Nextgov/FCW - Authors - J. Davidson Frame

Copyright Application Delays

J. Davidson Frame — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:10:55 -0400

The ways federal technology projects can get into trouble appear limitless. What we encounter most frequently are projects where the contractor lacks the management and technical capabilities to do a good job. A well-known example of this from the 1980s was PRC's struggle to manage the patent automation project.

Sometimes, projects are undone because of congressional meddling. For example, in the 1990s, the IRS's massive tax modernization program was derailed by Congress on two occasions, just as it was developing a head of steam. Occasionally, Federal projects are undone because the federal buyer devolves nearly all management authority and oversight to the contractor. Problems along this line arose in the 1990s and early 2000s when federal agencies implemented a Lead Systems Integrator approach to managing major programs, e.g., the Coast Guard's Deepwater program. More recently, the GAO reports that a major source of schedule slippage and cost overruns on Defense projects is DoD's propensity to launch these projects before the underlying technologies have achieved a measure of stability.

The Washington Post has just reported another way that federal projects can encounter troubles. In an article appearing on May 19, the Post states that major delays in processing paper-based copyright applications have arisen at the Copyright Office after implementing an automated approach to processing applications. What used to be a six-month process for processing paper-based applications has turned into an eighteen-month process. The new system was launched in July 2008, the result of a $52 million project.

The Post identifies two primary sources of problems. One is that the automation solution developed by the agency and its contractor is not so automated: applicants are still permitted to submit paper-based applications (about 45% of all applications). Problems arise, however, when these are manually converted to electronic format. A second identified source of problems is the inadequate training offered to employees to handle the new system.

In this case, the project problem has less to do with meeting project time and cost targets, and more to do with developing solutions that lead to superior performance.

David Christopher, associate chief operating officer at the Copyright Office, notes that the system will experience a major upgrade this year. This may help alleviate problems ... or it may give Murphy a second chance to implement his fearsome law.

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Black Swans in IT

J. Davidson Frame — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:16:55 -0400

IT has always been a risk-filled enterprise. That's because software development is a first-of-a-kind undertaking. Programmers write programs to make software and hardware systems function in new ways. Often, the novelty of the development effort is small, requiring minor adjustments to existing programs. In this case, development risk is generally low. To the extent that the programming entails exploring truly new territory, then development risk goes up.

Programmers and systems analysts have been aware of this aspect of development risk for decades. However, in an intriguing 2007 book, titled The Black Swans, Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that with our single-minded focus on the traditional perspective on development risk, we are ignoring a category of risk whose consequences can be devastating -- what he calls the black swans.

The idea of black swans arose among English philosophers in their discussion of David Hume's problem of induction. The induction problem holds that even if you observe 1,000 white swans, you cannot say with certainty that the next swan you encounter will be white. (As a matter of fact, black swans were unknown until their discovery in Australia in 1790.)

Taleb uses black swans as a metaphor for totally unanticipated high-impact events. DoD managers know them as unk-unks, i.e., unknown-unknowns. He points out that when you look at problems individuals, organizations, and societies face from a historical perspective, those with greatest consequences are the total surprises. The 9/11 attacks and the global financial crisis of 2008 are recent examples.

When applied to IT undertakings, we find that in certain respects, IT efforts are well-prepared to deal with black swan events, while in others they are not. They are well-prepared in the sense that all capable IT organizations have established disaster-recovery plans to deal with catastrophic challenges to their operations. By having cool, warm, and/or hot back-up sites, IT enterprises are able to handle disasters that bring down their data processing and communication capabilities. Thus they are able to handle the consequences of power outages, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. As the 9/11 attacks showed, they can even withstand horrific terrorist onslaughts.

However, in the day-to-day pursuit of IT projects, IT organizations do not generally equip themselves to deal with black swan events. Their risk management efforts are largely directed at catching problems through testing and resolving them by fixing bugs. Seldom do they explicitly take into account broader forces that can jeopardize IT projects, e.g., funding cutbacks, changes of management, technology changes that render their solutions obsolete, and other things of this ilk. These are the forces that are likely to produce black swans in IT. The fact that most IT projects gain funding support only after project champions promise to do ten months of work in six months, and promise to deliver more functionality than is possible to deliver, increases the negative impacts that black swan events can have on IT enterprises and their projects.

These are uncertain times. For the first time since the turmoil of the Great Depression, Americans recognize that when bad things happen, things do not always turn out for the best. It behooves all organizations -- including IT shops -- to recognize that even though black swans are rare-occurrence events that are not predictable, they need to be taken seriously. What may have been viewed as recoverable setbacks one or two years ago, may yield catastrophic consequences today.

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Deregulation, Free Markets, and Econ 101: Part 2

J. Davidson Frame — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:07:47 -0400

Three years after the crash of the stock market in 1929, the US banking system collapsed (1933). Congress determined that the mixing of commercial banking and investment banking contributed to conditions that led to the cataclysm. Consequently, in 1933 Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to build a wall between these two realms of financial activity. The motivation was to maintain the integrity of depository institutions by shielding them from risky ventures associated with investment banking.

In the 1980s, commercial banks increasingly began taking riskier initiatives, while investment banks ventured into commercial banking-like activities. It was time to re-visit Glass-Steagall to see if it was still relevant fifty years after its passage. To this end, in 1987 William D. Jackson of the Congressional Research Service wrote a seven-page analysis that should be must reading for policy makers and concerned citizens alike. In its simplicity and adherence to fundamentals, this paper shows that you donâ€™t need a PhD in finance to anticipate the consequences of regulatory policy.

Following is a direct quote from Jacksonâ€™s paper, where he describes the dangers of repealing Glass-Stegall:

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Deregulation, Free Markets and Econ 101

J. Davidson Frame — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:36:17 -0400

The week of 15 September 2008 saw the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system. It is clear that the economic problems we are currently encountering are tied to attempts to deregulate financial markets that began in the 1990s.

Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, it has been an article of faith among political conservatives that with deregulation, market forces take over, and the Invisible Hand automatically yields efficient markets. From this perspective, deregulated companies have no choice but to behave efficiently because the market forces them to do so. Shape up or die.

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Government in a Wiki World, Part 6

J. Davidson Frame — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:19:24 -0400

What do the following items have in common?

â€¢ Bill Gates retires as chief executive officer of Microsoft in July 2008 in order to spend time working on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of about $35 billion.

â€¢ Warren Buffet pledges some $31 billion of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

â€¢ Peter Senge, world renowned for his influential book, The Fifth Discipline, is dedicating his brain power to exploring social responsibility. In a recent book, he points out that individuals businesses are implementing creative solutions to establish a sustainable world.

â€¢ In defiance of the opposition of the oppressive and incompetent national government, locals in Myanmar Link">organized food distribution and relief efforts for victims of the May 2008 Tsunami, which killed some 140,000 people

â€¢ Thousands of volunteers from all parts of China rushed to Sichuan to Link">organize relief efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake that killed some 85,000 people.

â€¢ In America, volunteerism is growing dramatically and steadily.

â€¢ After President George W. Bush blocked funding for most embryonic stem cell research, private companies and state governments moved to fill the funding gap.

What these items have in common is that they show that some efforts traditionally assumed by the welfare state are being taken over by individuals, businesses and states operating independently of the federal government.

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Government in a Wiki World: Part 5

J. Davidson Frame — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:23:50 -0400

The Encyclopedia Britannica just announced that it is adopting a number of wiki principles in developing and offering its product. http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/06/ency.html For centuries (literally), Britannica has reigned as the worldâ€™s premier encyclopedia. Its entries have been deemed authoritative to the point that scholars are not embarrassed to footnote them in their scholarly works.

Britannica has depended on experts to write its entries. This served them well until the arrival of Wikipedia, whose entries are developed dynamically by large numbers of â€œamateursâ€ who, through a process of checks and balances, manage to produce detailed and (mostly) accurate content. While the Britannica approach provides accurate material, this material is almost instantly dated and remains so until updated some time in an undetermined future. Entries in Wikipedia, in contrast, can be updated daily.

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Government in a Wiki World, Part 4

J. Davidson Frame — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:04:02 -0400

In a previous blog, I mentioned that Intellipedia is a success story in the world of Government wikis. After 9/11, the Director of National Intelligence recognized that in order to deal with terrorist threats to the United States, the US's 16 intelligence agencies need to share as much intelligence information as possible, rather than play things close to the chest - their traditional modus operandi. Intellipedia was established to encourage intelligence specialists from across all intelligence agencies to share insights on terrorism. By all accounts, it has been successful in opening inter-agency communication.

A problem with Intellipedia is that it is only open to players with US security clearances, so that it is out of the reach of most government employees. I have received a number of inquiries asking whether I was aware of other government-oriented social networking experiments that are accessible by ordinary citizens. Following are three examples of such experiments shared with me by readers:

http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage

This site is hosted by GSA Intergovernmental Solutions. It focuses on a number of communities of interests that are concerned with fairly narrow issues. It provides listings of resources that address the concerns of the members of these communities of interest. (This information was shared by Brian Green.)

http://webstandards.govt.nz/index.php/Home_page

This site is hosted by the New Zealand government. Its goal is to solicit inputs from the outside world to help strengthen the design of web pages produced by New Zealand government agencies. (This information was shared by David Zetland.)

www.futuremelbourne.com.au

This wiki site is hosted by the City of Melbourne (Australia) and its Future Melbourne Reference Group. Its objective is to stimulate insights into future directions that the City of Melbourne can pursue. The site reports that hot topics currently discussed address transportation improvements, tax reform, and improved water quality. (This information was shared by Dale, of the Future Melbourne team.)

Check out these sites. Clearly, government's involvement in social networking is in a nascent stage. My sense is that as governments move into social networking, their early efforts will focus on information sharing. That is, they will likely be listings of information resources. Their first steps at establishing wikis will be more like chat rooms than full-fledged wikis. However, it is probable than within the next five years, governments at the national, state/provincial, and local levels will begin developing social networking sites that garner substantive inputs from the public that, ultimately, have an impact on how government conducts its business.

If you have information on additional government sites, please share it with us.

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Government in a Wiki World Part 3

J. Davidson Frame — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:52:44 -0400

The wiki concept is a part of the larger concept of social networking. Given the astonishing success of Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking platforms, enormous attention is focusing on the potential value of social networking in the business and government arenas. Some argue that because far more talent resides outside an organization than inside it, companies and government agencies should strengthen their performance by tapping into the knowledge and wisdom of non-employees.

While proponents of social networking emphasize that it is a new phenomenon rooted in the growth of the Internet, this is not true. Social networking has been with us for a long time. For example, from its beginnings, science has progressed by having scientists articulate their theories and findings publicly, then having other scientists in the scientific community critique them â€" sometimes savagely! Scientific knowledge gradually accretes through a give-and-take process of exposing ideas to scrutiny, then refining them. The principle is that if a new idea cannot withstand close scrutiny, then it lacks merit and should be discarded. This is the same principle underlying the building of Wikipedia, where a point is articulated then reformulated many times by subsequent generations of contributors. Through this process, weak and frivolous points are winnowed, and strong ones remain.

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Government in a Wiki World, Part 2

J. Davidson Frame — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:09:27 -0400

Wiki forces are upon us. With the wiki concept, an individual posts an idea publicly. Then over time, subsequent contributors add to, adjust, or take away from the idea iteratively. Over time, with input from many players, what starts as a primitive idea can grow into a well-developed statement. The most dramatic example of the power of wikis is Wikipedia.

Recognition that collaborative efforts can lead to great results is growing in both the public and private sectors. What distinguishes the wiki approach from previous collaborative initiatives is that contributors to the process can be â€œamateursâ€ rather than professionals. Anyone can contribute. The contributions of some may be modest, focusing on the correction of spelling and grammatical errors. The contributions of others may be deeper â€" for example, they may focus on developing and refining foundational ideas. The Wikipedia experience has shown that well-articulated and valuable insights can emerge through this process.

Government agencies are mulling over the wiki phenomenon to determine its value in the public sector. Its value can be seen at three levels of operation:

â€¢ Project level: In building new systems, requirements can be harvested through wiki exercises. That is, a primitive statement of system requirements can be posted publicly. Customers and technical people can be asked to build on this primitive statement in order to create a full-blown set of requirements that reflect both customer and technical sensibilities.

â€¢ Intra-agency level: When an agency plans to launch a program that will change how it operates, inputs from employees and contractors handled through wiki processes can help the agency to formulate the program architecture more quickly and comprehensively than by setting up a task force to do the job.

â€¢ Inter-agency level: Government agencies tend to operate as stove pipes. However, this can lead to poor results, as the 9/11 catastrophe showed us. Because US intelligence agencies did not share their knowledge and insights regarding terrorist activity, the US was unable to anticipate and prevent the 9/11 attack. Government agencies can establish wikis to span organizational boundaries. The intelligence community did this after 9/11 when the created Intellipedia, three wikis that solicit contributions from employees of 16 intelligence agencies. Early results from this effort are encouraging.

There are two basic advantages to a wiki approach. First, because it is carried out in a virtual environment, it can be implemented quickly. There is no need to assemble committees of experts who deliberate indefinitely. Second, because it solicits input from a wide range of contributors spanning organizational boundaries, it has the potential of generating solutions that are both deep and broad.

Government should experiment with cross-boundary collaboration at the project, intra-agency, and inter-agency level. The tendency of bureaucracies to operate inside boxes is well-known, as are the perils â€" particularly the curse of parochialism. However, in exploring the strengths of collaborative action, government should avoid marching around with the wiki tool in search of applications. First, it should identify situations where collaborative inputs would help it function more effectively. Then it should determine whether a wiki approach is appropriate to engender meaningful collaboration, or whether some other approach is better. Finally, it needs to address the details of implementing a wiki solution â€" Are we able to establish a wiki platform? Will our organizational culture promote meaningful participation by the intended audience? As wiki solutions to problems emerge, will they be taken seriously by the agencyâ€™s management?

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Government in a Wiki World, Part 1

J. Davidson Frame — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:29:06 -0400

The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1995. Cunninghamâ€™s goal was to use his wiki to establish a compendium of software design wisdom.

The rationale underlying the wiki concept is to post an idea publicly, then to let players add to, adjust, or take away from the idea iteratively. Over time, with input from many players, what starts as a primitive idea can grow into a well-developed statement.

The power of the wiki was demonstrated with the creation of Wikipedia in 2001. In a very short period of time, with input coming from tens of thousands of contributors, Wikipedia evolved into a first-rate encyclopedia. What is interesting is that the encyclopedia emerged without any central organizing force. It has been created by amateurs who organize their efforts independently. No one tells them what to do. They work on what they find interesting. Furthermore, Wikipedia is a work in progress â€" entries are continually changed to reflect prevailing thinking and actions. It will never be a finished document.

Both public and private sector entities are trying to harness the forces of wiki-like collaboration. The traditional way of getting things done has been to put a job into the hands of experts. For example, in developing a new product, technical people work on technical things, editors work on documentation, marketers develop a market strategy, and so on. The wiki-way is very different. Different players contribute their insights to develop a new product, regardless of their expertise. Technical people can contribute thoughts on marketing strategy, while marketers can suggest technical enhancements.

Interestingly, some of the greatest enthusiasm for collaborative work efforts in government is coming from the intelligence community. The 9/11 disaster highlighted the price the USA had to pay for the absence of a collaborative spirit among intelligence agencies. We now know that all the information needed to stop the 9/11 terrorists was in the hands of American intelligence agencies prior to the attack. However, because the agencies did not share the information they had, no one in the US government was able to anticipate and head off the impending calamity.

One attempt to harness the collective wisdom of employees working at different intelligence agencies has been to establish the wiki Intellipedia, which was set up in 2006. Link Only employees with proper clearances are able to access and contribute to Intellipedia (comprised of three wikis). Already, it has provided the intelligence community with insights into how to deal with terrorist attacks in Iraq. Its strength is that it can quickly leverage the knowledge and thoughts of the entire intelligence community. There is no need to set up a task force and wait six months for results.

In order to make sure that managers within the intelligence agencies take the need for cross-agency collaboration seriously, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has issued a new directive that will require senior managers at the nationâ€™s sixteen intelligence agencies to be assessed according to a common performance evaluation system Link. A key criterion for evaluation focuses on the extent to which senior managers promote collaboration across agency boundaries. This is a good step.

Intellipedia offers a technical fix to the challenge of cross-agency collaboration. However, given the strong territorial tendencies of the agencies, a number of important questions arise: Are their employees willing to participate in the effort in an effective way? Will they hold back information that they feel their agencies â€œownâ€? When looking at the conclusions emerging from a wiki exercise, will they ignore the findings based on not-invented-here feelings?

Ultimately, the success of cross-agency collaboration requires that the players trust the system and want to work together. If these criteria are not met, then technical wiki fixes wonâ€™t work.

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Lost Institutional Memory: Good or Bad?

J. Davidson Frame — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:05:58 -0400

Today, there is a looming crisis in the federal acquisition arena that overshadows specific actions to reform the system: Roughly half the federal acquisition community is eligible to retire from government service within the next eight years. This gives rise to two threatening scenarios. First, an already burdened contracting and procurement system will find itself further shorthanded. With the outflow of experienced professionals, Congress is worried that there will not be enough people to handle the program management, contracting and procurement needs of government.

Second, the federal acquisition professionals who will be left behind lack the experience of those who have departed. Congress has expressed concern that a substantial portion of governmentâ€™s institutional memory will be lost in the next few years. As a consequence, we will face a situation where we have fewer acquisition professionals serving government, and these people will have lower skills levels than the old guard.

Congress recently received testimony from three key acquisition management institutional players: the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI), the Defense Acquisition University (DAU), and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP). Leaders of these government organizations were asked what they were doing to stem the flow of experienced acquisition professionals. The response: We are instituting inducements to keep experienced professionals from bailing out, we are strengthening training of existing professionals, and we are actively recruiting fresh blood to fill the ranks.

These are good answers to Congressâ€™ question. However, it is not clear that Congress asked the right question. In view of the fact that the acquisition process has struggled over the past several decades, do we really want to take extraordinary efforts to retain the institutional memory associated with a problem-filled acquisition process?

A better question that Congress should raise is: With the exodus of the current acquisition workforce, what are the DAU, FAI and OFPP doing to change the mindset of acquisition professionals so that we have a new generation of professionals who understand that effective acquisition management requires good business sense and goes beyond the mindless implementation of the Federal Acquisition Regulations?

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Hammers, Toilet Seats, Coffee Pots

J. Davidson Frame — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:17:42 -0500

Weâ€™ve all heard about the $435 hammer, $640 toilet seat, and $7,600 coffee pot. These were some of the government purchases highlighted in the 1980s to show that the federal acquisition system was broken. Even before these embarrassing revelations, Sen. William Proxmire, R-Wis., established the Golden Fleece Award to focus on examples of an acquisition system gone haywire.

Concerned citizens have worried about what is now called acquisition reform since the time that George Washington led Americaâ€™s Continental army. The combined forces of complexity, bureaucracy, incompetence and corruption have led to an environment where government has had a tough time getting value for the goods and services it has bought. While most of the steps undertaken to reform the system have made good sense, the results of these efforts have been consistently disappointing.

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Outsourcing Hollows Out Fed Tech Workforce

J. Davidson Frame — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:43:55 -0500

The idea that government should not be in the business of business was first articulated by the Bureau of the Budget during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. BOB was the predecessor to the Office of Management and Budget, which was created in 1970 during the Nixon administration.

Government should not be in the business of business. What this principle means is that there are broad areas of business activity that should lie outside the domain of government effort, e.g., providing food service, manufacturing, advertising, and offering medical services.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one of his top priorities was to shrink government. He believed that many of the activities carried out by civil servants could best be executed by the private sector. So he instructed the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) to aggressively implement OMB Circular A-76, a government directive geared toward privatizing government activities.

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