Being the CIO of a small agency requires agility, superb problem-solving skills, and not least, the ability to multitask, to do a lot with a little, and to attract talented staff to join you in the trenches for less money than they could get elsewhere.

Stephen Warren, CIO of the Federal Trade Commission and co-chair of the Small Agency CIO Council, can tell you all about it.

The fundamental difference between small agency CIOs and their counterparts in the large departments is the variety of issues in which they get personally involved, he said. "In any given day we do diverse things. We might help a senior executive fix his Blackberry, then help figure out where to move our infrastructure or we might start the day in executive strategy meetings, and then have an outage and it's 'all hands on deck.'" The life of a small agency CIO is constantly "cycling from the very rarified to piddling details. It makes us more tech-savvy and we have to figure out how to do it on a shoestring."

The FTC is a regulatory agency responsible for anti-trust and consumer protection investigations and adjudications. Its budget of about $225 million and 1,074 full-time employees are less than the total IT budget Warren managed previously as CIO for the Department of Energy's Environmental Management Program. The FTC CIO's $30 million budget and 150-person staff (including contractors) are less than 15% of the agency totals-a relatively low percentage for a knowledge organization.

Despite the limited resources, the FTC CIO's operation must be as pure as Caesar's wife. Since the FTC's mission involves taking civil action against companies that don't meet basic security standards, the agency has to meet the same standards. It's a "tremendous amount of pressure."

Still, the FTC and Warren have scored some impressive achievements on behalf of U.S. citizens. He is especially proud of the creation of the first Do Not Call Registry, which protects consumers against intrusive calls from telemarketers. It currently has more than 100 million telephone numbers registered.

The Do Not Call Registry was created in 2003, in response to public outcry about telemarketers who made a practice of phoning consumers at all hours. President Bush summed up the problem when he launched the popular tool from the White House Rose Garden. "Unwanted telemarketing calls are intrusive, they are annoying and they're all too common. When Americans are sitting down to dinner, or a parent is reading to his child, the last thing they need is a call from a stranger with a sales pitch."

The project's high visibility made it critically important to ensure that the system was in place quickly and worked flawlessly from the start. The FTC committed to making it operational within 100 days after funding was available in late March, and by the time of the President's speech on June 27, the system was up and running. "We wanted to show that we could deliver in Internet time--that it doesn't take many, many, many years for government to get a request and turn it into a service," Warren said. "We succeeded and far exceeded expectations."

Warren received a string of awards for his work on the Registry, including the Service to America Social Services Medal, the Association for Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) Leadership Award for Innovative Applications, and the American Council for Technology's Intergovernmental Solutions Award. He was also named to Federal Computer Week's 2004 Federal 100 list of IT leaders.

As co-chair of the Small Agency CIO Council, Stephen Warren has found that his members face the same issues as other government CIOs--privacy, security, capital planning--and then some. But there are differences, like staffing and workload.

"Small agencies are lean as lean can be," he said. "At the FTC, like most small agencies, we're always understaffed. We have difficulty hiring for mid-to-higher levels, where we are competing with the private sector and larger departments, who are authorized to pay more. Government financial organizations, for instance, have a higher pay differential and can offer IT experts up to $240,000 a year; we can only offer retention pay, signing bonuses and pay differential for mid-grades. For GS-13s-15s, it's only salary. What we have to offer is cachet, and our reputation as an agency."

The Lines of Business initiative has relieved some of the workload for small agencies, many of which moved to financial management and human resources shared service providers well before the large Cabinet-level agencies. "And we're trying to figure out how to use the others," he added. Small agencies can show savings of tens of thousands of dollars by freeing up the multi-tasking IT staffers tied up in performing those non-mission related administrative functions.

The Small Agency CIO Council is a source of support for its 90 independent federal agency members, particularly in offering "word-of-mouth" information and focus-tech sessions. Warren and co-chair Brett Bobley of the National Endowment for the Humanities continue to search for ways to help their members do more with less. "We're very hands-on in the detail of what we're doing now," he said. "We have common problems and come together to really share. There isn't time to do point papers." The Council also helps small agencies exert leverage on their vendors. "In one case, 30 of our members had the same problem with a vendor's product," he said. "They got together and went to the vendor to tell him he had to change his product…He did."

Stephen Warren holds a bachelor's degree in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan and a master's in Systems Management from Florida Institute of Technology. He has spent 25 years in the federal government, including a stretch as a transport officer and squadron commander in the Air Force. He was a research scientist on the Strategic Defense Initiative, and worked at the Department of Energy for 10 years before joining the FTC in 2001.

The fiscal year 2008 budget proposal released February 5 includes $65.5 billion for information technology, 2.6% more than the FY 2007 budget. The Department of Defense will get the biggest share, with $31.4 billion budgeted for FY 2008, a 2.1% increase.

"The Federal government continues to make progress by maximizing its IT investments to deliver program results through the adoption of electronic government management principles and best practices," OMB reported in Analytical Perspectives, United States Government, Fiscal Year 2008.

The budget does not include any new e-government or line of business initiatives but is focusing on achieving internal efficiencies and improved services from existing programs. In FY 2008, agencies will continue to focus on:

• Improving service levels to citizens and government decision-makers
• Making better purchasing decisions
• Securing systems and data and
• Reducing duplication and related costs.

The number of major IT investments in the federal IT portfolio will drop by 2% to 840 in FY 2008. This was attributed to better management of agency Capital Planning and Investment Control processes. However, the number of projects on OMB's Management Watch List--defined as those that need improvement in performance measurement, earned value management or system security--is expected to increase by 32% to 346, worth about $14.4 billion.

OMB reported results from the e-gov initiatives. By first quarter FY 2007, agencies had shut down 44 legacy or redundant systems through the Integrated Acquisition Environment, E-Payroll, E-Training, E-Rulemaking, Recruitment One-Stop and Human Resources Line of Business initiatives, with 114 additional shut-downs planned.

Agencies are also making progress in closing critical IT workforce skill and competency gaps. Of 26 agencies evaluated on the Human Capital Scorecard:

• 17 agencies (65%) have met all planned skill or competence gap closure milestones, and
• 15 agencies (58%) have met or are consistently meeting their IT hiring goals.

Progress has also been made in securing government systems, OMB reported. In FY 2006, the percentage of certified and accredited systems rose from 85% to 88%, despite an increase in the total system inventory to 10,600 systems.

The federal IT budget is allocated among five types of investments, with 36% going to mission area support; 33% to infrastructure, office automation and telecommunications; 29% for grants to state and local/national security systems; 2% to enterprise architecture and planning; and <1% to grants management programs.

OMB has released the latest Executive Branch Management Scorecard for the first quarter of fiscal year 2007, which ended December 31. Five agencies' scores on the e-government portion improved, while three agencies' scores dropped. The following improved for the quarter:

• The Department of Justice and the Smithsonian Institution advanced from yellow to green
• The Departments of Agriculture and Defense and the Office of Personnel Management moved up from red to yellow.

The following dropped:

• The Departments of Education and Transportation fell from green to yellow
• The Social Security Administration dropped from yellow to red.

The Departments of Labor and State are green in all areas of the scorecard.

OMB evaluates agencies in four areas of the President's Management Agenda as well as e-government--workforce, competitive sourcing, financial performance, and budget and performance integration--rating them "green," "yellow," or "red" in each category. Green means an agency is implementing its initiatives as planned, yellow shows a need for adjustments to achieve the objectives in a timely manner, and red means an initiative is in jeopardy.

OMB created FederalSpending.gov in response to the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA), which calls for the development by January 2008 of a publicly accessible searchable website that provides detailed information about how federal funds are being spent.

The website will contain the following information for each federal funding award:

• The name of the recipient
• The amount of the award
• Transaction type, funding agency and other information about the award
• The location of the recipient
• A unique identifier for the recipient.

OMB has created a Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Task Force to oversee implementation of FFATA. The task force is asking for feedback from the public on how citizens would like to see the Act implemented and government award information presented. Comments can be submitted on the website, which was created for OMB by the GSA Office of Citizen Services.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) sent the CIO Council a draft publication January 31 finding that IPv6 standards for testing and profiling used by the Defense Department and industry do not meet the needs of civilian agencies.

A Profile for IPv6 in the U.S. Government said the current standards "are not well suited in content, nor governance, for the perceived requirements of the [U.S. Government] as a whole." In the short term, agencies should look to a distinct profile and testing program; over the long term, NIST recommends that government and industry agree on technical and process requirements.

This was one of five findings NIST scientists made after reviewing existing standards, the state of implementation in the commercial world, the DOD IPv6 profile, product testing capability and national and international profiles and testing programs.

NIST is accepting comments on the profile until March 2.

The CIO Council's IT Workforce Committee has identified the demographic characteristics of the "typical" federal government IT worker using preliminary data collected in its biennial IT Workforce Capability Assessment Survey.

The survey, conducted from September to November 2006, revealed that the typical IT worker most often:

• Was between 51 and 55 years of age
• Was a GS-12 (was a GS-13 in 2004)
• Had over 20 years of federal government experiencec
• Had little or no private sector experience
• Was likely to retire in the next 11 to 20 years
• Held a bachelor's degree.

The survey results, which have not been published yet, were reported by Federal CIO Council's IT Workforce Committee Co-Chair, Janet Barnes, in an intergovernmental conference call with state and local government groups.

She also reported the specialized skills most needed by CIOs across the federal government were in the areas of IT project management, IT security/information assurance, and enterprise/solutions architecture.

In late December, the IT Workforce Committee published its biennial revision of the federal government's IT Competencies as required by the Clinger-Cohen Act. The next IT Workforce Capability Assessment Survey will be conducted in 2008.

Meanwhile, Barry West, Commerce Department CIO, has been named co-chair of the committee along with Barnes, to replace the former Treasury Department CIO Ira Hobbs, who retired in January.

In its first-ever CIO survey, Government Technology's Public CIO magazine reports that public sector CIOs remain in their jobs much longer than the 18 months traditionally believed. More than half (53%) of the respondents said they had been in their current positions four years or longer. Only 15% had been in their current position less than a year, 19% two years, and 14% three years.

This reflects a growing trend in the private sector where, according to Forrester Research, the average tenure is 3.6 years, Public CIO reported.

Of the 250 respondents in the Public CIO survey, 17% worked in the federal government; 23% for a state; 44% for local governments; and 16% were in the education community.

IT budgets are rising according to the survey respondents. Forty-two percent had seen an increase in their IT budgets over the past year and 49% expected an increase in the next year. This compares to 20% whose budgets had been reduced over the prior year and 14% who expected a decrease in the year to come.

The General Services Administration has issued an interim rule change that would enable state and local governments to order products and services from federal contracts in the event of major disasters or terrorist acts.

The new rule, published in the Federal Register February 1, allows state and local governments to use GSA's Federal Supply Schedule contracts normally only available to federal agencies.

Purchases must be for recovery from a major disaster declared by the President under the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, or an act of terrorism. However, they may be made in advance of a disaster to allow for rapid response and recovery.

Contracts for disaster relief, homeland security and equipment for fighting wildfires will be among the first available. All GSA Schedule contracts will be opened for state and local disaster recovery in the spring.

The Waseda University Institute of e-Government in Tokyo issued its third annual world e-government ranking January 29. For the third time, the United States ranked first among 32 countries.

Waseda's research was conducted from April through July 2006 by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from 14 countries. They compiled scores on 26 indicators in six sectors: network preparedness, required interface-functioning applications, management optimization, homepage situation, introduction of CIO, and the promotion of e-government.

The United States scored highest on "CIO" and "promotion of e-government," as well as being rated best overall.

The countries ranked in the top 10 were:

• United States
• Singapore
• Canada
• Japan
• Korea
• Australia
• Finland
• Taiwan
• United Kingdom
• Sweden.

The American Council for Technology's Industry Advisory Council (IAC) honored five innovative and collaborative IT projects with Excellence.gov awards at a luncheon February 20. The winners included two e-gov initiatives, two federal agency projects, and one non-federal.

The winners were:

• Disaster Management e-gov Initiative (Department of Homeland Security)
• E-Rulemaking's Docket Management System (Environmental Protection Agency)
• Knowledge Services Network (KSN) (Federal Aviation Administration)
• My HealtheVet (Veterans Health Administration)
• Justice Information System (JUSTIS) (The Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, Government of the District of Columbia)

They were selected for "leveraging technology to enhance collaboration," helping government organizations achieve their objectives by working together using innovative technology. They were chosen from 20 finalists drawn from 115 entries and announced January 8.

Also available in pdf 472 kb

Collaborative Expedition Workshop: SOA-based Identities Management
Arlington, VA
February 27

IPIC 2007
Orlando, FL
March 4-8, 2007

Community 2.0
Las Vegas, NV
March 12-14

ITAA Beyond the Beltway 2007: State and Local Market Watch
McLean, VA
March 19

FOSE 2007
Washington, DC
March 20-22

GSA Collaborative Expedition Workshop on Social Networking
Arlington, VA
March 22

Annual High Performance Computing and Communications Conference
Newport, RI
April 3-5

GSA Collaborative Expedition Workshop: Connecting Process Improvement, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Architecture
Arlington, VA
April 17

IRMCO 2007
Williamsburg, VA
April 29 - May 1, 2007

Customer 2.0: A Web Customer-Centricity Summit for Government, Trade Associations and Non-Profits
Washington, DC
May 1

NASCIO Mid-year Conference
Chantilly, VA
May 1-4

Government CIO Summit
Fort Myers, FL
May 6-8

GSA Expo
Orlando, FL
May 15-17

ACT/IAC Management of Change Conference
Richmond, VA
June 3-5

WITC Western CIO Forum
Denver, CO
August 5-7

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The DotGov Buzz is produced by the following individuals in the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications:

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