Watchers of federal contracting-out policy found a
note of irony in a recent statement by the Office of
Management and Budget regarding provisions under
consideration in the Defense Department authorization
bill for the fiscal year that starts October 1.
The House version of the measure would establish a
pilot program requiring that a tenth of new functions
be subject to a formal in-house versus contractor
cost comparison, meaning that DoD could not simply
decide to grant the new work to contractors without
formally considering hiring more federal civilian
employees to do the work. The measure also would
require similar studies of certain work already
contracted out; such studies would have to be
performed on a number of contractor jobs equal to a
tenth of the number of in-house jobs being studied
for conversion to contract.
In a statement opposing such provisions, OMB said
that “arbitrary quotas concerning commercial work
to be performed by federal employees would
undermine the department’s ability to redirect its
manpower . . .”
The phrase “arbitrary quotas” rang more than a few
bells around Washington, since that was the
opponents of contracting policy used against an
OMB initiative that had targeted 15 percent of
commercial-type jobs to be studied for possible
conversion through last year, and that had targeted
half of such jobs for eventual study. OMB ultimately
dropped those goals under that pressure, although it
still uses activity on “competitive so1. CIO Council
Reviews IT Investment Measurement Tool
As part of an assessment of the effectiveness of
commercial performance measurement methods for federal
IT efforts, the Federal Chief Information Officers
Council ran a pilot program for the balanced scorecard
measurement system (BSC) with the Department of Agriculture.
The underlying notion with BSC is that organizations
are more effective when guided by their missions and
when “balanced” by focusing on multiple perspectives,
said the report, authored by Patrick Plunkett,
co-chairman of the Community of Practice for IT
Performance Management.
USDA’s food acquisition tracking and entitlement system
(FATES) initiative replaced an inventory management
system across three USDA service agencies funded at $1.5
billion annually, and BSC took into account five
perspectives: customer, stakeholder, internal, one for
learning and growth, and a financial and budgetary
perspective. Each perspective included three objectives
with measures to gauge progress, plus initiatives for
achieving the objectives, said the report.
It said the BSC had to be tailored for the government
agency, and that for a major IT initiative such as FATES,
a BSC would typically be developed only after
organizational scorecards were available to align the
effort with the broader mission. But in this case those
scorecards did not exist for the USDA service agencies,
so its team had to “clarify organizational objectives in
addition to the IT objectives.”
The contractor said that as a top-down methodology, BSCs
are most effective when “organizations cascade them down
and throughout organizations to set priorities and guide
objectives of operating units,” according to the report.
It said the BSC methodology established a consensus among
senior managers for three objectives stemming from the
five perspectives. Those objectives reflected a strategy
to satisfy the mission, customers and users.
However, the methodology did not go far enough to define
methods to collect measurement data, which could impede
implementation, said the report.
Published weekly by FEDweek LLC
11551 Nuckols Rd. Suite L
Glen Allen, VA 23059
(804) 288-5321
Putting Federal Employees and Retirees First
A 100% Veteran-Owned Business
