Margaret Weichert details federal workforce progress, and what’s to come
The government has made progress on hiring authorities and performance management, but still has work to do on “building in agility” to what it means to be a federal employee, Margaret Weichert said Thursday.
At FedScoop’s Workforce Summit, the deputy director for management in the White House Office of Management and Budget said workforce is “one of the most important issues we can address as Americans.”
“As the largest employer in North America, the federal government is actually representative of a problem that we’re dealing in society at large,” she said. The issue? Well, it has to do with the future of work. “As we have service delivery models for delivering services in the 21st century that are a combination of people, process and technology, how do we integrate the people into an evolving, changing way of work?”
“A 19th-century framework for people and talent,” she said, referring to how federal service is currently structured, “isn’t going to cut it.”
The good news, she said, is that the federal government has made progress recently.
In the hiring arena, for example, the government has established rules around direct-hire authority for science and technology jobs. There have also been initiatives around making it easier to bring in “junior employees,” she said — people with “very relevant out-of-school skills.”
The government is also working to educate on some of the “fallacies” that exist in the hiring process that lead agencies to believe that candidates who “self-evaluate” as qualified must be considered as qualified.
“My favorite example is someone who said ‘I worked as a gas station attendant and therefore I am qualified to run the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.’ True story,” she said. “That’s not qualified. That is unqualified. And no hiring manager should have to look at a list of unqualified people before they make a determination about next steps in hiring.”
There’s still work to do, though, on “building in agility” to the workforce — an “absolutely critical” task, she said. When it comes to automation and its potential to allow human employees to do “what humans do best,” and to enable a workforce culture of continuous learning, she argued, the federal government should show other employers the way.
“We need to show for all of America how we evolve our workforce in a world of automation, in a world of integrated technology and human service delivery,” she said. “We need to take care of our workforce.”
USDA’s Francisco Salguero hired as FCC CIO
Francisco Salguero will be the next CIO of the Federal Communications Commission.
Salguero, currently deputy CIO with the Department of Agriculture, will take over the role at the beginning of December, several sources close to the agency confirmed to FedScoop.
Salguero has been with Agriculture for more than 14 years, rising to the level of department-level deputy CIO in 2017. He also spent several years in the private sector serving government prior to that.
Most recently at USDA he’s worked closely with CIO Gary Washington in the department’s modernization efforts in partnership with the administration’s Centers of Excellence program.
John Skuldarek has been serving as acting CIO at the FCC since Christine Calvosa left the role in May. Prior to that, David Bray was FCC’s CIO for four years.
CIO John Zangardi leaving DHS
Department of Homeland Security CIO John Zangardi announced today in a note to staff he is leaving the agency.
“It has been a privilege and honor to serve with each of you as the Department of Homeland Security’s Chief Information Officer for the past two years. It has been quite a ride,” the note says. Friday is his last day.
Zangardi will depart DHS to take time off, ending his nearly two-year tenure with the department. “After three decades of military and government service, I feel the time is right for me to try my hand at something different. I am going to take a very short break from work and then dive right back into the excitement,” says his announcement.
Sources close to Zangardi said he plans to take a role with Leidos after his time off.
Previously Zangardi served as acting CIO of the Department of Defense and, before that, as the acting Department of the Navy CIO.
Zangardi is a retired naval flight officer with a doctorate in philosophy from George Mason University.
Beth Cappello, Zangardi’s deputy, will take over the office in the interim.
AWS files protest of JEDI award in federal claims court
Amazon Web Services is protesting the Pentagon’s award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Microsoft.
The company submitted a pre-filing notice Nov. 8 with the Court of Federal Claims, according to an AWS spokesperson.
“AWS is uniquely experienced and qualified to provide the critical technology the U.S. military needs, and remains committed to supporting the DoD’s modernization efforts,” the spokesperson said in a prepared statement. “We also believe it’s critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence. Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias — and it’s important that these matters be examined and rectified.”
AWS was widely considered a favorite to win the JEDI cloud contract, worth up to $10 billion over 10 years, but the Department of Defense awarded the contract to Microsoft in late October. The company said it was “surprised” by the award.
This story is developing. FedScoop will update with new information as it becomes available.
DOD, IC leaders push for diversity in IT workforce
Leaders from the Department of Defense and intelligence community Thursday emphasized the need for a diverse workforce in support of national security.
CISO Jack Wilmer pointed to improving diversity as one of DOD’s greatest workforce needs in defending the military and nation against cybersecurity threats.
“When you look at what our adversaries are actually doing, the approaches they’re taking, they really do have some very clever and creative things they’re doing, Wilmer said at FedScoop’s Workforce Summit. “And one of the things I certainly realized is one way of thinking about what they might be doing is not at all sufficient.”
It takes a diversity of thought, he said, to anticipate and respond to sophisticated bad actors.
“If we only have a set of people that all kind of think the same kind of way and were all taught and grew up the same kind of way, we’re probably not going to be able to come up with the right set of things that the adversaries might then try and use against us,” Wilmer said.
He pointed to recruiting more women into cybersecurity and IT as one of DOD’s biggest needs.
Within the intelligence community, there’s the same need for diversity, said Sherry Van Sloun, acting assistant director of national intelligence for human capital.
“Diversity in thought, diversity in culture, diversity in experiences is critical” to the national intelligence mission, she said.
She highlighted the intelligence community Center for Academic Excellence program’s “focuses on diversity in underserving schools and diverse schools across the country” by giving schools grants to build national security curriculums.
The intelligence community just concluded a special recruitment event in Huntsville, Alabama, last month “where we went down as one IC, there were no separate seals … and it was a STEM-focused recruitment fair, and we used technology to target those kids who were studying STEM,” she said.
Through that event, the agencies invited 1,000 seniors from 33 schools within a 200-mile radius graduating next spring to participate. Of those, the intelligence community met 600 of them and gave about 100 jobs on the spot, Van Sloun said.
“This builds a pipeline of students who want to come and work for the intelligence community,” she said.
OMB’s shared services effort will take years to yield results
Don’t expect results from the government’s efforts to standardize shared services for a few years, especially when it comes to grants management.
That was the message from officials at the Association of Government Accountants’ 2019 Shared Services Summit on Thursday.
The Office of Management and Budget designated four initial agencies as Quality Services Management Offices (QSMOs) in an April memo, which launched the planning phase.
All 24 CFO Act agencies have designated a point of contact that is working with the Shared Services Governance Board to establish a standardization process. But planning around grants management is delayed into the first quarter of fiscal 2020, said Suzette Kent, federal CIO.
“There are a lot of things that we like to do really fast and do a pilot and see results in six months,” Kent said. “We’re going to see results, but that long-term goal, and checking off every box, is a longer journey.”
QSMOs have done “tons of work” since the summer, despite the Department of Health and Human Services — the grants management QSMO — needing more time to engage customer agencies concerning impacts, Kent added.
Officials have said all along that grants management would take longer because it lacked a preexisting shared services model like the others.
“We also have money that agencies have requested during the 2020 budget process that is still kind of hanging,” Kent told reporters after her speech. “So they’re developing the detailed plans, those types of things, and as we move over to the beginning of the year, detailed sets of activities.”
QSMOs must make organizational changes and have already begun hiring new roles, but work on transitioning agencies from aging payroll systems to Software-as-a-Service solutions — called the NewPay Initiative — is first up in the move to shared services, she said.
The General Services Administration awarded a governmentwide, blanket purchase agreement for NewPay in September 2018 with the goals of reducing payroll costs and information technology risks. A year later, GSA awarded the first two, multi-million dollar task orders.
“These are not short-term projects, and I would say that’s probably the biggest challenge because we know we’ve got a process,” said Earl Pinto, deputy associate administrator of the Office of Shared Solutions and Performance Improvement within GSA. “Standards first … and that has taken, for several mission-support functions, well over a year to get to standards — some over two years.”
The acquisition timeline “can be long” and implementing and integrating systems “even longer” — a few years, Pinto added.
Funding, personnel and pace resources must align between QSMOs and customer agencies, Kent said.
Agencies like the Interior Business Center remain unclear on whether they’ll fund NewPay or that will be done through existing providers, GSA or one big appropriation.
“That is a much longer discussion, but right now we’re using the current model where consuming agencies pay for the services that are delivered,” Kent told reporters. “As we go longer term, there may be opportunities to streamline.”
USDA places focus on reskilling after Centers of Excellence modernization
The Department of Agriculture has made great strides in the past two years to modernize its IT enterprise. But with that, the department now faces the daunting challenge of bringing its employees up to speed with the new systems and environment.
CIO Gary Washington said a major challenge “that doesn’t get discussed is how you prepare your workforce to be able to support this new environment” after modernization.
USDA was the first agency to partner with the administration’s IT Centers of Excellence program, operated out of the General Services Administration. Washington said Thursday at FedScoop’s Workforce Summit that the initiative has led to USDA “taking a more business-focused approach to IT, and it’s really about providing value to our customers, making sure we get desired outcomes and that kind of thing.”
However, one result of that is consolidation — of data centers, security operations centers, user support functions and more — leaving many employees without work in those areas.
So, USDA is creating programs to train those employees, Washington said. “We need to make sure that our 3,100 federal employees at USDA are in a position to be a part of that journey.”
For instance, as USDA closes some of its data centers, Washington said, USDA is looking to reskill the technicians who operate them, “whether it be cloud computing, helping manage the enterprise data center, whether it be [robotic process automation] or some other skill set.”
The same is happening with USDA’s ongoing security operations center consolidation, led by CISO Venice Goodwine. As the department closes the 17 component SOCs in favor of one to operate across the entire enterprise, USDA wants to “ensure we bring all of these people along and we have an opportunity to train not just on modern concepts but to retain them in USDA,” Washington said.
Separately, USDA over the summer created a robotic process automation reskilling pilot at an office in New Orleans. The first cohort will graduate this month. “These people are hungry,” Washington said. “They don’t want to go back to their old jobs. They want to learn how to do RPA. They want to develop bots, fix business processes, that kind of thing. So as these folks graduate, they’ll be a part of our future moving forward in terms of making sure that people go to more high-value work and we automate those things that can be automated on the back end.”
While not everyone is always up for an opportunity to reskill, Washington said, most are. “What we’re finding is if you give them the opportunity to participate, they would more than welcome and engage in terms of learning something new.”
The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress gets another year
The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to extend the charter of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress to the end of the 116th Congress — almost another full year.
The committee was originally set to expire on Feb. 1, 2020. Now it will be able to continue its work until Jan. 3, 2021.
“It’s important to get Congress working better on behalf of the American people,” Chairman Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., and Vice Chairman Tom Graves, R-Ga., said in a statement. “We are grateful to our colleagues, House leadership, civic groups and the American people for seeing the value of this work and ensuring the progress continues over the next year.”
The committee has enjoyed thorough bipartisan support, including last week, when leaders of the Republican Study Committee and the New Democrat Coalition (which taken together represent 249 members of Congress) sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi requesting the Select Committee be extended. Earlier this week a group of almost 40 freshman members also expressed their support for the extension.
The Select Committee was created as part of Title II of the House rules package in January. Leadership chose the committee’s six Republican and six Democrat members in February, and work got underway in March.
The resolution adopted by the House also gives the panel until Oct. 30, 2020, to finish its official report. The original deadline was February 2020.
In its relatively short life, the committee has held 12 hearings and issued 29 unanimous recommendations. Given the committee’s extraordinarily broad mandate, these recommendations run the gamut from human-resources issues to accessibility to transparency.
A decent chunk, however, falls under the category of “modernize and revitalize House technology.” These recommendations include things like reestablish an improved Office of Technology Assessment, allow member offices to experiment with more new technologies and more.
What comes after cyber for federal reskilling initiatives? Data science
Data science will be the next big subject for the federal government’s reskilling initiative, an Office of Management and Budget official said Thursday.
After two successful cohorts of the Federal Cyber Reskilling Academy, the Federal CIO Council is taking the concept to another high-demand area, deputy Federal CIO Margie Graves at FedScoop’s Workforce Summit.
“The next thing we’re going to tackle is the data scientist arena,” she said. The “clear demand signals” from recent legislation like the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, and more, contributed to this decision, she said.
The lessons that OMB learned during the cyber academies — including some of the things that went less well, like figuring out how and where to place newly upskilled talent — will guide the council’s reskilling working going forward.
“One of the things that we wanted to gain out of this agile approach is that we were going to take forward the things that worked and build upon them,” Graves said.
As with the Cyber Reskilling Academy, the data science training won’t just be for existing practitioners. A basic understanding of data science is important for everyone, Graves said, from the operational level up through leadership.
“Understanding what data and analytics can do for you in terms of decision making, in terms of driving customer experience for the citizen, in terms of protecting the nation — those things are important to understand at a leadership level,” she said.
This won’t be the first data science training program inside government. In 2017 the Office of the CTO at the Department of Health and Human Services launched the CoLab, an eight-week-long data science training program. The State Department’s Foreign Service Institute’s School of Applied Information Technology has also experimented with data literacy training for diplomats.
Earlier this fall Federal CIO Suzette Kent said she expects the government’s cyber reskilling efforts to continue to grow, too.
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