April 4, 2008

A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

1. Making Telework Work
2. Federal Diary: Senator Presses White House on Hiring Veterans
3. Employee Buy-in Key to Infrastructure Change, Experts Say

Making Telework Work

Government Computer News

By Kathleen Hickey

The greatest barriers to telework in the federal government today are ignorance and middle managers, according to panelists who discussed the subject at the FOSE Conference and Exposition in Washington this week.
 
The No. 1 obstacle is middle managers, said Joseph Hungate, the Treasury Department's principal deputy inspector general for tax administration. Yet if middle managers are allowed to telework and are given the tools to manage their employees remotely, including metrics on employee productivity, resistance to the idea is dramatically lowered, he said.
 
"Managers need to get away from managing conduct and start managing product," he said.
 
Additionally, 42 percent of federal employees don't know if they are eligible to telework, and one-third are not aware if their agency has a policy on telework, said Joel Brunson, president of Tandberg Federal, a New York-based provider of videoconferencing equipment and mobile video devices to the federal government.
 
"We've done a good job of expounding upon what are the benefits of teleworking.... If we spent as much time [educating federal employees on eligibility], we would see an even greater adoption rate," Brunson said.
 
To attract the next generation of workers, agencies must offer telework as an option, said Stephen O'Keeffe, executive director of the public/private Telework Exchange, based in Alexandria, Va.
 
The organization hosted a series of focus groups to better understand Generation Y employees in the federal technology field. In a report released in November, the organization found that such employees have chosen to work in the federal government because of benefits that include telework.
 
"There are 17 million people born between 1977 and 2002," O'Keeffe said. "They are entering the workforce today, and they want to be flexible. They are mobile. They know information security is critical, but they want the system to be user-friendly. They recognize privacy, but if it compromises functionality, that is not going to cut it."
 
According to CDW Government, a subsidiary of CDW Corp. and an IT solutions provider to the federal government, the federal sector is ahead of the private sector when it comes to telework: 17 percent of federal employees telework compared to 14 percent in the private sector.
 
However, the number of eligible federal employees has dipped to 40 percent from a high of 55 percent in 2006, most likely due to security concerns, the company said in its fourth annual telework survey released March 31.
 
Although security remains a pressing issue for the federal government, telework has the benefit of enabling an agency to continuing functioning during a disaster or even smaller incidents such as snowstorms.
 
It also improves employee morale and saves money, Hungate said. Treasury's telework program saves the agency $1 million annually on rent, he added.

Senator Presses White House on Hiring Veterans

The Washington Post

By Stephen Barr

 

It's a never-ending tale -- a stern, workhorse senator has an idea, and a White House aide makes nice, without showing support.

First, the idea.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote to the president on Feb. 27, urging the administration to ramp up its hiring of recent combat veterans. Grassley asked President Bush to establish the goal that 10 percent of all new hires by federal agencies be veterans.
"Because the nature of military service can make it more difficult for veterans to find employment after separating from the service, the federal government has a special obligation to look to veterans first when federal jobs come open," Grassley wrote.

Now, the reply.

Karl Zinsmeister, the president's domestic policy adviser, sent Grassley a letter Tuesday that noted the 10 percent hiring goal. Bush "wholeheartedly agrees" that the nation owes a special debt to veterans and their families, Zinsmeister wrote, pointing to the president's State of the Union address as proof.

The January speech, Zinsmeister wrote, "highlighted the need for federal government hiring preferences to be extended to spouses as well as veterans. This simple step will help alleviate the lower-than-average employment rates for military spouses."

The government is reaching out to recruit veterans, and they make up 25 percent of the civil service, Zinsmeister wrote.

And, now, the reply to the reply.

The White House "response lacked much substance and the central request of my letter remains unaddressed," Grassley said in a second letter to Bush, dated Wednesday. "The overall figures hide a wide disparity between various departments and agencies in terms of their success in recruiting and hiring veterans."

For example, 46.4 percent of new hires in the Air Force civilian ranks were veterans in 2006, while only 4.4 percent of new employees at the Department of Health and Human Services and just 1.6 percent of new hires at the Federal Trade Commission were veterans, Grassley wrote.

A third of the Cabinet departments and more than half of independent agencies fall short of filling 10 percent of their job openings with veterans, Grassley said.
The White House "attempted to change the subject and ignore my request," Grassley wrote. He again asked the president to commit to a 10 percent hiring goal for each agency.

Grassley also asked the president for a reply by next Friday.

Employee Buy-in Key to Infrastructure Change, Experts Say

Federal Computer Week
By Richard Walker

Managing change -- not implementing technology -- is often the biggest hurdle when an agency transitions from existing systems to a new information technology infrastructure, Internal Revenue Service officials said April 1.

"Instilling change is 80 percent of it," said Theresa Beverly, infrastructure transition program manager at IRS. "People are a very big part of it. Basically, they've been used to doing work [one way] and it's been working for them. Now you want [to change it] and make it better, but they say, 'Who asked? It's working for me.' "

Modernized processes are a lot different from legacy processes, said Harry Lee, director of infrastructure, architecture and engineering at IRS. "We have a lot of cultural difference when we're trying to transition from one mode of operation to another. So I think technology is really the easier piece," he said.

Lee and Beverly spoke April 1 at a panel discussion on lessons learned from agency infrastructure transitions at the FOSE 2008 conference and expo in Washington, hosted by Federal Computer Week's parent company, 1105 Government Information Group.

John Schwenker, senior enterprise architect at Hewlett-Packard, talking about HP's recent infrastructure overhaul, agreed with Lee and Beverly. "It's people, process and technology," he said. "With HP's transformation, the people piece is like 50 percent. It's bigger than any of the others."

Beverly said that transition management programs demand "a clear communications framework" to make sure stakeholders in the transition are on the same page. "Communication is the key," she said. "If you don't communicate and you don't have the same message going out, and everybody doesn't buy in, then it's not going to be a successful transition."

The Housing and Urban Development Department's move to a consolidated IT infrastructure is an example of a successful transition, said Tim Young, deputy director for e-government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget, who moderated the panel.

HUD's infrastructure transition is "a model that many agencies have been following, not only for significant best practices -- what worked well -- but what was very challenging," he said.

To achieve a vision of a "real-time infrastructure" that meets business needs, HUD officials decided to outsource their IT infrastructure, said Michael Milazzo, acting deputy chief information officer at HUD. "The goal was to create value, not only reduce costs," he said.

In January 2005, HUD awarded contracts to EDS and Lockheed Martin to provide and and run its IT infrastructure. "A huge part of what we do is manage these contracts," he said. "If there are issues with the infrastructure, [the contractors] work it out as part of their contract."

An immediate benefit was a single, national help desk. "It's a godsend," Milazzo said. "We have 90 field offices. Every office had at least one help desk."

 

Overall, HUD has seen a 20 percent savings in infrastructure costs since outsourcing its IT operations, he said.