacy system. That is what we are holding the agencies accountable for. We will not realize the cost savings and true benefit of what we have been trying to do here until they shut down legacy systems.

GCN: You used the example of HHS. Will the department be expected or asked to shut down its old system once the gaps are addressed?
EVANS: You said, ask, expected, all that—the answer is yes. The agency will say, “It is in my best interest to get rid of this investment because I’m moving everything over to the new system.” We really want to make good business decisions because the agency will see them [instead of just] investments. It will not be a matter of us saying you will have to. But the expectation is, and we will follow up on it, you have to eliminate redundancies.

GCN: Do you have any idea of how many redundant systems there are?
YOUNG: We actually are working on that in the context of the agency’s quarterly e-government PMA score. About a year and a half ago, we worked with every agency to develop comprehensive plans with milestones and dates to implement all e-government and LOB initiatives.

GCN: What is the status of the Government-to-Government portfolio?
YOUNG: Grants.gov hit a major milestone that we have been planning for three years. The goal was 75 percent of grant opportunities would be available for online application. They exceeded that goal by 1 percent and hit 76 percent. In fiscal 2005, the goal was 25 percent. In 2007, the goal is 100 percent.

It went from a conversation about “no we can’t do this because …” to a conversation of “yes, we will do it if …” and the condition of certain aspect of agency rules and policies put in place and goals from OMB being established and a governance structure that takes into account what every agency does in grants management and [what] the citizen and higher-education aspects are. This goal was not accomplished because OMB said it will be done, but because it made sense, it was transparent and there was a big benefit not just to agencies, but agencies’ constituents.

Disaster Management implemented Disaster Management Interoperability Services at every emergency operations center of federal agencies. They have a tool to communicate in times of disaster or times of preparing for disaster. That all happened because there was a sense of urgency, a clarity of goals and a commitment on behalf of the CIOs from all those agencies. The focus now is on enhancing the current tool set to meet the evolving needs of the first responders.

EVANS: Disaster Management is totally included in DHS’ appropriations. It has a self-sustaining model from our perspective because it has a business owner, it has appropriated dollars and its future is set. But because it is also within DHS’ appropriations there are things when we talk about shutting down duplication and all these other types of activities, the CIO at DHS has to look at his portfolio overall and say this is a business line we provide, disaster management, how are we doing it? It keeps getting reported that we are shutting down disaster management and it is going away. This one is so mature, it is getting ready to go to version 2. The agency owns it and looks at how we can deliver service across the board across all our components.

GCN: DHS CIO Scott Charbo is not unfunding disaster management, then?
EVANS: He is improving the services of disaster management, the business line within DHS. The presidential initiatives when we first started were proofs of concepts that we could do these. Scott is looking at what the business of DHS is and what tools we are using to support it.

GCN: Describe some of the biggest accomplishments and disappointments of the e-government and LOB projects that occurred in 2006.
CIAFARDINI: GovBenefits.gov continues to provide outstanding benefits information to millions of citizens, and USA Services continues to lead the way in helping federal agencies serve citizens by utilizing cost-effective call centers and information services such as FirstGov.gov.

Due to a contract protest, development and deployment of the National Recreation Reservation Service under Recreation One-Stop has been delayed. However, in 2007, the initiative plans to launch NRRS—the consolidated recreation reservation system.

KOCH: The Department of Labor, one of the first agencies to complete its E-Travel implementation, reported that their cost per travel voucher decreased from $62.59 to $24.75 (more than 60 percent) and voucher processing time decreased from seven to three business days. Agencies migrating to one of the four E-Payroll providers saw a nearly 30 percent reduction in average cost per W-2 in 2006 ($176 to $126). Currently, 86 percent of federal employees are serviced by one of the E-Payroll pro- viders. All agencies that are not currently using an E-Payroll provider are scheduled to migrate in 2007.

LIBERANTE: There are more than 25,250 Federal Register documents posted on Regulations.gov that are available for public comments and over 300,000 documents (supporting material, notices etc.) available on the site. Beginning in September 2005, agencies began adopting the Federal Docket Management System as their docket management tool. While funding restrictions delayed implementation of FDMS, there are currently 13 agencies that have fully implemented FDMS and new agencies continue to implement at a rate of three to four agencies per quarter. FDMS currently logs more than 2,300 agency staff as registered users.

BALES: The U.S. E-Authentication Identity Federation membership more than doubled in size during the past year. We currently have 32 relying parties operational in the federation with three more expected to go live this month.

GCN: How has your communications strategy with the Hill changed over the past year? How will it be different with the Democrats in charge? Will obtaining funding for e-government be easier now?
YOUNG: We will continue our efforts to work with agencies and their congressional stakeholders to clearly define e-government benefits to agencies and citizens. It is our job to actively communicate these benefits to lawmakers and their staff. We will continue to strive for the same goals because we believe e-government is good government.