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GCN Home > 05/19/08 issue

Putting Web 2.0 to work

2008 GCN Technology Leadership Award winner Nancy Sternberg’s use of new technology tools gives Business.gov an edge

By David Essex, Special to GCN

At its launch in 2004, Business.gov was a forms-pushing federal compliance site, indistinguishable from many other government sites. However, in late 2007, it was redesigned for easy access to more than 9,000 resources throughout government. Since then, the government’s one-stop Web portal for business, which the Small Business Administration manages in partnership with 21 agencies, has been steadily growing in popularity.
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People involved with the transformation give much of the credit to Nancy Sternberg, the hard-driving program manager of the agency partnership, the Business Gateway Initiative.

Sternberg said the first six months after her May 2006 start were marked by a lot of complaints from partner agencies about diversion of time and money to the site.

She persevered as her team worked to create benefit statements for each agency. “I don’t give up,” she said. “We gave them tools that helped them go back to their agency. We were very successful in getting the naysayers to quiet down and even step up.”

“She is driven to continuously improve the site and works hard to ensure that customer feedback and requests drive the enhancements,” said Sternberg’s boss, SBA Chief Information Officer Christina Liu. “Her passion and enthusiasm are infectious.”

Sternberg’s previous jobs had prepared her well. A programmer with a degree in management information systems, she left the private sector in 1992 for the Agriculture Department, where one of her responsibilities was compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act. She also took a three-month detail in 2001 at the Office of Management and Budget, where she handled data collection for the act.

The Business Gateway Initiative works with a variety of agencies. Sternberg said the partnership helped the General Services Administration save customers time with data harmonization to minimize redundant entries at Forms.gov. The group also provided funding and expertise to help reduce the number of coal-mining forms required by several agencies and is doing similar work for NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, IT Management, Web Strategies



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