Government Executive - Authors - Denise Kersten

Risk and Rewards

Denise Kersten — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

In a complex world, risk management means weighing odds and placing smart bets.

Among the first things Michael Chertoff did after he was sworn in as secretary of the Homeland Security Department in February was to announce his plans to better manage national security. Central to his approach would be a sharper focus on what he termed "risk management."

In a March speech at The George Washington University in Washington, Chertoff said: "Risk management is fundamental to managing the threat, while retaining our quality of life and living in freedom. Risk management must guide our decision-making as we examine how we can best organize to prevent, respond and recover from an attack."

Chertoff's emphasis on risk management addresses criticism of grants to states and localities for preventing and responding to terrorist threats. Through these grants, the department (following orders from Congress) distributed billions of dollars without first making sure the funds were directed toward likely terrorist targets. Large amounts were used to subsidize local police and fire departments. Other funds went toward equipment that responders didn't need or weren't trained to use.

Any armchair manager can see that preparedness and response funds should go to the places most likely to need them. But figuring out which cities and states deserve federal grants and how to distribute the funds (for example, how much to protect a power plant, water treatment facility or shipping port) is a challenge even to the best minds.

On Aug. 31, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock of the Army Corps of Engineers appeared on the ABC News program Primetime Live. When asked whether the levees surrounding New Orleans should have been built to hold up in a storm as large as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the entire city, Strock replied: "No, I don't think so. We had done the analysis and we felt that Category 3 was the appropriate level of protection there."

Strock went on to explain that the Corps had done a "benefit-cost ratio" that showed the expense of guarding against a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane outweighed the protection.

The announcer's response-"Well, that cost-benefit analysis may not look so good today"-reflects the fact that the Corps' mathematics either underestimated the probability of a larger hurricane hitting the area or undervalued the consequences.

If risk management is a science, it's an imperfect one. At its core is the effort to make the unknown known-something we can approximate only by applying current information to historic patterns. The flooding of New Orleans is a vivid reminder of this reality.

To make calculated risks, and to set Homeland Security strategies, experts will draw on principles of risk management developed by structural engineers, insurance companies, natural disaster managers, the financial industry, public health experts and others.

Risk management has gained currency in recent years across the public and private sectors as corporations and government agencies have sought to apply more sophisticated techniques to assess, prepare for and cope with the risks inherent in doing business in a complex world.

Many large companies now have executive-level chief risk officers, and Kimberly Thompson, a professor of risk analysis and decision science at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, calls this "the age of risk management." Says Thompson: "We now know there are unintended consequences of decisions, and our ability to compute risk is very high."

But what, exactly, does it mean to "manage" something as seemingly unpredictable and potentially devastating as risk? Besides avoiding hazardous endeavors, how can individuals and organizations protect themselves?

THINKING AND FEELING

The reason we need a formal method for coping with risk has a lot to do with the way our brains are programmed. "The fundamental way that we respond to risk is through our feelings," says Paul Slovic, an expert in risk perception and assessment who is a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit corporation in Eugene, Ore. Does a particular danger worry us, or make us feel uneasy? Does it evoke dread? Do we have a personal connection to it, or have we seen images of it on television? Emotional responses have served as a guide to risks throughout human history, and researchers have shown that patients who suffered damage to the part of the brain that controls emotions have been unable to respond to and to protect themselves from danger.

Humans always have faced serious risks, including natural disasters, predators, violence, disease and famine. But today's risks are more complicated and harder to understand, says Slovic.

In addition to terrorism, we face computer viruses, identity theft, toxic waste, prescription drug side effects, hackers and more. "And there always seem to be some new things coming up," he says.

Emotional responses are very fast and can be highly effective, Slovic says, especially in situations in which we have lots of experience, such as driving a car. But feelings can confuse us, creating a distorted view of dangers.

Risks such as terrorism that are linked to strong emotions can seem more probable than they actually are. "When the feelings are strong, we ignore the probability and act as if [the event] is likely," Slovic says. We underestimate other dangers when, for example, we can't connect them to an experience or image and understand them only as abstract statistics.

Fortunately, feelings no longer are our only tool for dealing with risk. "We also, when we can, use analytic thinking, which is a much more recent development in the human mind," Slovic says. "We've only been analyzing risks with probabilities and mathematical concepts and science in the last few hundred years of human existence, but we've gotten pretty good at it." We can detect possible hazards, calculate their probability, assess the consequences and determine the best way to prevent or prepare for them.

Slovic gives the example of deciding whether water is safe to drink. "In the past, we did that through our experiential senses," he says. We would perhaps look at and smell the water source, and judge whether we got sick after drinking from it the last time.

Today, we worry about trace amounts of carcinogens and other harmful chemicals, and will test and clean up the water to ensure it doesn't pose short- or long-term health problems.

Risk management uses analysis to compensate for the shortcomings of instinctive, emotional ways of sizing up and responding to risks. The growing interest in risk management is "both a recognition that risk is part of life and that if we use the tools that are available to us, we can do better than if we let the fates decide," says Thompson, of the Harvard School of Public Health. The first step is to take stock of the possibilities, probabilities and consequences. Quantifying risks often reveals that the high-profile dangers we worry about aren't as likely as others that don't get as much attention. Fear of flying is prevalent, for example, though far more people die in car accidents.

But risk management goes beyond making assessments to weigh the costs and trade-offs of interventions, the likelihood of their success and the other priorities competing for resources.

The best solutions-low cost but highly effective measures-often seem mundane compared with the flashy or complex answers we crave for risks about which we have strong emotions. One of the most effective examples of risk management is the seat belt, which saves more than 10,000 lives each year, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.

"Most of us in public health risk management spend our time reminding people to do things that their mothers should have told them to do," such as washing your hands, forsaking cigarettes and wearing seat belts, Thompson says. "That tends to make it not such hot news, but these are really important things." She cautions against assigning priority to risks based on the emotions they trigger. A vital question to ask, Thompson says, is: "Are we putting so much focus and resources on the scary 'what ifs' and in the meantime not focusing enough on the stuff that is causing people to be unhealthy?"

TOUGH CALLS

In November 2004, the Agriculture Department confirmed that a plant disease called soybean rust had made its first appearance in the United States, as reported in a Louisiana State University research field. The disease is caused by wind-borne spores of a fungus from Asia that first reached the Western Hemisphere in 2001 when it wiped out large swaths of soybean fields in South America by defoliating the plants before they could produce seeds.

Within three weeks of Louisiana State's findings, soybean rust showed up in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Farmers had three options: They could live with the risk and face possible financial ruin. They could avoid the risk by switching to a different crop. Or they could mitigate the risk with insurance and by treating the plants with fungicides that kill the disease.

In this case, the third option made the most sense, but farmers needed a way to make the most of limited resources-to treat the plants when necessary without wasting chemicals on false alarms.

Estimates showed that the United States had only enough chemicals to spray about one-sixth of the national crop, and because of environmental regulations, some chemicals could not be used more than three times.

As soon as the disease was identified, Agriculture's Risk Management Agency swung into gear. The agency helps farmers manage their business risks with insurance through the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, which it oversees, and by providing guidance and information. The Agriculture Department developed a method to track the flow of the disease, and RMA worked with universities to provide guidance to farmers on when to spray their crops.

"Everyone was going out and talking about what they should and shouldn't do," says E. Heyward Baker, director of risk management services at RMA. "What they were emphasizing was not to spray unless they had to."

As long as the farmers treated the soybean plants when they were supposed to-or documented that they had tried, but the chemical or equipment were unavailable-they were covered by the crop insurance.

Fortunately, soybean rust has not yet hit U.S. fields as hard as some feared, and RMA's strategy proved effective.

Sometimes, though, the cost of guarding against a risk is deemed too high-either because of limited resources, financial expense or some other trade-off-when balanced against the probability of a danger and its likely consequences.

Jim Crockett, manager of risk for Denver Water, a public utility, remembers a proposal about 10 years ago to put up a 6-foot chain-link fence around Dillon Reservoir, a beautiful mountain reservoir that's also used for boating and fishing. The fence would have cost around $10 million, he says, and probably wouldn't have been very effective.

"Someone could drive a truck through it if they wanted to get in," he says. Worse, the community would have objected to restricting access to the natural resource. "Politically, it just wouldn't have been possible," Crockett says.

THE GREAT UNKNOWN

Predicting terrorism is even more difficult than forecasting natural disasters. "With our action, we change the probabilities. The terrorists always look for the weakest link," says Detlof Von Winterfeldt, director of the University of Southern California's Center for Risk Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, which was founded with a grant from DHS. "If we fortify one target, another may become more attractive."

To calculate probabilities of terrorism, researchers are using risk management tools from other areas. "We're trying to fit whatever is useful," Winterfeldt says. Game theory, a model for predicting human interaction often used in economics, helps determine how terrorists might adjust their plans to react to our counterterrorism strategies.

And in looking for trends that could help forecast the future, researchers have found that the logistics of terrorism are useful predictors.

"When you plot out historic terrorist events, you see the smaller the bomb, the more often it gets used," says John Abraham, a spokesman for Risk Management Solutions Inc., a Newark, Calif.-based company that specializes in quantifying and managing catastrophic risks. "Terrorists are using logic to trade off how they're going to accomplish their goal, which is to create chaos."

Winterfeldt says one way to quantify terrorism risk is to assume that terrorists are attempting a certain project, for example, detonating a dirty bomb in Los Angeles.

"Then you can figure out the likelihood that they'll succeed," he says. That analysis gives you an upper limit of the probability of such an event, but determining which projects terrorists are likely to undertake is almost impossible without specific intelligence.
"Ultimately, the question comes to where should we put our money," Winterfeldt says. "Those are very, very tough questions."

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Clay Johnson

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Office of Management and Budget
Clay Johnson
Deputy Director for Management

When Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., introduced Clay Johnson at a congressional hearing in March, he referred to the OMB deputy director's close ties to President Bush. "Mr. Johnson," he said, "you clearly have the ear of the president."

Indeed, few in Washington have as much history with President Bush as Johnson does. The boys from Texas first met as teenagers when they enrolled at Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in Andover, Mass. They later roomed together at Yale and partook in shenanigans such as tearing down the Princeton goal posts after a Yale victory.

After college, Johnson attended the MIT Sloan School of Management and then worked for Frito-Lay, Citicorp and the Dallas Museum of Art. They joined forces again in 1995, when Johnson went to work for then-governor Bush, serving first as his appointments director and later as chief of staff.

In Washington, Johnson is known not only for having the ear of the president, but also for speaking on the president's behalf. His booming Southern baritone has been an important instrument in the Bush administration's campaign to bring private sector management strategies to the federal government.

Accountability, measuring results and giving taxpayers more for their money are Johnson's constant themes. At OMB, he has pushed pay for performance and competitive sourcing, and instituted a quarterly score card grading system that evaluates agencies' progress toward goals in five areas of the President's Management Agenda.

During an online chat on the White House Web site, Johnson said agencies that don't perform well on the score card face "public shame and humiliation and the opportunity to be questioned about it by the president." After four years of the score card, only one agency-the Labor Department-has satisfied all its requirements.

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Susan J. Grant

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Energy
Susan J. Grant
Chief Financial Officer,
Director of the Office of Management,
Budget and Evaluation

Discipline. Accountability. Communication. These are the values Susan J. Grant emphasized at her nomination hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. They served her well at the Defense Department, where Grant was director for corporate resources of the Defense Financial Accounting System prior to her August 2004 appointment to the Energy Department.

Grant worked as a Defense Department civilian for more than 30 years. She seeks to bring to Energy the business practices she says are standard at Defense, such as five-year planning and performance measurement. "Because of the nature of the job here, we just don't have the sound project management we had in Defense. We're building it," she says.

Government chief financial officers must act as translators, Grant says, converting agency requirements into financial terms and vice versa. This requires moving beyond after-the-fact accounting to provide forecasts and analysis before decisions are made. "If you're driving a car, are you using the rear-view mirror or your front windshield?" she says.

The Energy Department needs to make better use of financial data in decision-making to retain its green rating in financial performance on the presidential management score card. The department's progress in this area has fallen behind.

One challenge she faces is what she calls "passive resistance" to change. Grant says her change-management strategy involves open discussion in which she emphasizes responsibility to taxpayers. "The whole move to have a government that's more responsive and citizen-centric is based upon accountability," she says. "I tell them, 'We're self-employed. Is this the way we want to spend our money?' It starts with that."

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Lynn Scarlett

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Interior
Lynn Scarlett
Assistant Secretary for Policy,
Management and Budget,
Chief Financial Officer,
Chief Acquisition Officer

If the Bush administration has its way, Lynn Scarlett will no longer be assistant secretary for policy, management and budget, chief financial officer and chief acquisition officer at the Interior Department. She was nominated in March to become deputy secretary, the No. 2 spot. Prior to joining Interior in July 2001, she spent 15 years as president of the libertarian think tank the Reason Foundation and the Reason Public Policy Institute, based in Los Angeles.

Scarlett's nomination, however, has been blocked in the Senate over oil development off the Florida coast. Thomas Weimer, who has been serving as acting assistant secretary for water and science, was nominated this spring to take Scarlett's place. Weimer's nomination, too, was held up in the Senate, over mineral rights in Colorado. It's unclear what would happen should Weimer be confirmed before Scarlett vacates the position.

Whoever holds the position will have a tough job. The Interior Department lags in financial management and linking budget decisions to performance measures. "We operate costly, duplicative financial and business management systems that include over 107 real property databases, 16 financial systems and 27 acquisition systems," the department stated in a second-quarter report of its progress on the President's Management Agenda. Consoli-dating those systems and eliminating the department's material weaknesses won't be easy.

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Samuel Tinsing Mok

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Labor
Samuel Tinsing Mok
Chief Financial Officer

Ask Samuel Tinsing Mok about his unusually long and varied career history-which includes stints in the Army, the Foreign Service, two national media companies, three international trade consulting firms (one of which he founded) and two federal agencies-and he jokes that he can't hold a job.

"There are three kinds of executives: maintenance, turnaround and entrepreneurs," Mok says. He describes himself as a change agent and entrepreneur who gets bored when he runs out of challenges. "I'm a horrible maintenance person," he says.

In 1986, Mok declined a State Department post in China when he learned he couldn't bring his then-teenage children. With no job lined up, he responded to a newspaper employment ad for comptroller of the Treasury Department. He got the job. The next year, he became the department's first career CFO, serving until 1992, when he became chief executive of a consulting firm.

As Labor CFO since January 2002, Mok's goal has been to shift from meeting basic accounting requirements to providing tools that will inform decisions. His team is replacing Labor's 15-year-old financial system with a new Web-based program that will be more flexible and have better internal controls. He says it will free his staff to do more high-level financial analysis. It is scheduled for completion in 2007.

The role of CFO at Labor is different from the job at Treasury, Mok says. At Treasury, each bureau has its own financial office, and his job was "policy and traffic cop." At Labor, he runs the centralized financial system. "Here it's an operational job, and I actually deliver services and get people paid and make sure the reports go to production," Mok says. He praises Labor Secretary Elaine Chao for the emphasis she puts on financial management. "It makes my job a lot easier," he says.

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Dale W. Sopper

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Social Security Administration
Dale W. Sopper
Deputy Commissioner for Finance,
Assessment and Management,
Chief Financial Officer,
Chief Acquisition Officer

"Time flies when you're having fun," says Dale W. Sopper. For him, "fun" means overseeing all the finance, procurement and management issues at the Social Security Administration. His responsibilities include the budget, business processes, financial policy, accounting, acquisition, facilities management, warehousing, printing and more.

His ascent to deputy commissioner came over the course of nearly four decades at Social Security and the Health and Human Services Department. He began his federal career in 1965 as a Social Security claims insurance specialist in Kansas City, Mo.

Sopper has received numerous awards for his work, most recently a distinguished leadership award from the Association of Government Accountants. He counts as his greatest achievement SSA's new accounting system, which earned the agency a green in financial management on the president's traffic-light-style management score card at the end of fiscal 2003.

His next goal is to provide managers up-to-the-hour financial information using the latest version of the Oracle accounting system. "That will be an incredible achievement-almost real-time information available throughout the agency," Sopper says. Social Security became the first agency to use the system in October 2003.

As the senior procurement executive, Sopper says his top priority is maintaining an expert workforce: "If the staff is well-trained and we keep them current on all the different nuances that affect acquisition activity, we're never going to have a problem." He credits his success to coaching and encouragement from high-level mentors. "I just hope," he says, "that I continue to do that same type of thing for people I work with."

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Phyllis F. Scheinberg

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Transportation
Phyllis F. Scheinberg
Assistant Secretary for Budget and Programs,
Chief Financial Officer

"It's actually somewhat of an accident," says Phyllis F. Scheinberg, of the 26 years she has spent working on federal transportation issues. She quickly notes that "accident" is a very bad word in transportation. "It was serendipitous," she says.

Scheinberg, the Transportation Department's chief financial officer, entered graduate school at the University of California at Irvine with the intention of studying education administration. Instead she discovered an interest in public administration. Upon graduation in 1979, she became a Presidential Management Intern. Again her career took an unexpected turn. She accepted a position as a budget examiner at the Office of Management and Budget.

In 1990, Scheinberg went to work at the former General Accounting Office. Her analytical nature was well-suited to assessing programs, and eventually she became director for transportation issues. Her GAO tenure trained her to ask a lot of questions and examine things closely, even outside her domain.

Still, moving from GAO to Transportation in 2001 was an eye-opening experience. "When you audit and review from afar, you just wonder why they can't get things done," Scheinberg says. The regulations, budget process and number of stakeholders make running an agency "much harder than it looks from the outside."

Transportation has its only red on the presidential management score card in financial management. "I can't tell you how hard we're working to change that," Scheinberg says. "My job is to get support from above and from my peers and then to push away the obstacles so my staff can push forward."

Because it manages grant and loan programs, trust funds and staffed agencies, the department has an especially complex budget, Scheinberg says. She notes that Transportation was the first to have a single accounting system for all its agencies.

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Rosita Parkes

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Energy
Rosita Parkes
Chief Information Officer

Coming from the turmoil of the newly formed Homeland Security Department in October 2003, Rosita Parkes found solid ground in the technology operations of the Energy Department. "The first descriptor is 'stable,' " she says. "The second is 'well-planned.' " But while the Energy Department was created nearly three decades ago, it shares with Homeland Security the challenge of integrating formerly distinct agencies, some of which have disparate missions. "The greatest challenge I have is getting buy-in for corporate solutions," such as standardizing the technology infrastructure across the department's agencies, Parkes says. "There's always that issue of turf."

The department also has struggled with its enterprise architecture. An audit from the inspector general published in April found that Energy had not completed a plan for the project, and said the lack of an enterprise architecture caused it to miss out on $155 million in savings since 1998. Parkes' office disagreed with some of the findings, and pointed to steps taken toward completing the plan.

Before her Energy appointment, Parkes served as CIO of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She helped provide computer and telecommunications support for Sept. 11 cleanup and recovery-and-response teams in New York. "With the infrastructure completely down, we had to go in and use mobile capability and wireless technology," she says. "We were innovative, and we looked at different ways to solve problems."

Parkes was one of only a handful of women in government technology when she joined the civil service in 1970, and often the only woman in executive meetings until the mid-1980s. Then, she says, "It was like the floodgates opened. It was just beautiful." Parkes encourages people to consider working in government technology. "There's no limit to what you can do if you aspire to a federal career," she says. "It's certainly been good to me."

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Michael W. Carleton

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

General Services Administration
Michael W. Carleton
Chief Information Officer

"I like to describe myself as a recovering budget analyst," Michael W. Carleton said during a radio interview in 2002. "I started working with the Department of Health and Human Services back in the late '70s, mainly doing budget analysis." He next worked on Social Security reform and systems modernization, and finally made the full transition to "the technology side" in 1996, when he became deputy director of HHS' Office of Information Resources Management.

Carleton then served as chief information officer for the HHS Office of the Secretary until June 2000, when he moved to the General Services Administration. He briefly worked as assistant CIO and acting CIO for the Public Buildings Service before being named CIO in September. In his current role, Carleton must have a long to-do list. He oversees a broad portfolio of technology projects, not only for the agency, but also for its customer agencies, vendors and contractors, and, in a few cases, private citizens. These projects include five of the Office of Personnel Management's e-government initiatives, for which GSA was named managing partner, to work in collaboration with other agencies.

Carleton also heads a task force on IT systems for the GSA reorganization, which will merge the Federal Supply Service and the Federal Technology Service into a single acquisition group.

The broadest reaching of the e-government initiatives for which GSA is taking the lead is USA Services, which aims to provide a single access point for government services through GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Communications. A Web portal for government services, FirstGov.gov, launched in 2000. Another project, called E-Authentication, will provide a secure and efficient way for agencies, businesses and citizens to verify identity when conducting business with the government online.

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Patrick Pizzella

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Labor
Patrick Pizzella
Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management,
Chief Information Officer,
Chief Acquisition Officer,
Chief Human Capital Officer

Patrick Pizzella holds the enviable position of being the top management adviser at the Labor Department, the first agency to earn top marks in all five areas of the President's Management Agenda score card-the equivalent of a 4.0 grade point average. "That's quite an accomplishment for the department," he says. "I was glad to play a role in it."

Pizzella credits Secretary Elaine Chao's leadership, but observers cite his influence as a powerful factor. Serving as CIO, CHCO and CAO as well as assistant secretary, Pizzella has overseen such improvements as the development of a uniform performance management system for all employees, an outreach program to recruit MBAs, and the launch of GovBenefits.gov, an Internet portal that helps citizens access government benefits. He describes his management style as "lead, follow or get out of the way."

Pizzella began his career in government after working on Ronald Reagan's first campaign, landing a job as special assistant to the administrator at the General Services Administration. He also served in the Small Business Administration, the Education Department and the Federal Housing Finance Board. He left government from 1996 until 2001, working as a lobbyist with Preston Gates and Ellis.

The challenges facing the Labor Department, Pizzella says, include completing a strategic plan for information technology that will help the agency meet new e-government requirements, and managing real property, one of the newer initiatives of the President's Management Agenda. The department also will "have to continue to be vigilant" in order to maintain its high rating in the five primary areas of the score card, he says. "You just can't kick back."

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Claudia Cross

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Energy
Claudia Cross
Director of Human Resources,
Chief Human Capital Officer

Claudia Cross remembers joining the Senior Executive Service in the 1990s as one of the proudest moments of her life. "I had a lot of ideas," she says, and she relished the opportunity to test those ideas as manager of the Energy Department's executive resources organization. The job, she says, was "a grand experiment."

Cross, who started her federal career in 1975 as a Navy intern, remains an innovator. As Energy's director of human resources and chief human capital officer, she now has a broader platform. "What is so much fun about the CHCO role is influencing government-wide," she says. Many of her ideas center on better supervisory and leadership training, which she describes as "close to a silver bullet," noting that government lags behind the private sector in helping recently promoted supervisors tackle their new duties. "Overnight, you're just supposed to be a good manager," she says.

She also is working to shift emphasis to skills, rather than qualifications. For example, the Energy Department needs engineers who can manage contractors. "An engineer is not one-size-fits-all," she says.

Another priority is to get managers more engaged in issues such as succession planning, recruitment, mentoring and training. "The budget has always been one of the things managers understand," she says. "For some strange reason, having the right people hasn't been talked about."

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Gail Lovelace

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

General Services Administration
Gail Lovelace
Chief People Officer,
Chief Human Capital Officer

As the story goes, Gail Lovelace was director of human resources when she gave a speech that changed the structure of the General Services Administration. She told HR Magazine in 1999: "I said something to the effect that the government recognized money was important and created a chief financial officer. They recognized information technology as important and created a chief information officer. So where was the chief people officer?"

The crowd cheered, and newspapers covered the story. In 1998, the agency created the chief people officer position, which reports to the administrator, and chose Lovelace.

By the time the Chief Human Capital Officers Act passed in 2002, Lovelace had several noteworthy achievements under her belt, for which she received a Presidential Rank Award. She had developed a human resources information technology system for GSA and its clients, started an initiative to engage executives in recruitment and retention, and promoted the use of workforce flexibilities such as teleworking, recruitment bonuses, alternative work schedules, and subsidies for child care and transportation.

The Office of Personnel Management in 2003 tapped Lovelace to chair the Chief Human Capital Officers Council subcommittee on emergency preparedness. GSA also became the first agency to receive certification from the Office of Personnel Management for its performance-based pay system for senior executives.

Despite this progress, GSA has not led the field in human capital management. At the end of the second quarter, GSA still had a yellow in this area of the President's Management Agenda score card while 11 other agencies already had reached green, the highest rating. Some of GSA's remaining work involves merging the Federal Supply Service and the Federal Technology Service into a single acquisition workforce.

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Robert Hosenfeld

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Health and Human Services
Robert Hosenfeld
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources,
Chief Human Capital Officer

When Robert Hosenfeld was appointed chief human capital officer at the Health and Human Services Department in January, he took the helm of a ship already on course. For its human capital management, the department had earned a green rating, the highest, on the President's Management Agenda score card in the third quarter of 2004. Yet it won't necessarily be smooth sailing for Hosenfeld. He will have to steer HHS through implementing the plans his predecessor laid out-especially the move to performance-based pay.

Hosenfeld is no stranger to managing change. He came to the CHCO job from the National Institutes of Health, where he served as director of the Office of Human Resources. He also headed human resources at the Interior Department's U.S. Geological Survey and worked at the Defense Department, Army and Navy-accumulating more than 30 years' experience in human resources.

A proponent of technology, Hosenfeld built a reputation in part through his drive to automate human resources functions. Under his leadership, the Geological Survey became one of the first federal agencies to use software from Monster Government Solutions, a division of New York City-based Monster Worldwide. The system, called QuickHire, automates the collection and screening of job applications and allowed the Geological Survey to drastically cut down the time it spent choosing candidates.

It has not worked as well at HHS, however. Late last year, large numbers of applications caused the system to crash at both HHS and the Homeland Security Department. While officials at Homeland Security decided to terminate the contract with Monster, Hosenfeld opted to stick with QuickHire while the company worked out glitches in the software. It became fully operational again in August.

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Ronald J. James

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Homeland Security
Ronald J. James
Chief Human Capital Officer

All eyes have been on Ronald J. James since he was named chief human capital officer at the Homeland Security Department in May 2003. Under the 2002 Homeland Security Act, which created the department, Congress allowed Homeland Security to develop a new system for hiring, pay, performance management and labor relations for its nearly 200,000 employees. DHS' human capital management system, called MaxHR, could become a model for governmentwide reform.

James and his team designed MaxHR to link performance expectations with the department's strategic goals, tie pay to performance measures, facilitate leadership development and continuous learning, and help the department recruit a skilled and diverse workforce. The centerpiece of the plan is to replace the General Schedule pay system with an evaluation system that distributes raises and bonuses to employees based on job performance instead of tenure.

James has spoken often about the importance of getting employee support for personnel reform, but thus far his proposals have proved highly controversial. Federal labor unions filed a lawsuit earlier this year to block the implementation of MaxHR, objecting to limitations on collective bargaining and other rules. In mid-August they won a ruling from a federal judge halting implementation, and the department is considering whether to appeal.

Such disputes are familiar territory for James; prior to his appointment as CHCO, he was a partner with the international law firm Squire, Sanders and Dempsey LLP, where he represented management in labor and employment issues. Earlier in his career, James served as an administrator at the Labor Department, an assistant general counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and an attorney at the Transportation Department.

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Reginald Wells

Denise Kersten — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Social Security Administration
Reginald Wells
Deputy Commissioner for Human Resources,
Chief Human Capital Officer

Public service "is kind of in my genes," Reginald Wells told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Federal Workforce and Agency Reorganization in 2003. "I happen to be a second-generation fed. My mother worked for the Internal Revenue Service for 45 years."

Wells arrived on the federal scene as the deputy commissioner of the Administration on Developmental Disabilities at the Health and Human Services Department in 1995 and moved to the Social Security Administration in 2002. With a doctorate in psychology, he had worked for 10 years in the District of Columbia's Department of Human Services and managed a long-term care and geriatrics facility in New Jersey.

Matching his mother's tenure might be out of reach, Wells told the subcommittee, but he plans to stay "for a career." Should he stick around beyond 2010, he likely will have to shepherd the agency through a human capital crisis caused by the retirement of baby boomers. Twenty-two percent of Social Security's employees are eligible for retirement. By 2009, that will rise to 40 percent, and 21 percent are expected to retire.

And while all agencies face the challenge of coping with an aging workforce, the trend will deal a double blow to Social Security. The national retirement wave will boost demand for the agency's programs just as its own employees are leaving the job.

To meet the challenge, the agency developed a Future Workforce Transition Plan and is using newly granted management flexibilities, such as early retirement for some workers, a strategy to minimize the potential for a mass exodus. Social Security also developed a recruiting campaign and created multiple career development programs in its headquarters and regions as well as a computer-based training system.

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Bytes vs. Brains

Denise Kersten — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Sometimes computers make better decisions than people.

In 1997, the Marine Corps created a panel to investigate the most dangerous plane in the military fleet. The Harrier, a British-designed fighter jet with the remarkable capability of taking off and landing vertically, had racked up an atrocious safety record since the Marine Corps first bought it in 1971. Dozens of marines had died in nearly 150 noncombat accidents. Along with a slew of mechanical and other problems, the panel found that insufficient maintenance and pilot training caused some of the crashes. Pilots were averaging about half the flight hours needed to keep current on handling a plane one Pentagon official called "the nastiest horse in the rodeo." And the Harrier's formidable maintenance requirements-about 25 hours of work for each hour of flight, according to the Associated Press-weren't always met.

Part of the problem stemmed from the complexity of deciding which pilot and plane should fly on each mission. When commanders created flight schedules, they coordinated a range of factors. Flying with night-vision goggles, for example, requires extra training, so commanders had to account for a pilot's qualifications, the time of the flight, and the time of sunrise and sunset. They also had to coordinate with the maintenance crew to ensure the plane would be ready.

Choosing the safest and most efficient schedule for an entire squadron became a logistical headache. "There was too much data for a commander to sift through," says Lt. Col. Alan Pratt, a Marine Corps Systems Command project officer. As a result, commanders sometimes overlooked important information, such as how many hours each pilot had flown in a given month. With another type of plane, such oversights might not have mattered as much; a commander's best approximation might have been good enough. But the demanding and temperamental Harriers raised the stakes. They left no room for human error.

The Harrier Review Panel determined that the Marine Corps needed better information systems to prevent maintenance and training lapses. The Marine Corps now is testing a system called the Coherent Analytical Computing Environment. It does quite a few things, such as providing a central repository for information on pilots and planes, and helping operations and maintenance share information. Perhaps most important, CACE can consider more than 26,000 factors and produce a flight plan for six months. Commanders can enter criteria-for instance, that they want a new lieutenant trained within four months-and the system will find a solution that meets the parameters. By letting the system select the schedule, "You've got the right pilot with the right equipment flying the right mission," Pratt says.

CACE is an example of what some experts call "decision automation," the use of computer systems to analyze information and produce decisions. Others might call CACE "decision support," because it requires a person to sign off on a recommendation, but the line between systems that make decisions and systems that recommend decisions blurs easily.

Decision automation has become indispensable in parts of the private sector and government because of computers' ability to process large volumes of information and to crunch data quickly. The banking industry uses decision automation to approve or reject loan applications. Airlines use it to set prices and schedules. And as the technology has become more flexible, government agencies have been relying on it more and more to manage logistics, detect fraud or security threats, and evaluate applications for government programs.

Computers, it seems, are better than people at making decisions-at least some of the time. But what are their limits, and how far are we willing to trust them? As decision automation becomes more sophisticated, how should federal agencies best put it to use?

CLONING EXPERTISE

In the best-selling book Blink (Little, Brown 2005), Malcolm Gladwell extols what he calls "the power of thinking without thinking." He describes scenarios in which snap judgments prove correct, sometimes in contrast to conclusions reached through careful research. The benefit of such instinctive thinking seems contrary to the value of decision automation, which seeks to add more data and more considerations to the picture. Gladwell's snap judgments are gut feelings; decision automation is factual analysis.

But Gladwell isn't writing about guesswork. The psychologist, art historians and others he profiles draw on years of training, experience and observation to make their swift assessments. In other words, they're experts. They have collected enough information in their memories to quickly and accurately recognize patterns. Gladwell even describes the part of the brain that makes rapid judgments as "a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need."

As recruiters and human resource managers know, however, experts are in short supply. Take the challenge the Homeland Security Department's Customs and Border Protection bureau faces in inspecting the millions of shipping containers that come into U.S. ports each year. Because the ships carry far too many containers for federal agents to inspect, the department must decide how best to use its resources to detect security threats, drugs and other forbidden cargo. One could imagine a Gladwellian agent with an uncanny ability to home in on problematic containers. But if such agents exist, there are not enough of them.

The department uses the Automated Targeting System, which helps even the least experienced agent know with the accuracy of an expert which containers to inspect. It sifts through historical patterns and current intelligence to direct agents to the containers most likely to hold dangerous or illegal cargo, based on characteristics such as the container's point of origin and declared contents.

With ATS, Customs and Border Patrol agents have the benefit of more information than a human mind could handle. Researchers say decisions based on data tend to be more accurate. "There's a fair amount of research suggesting that if you can bring data and analytics to the table, the decisions will probably be of higher quality," says Tom Davenport, a professor at Babson College who often writes about decision automation. "But there's a fair amount of research that says humans prefer to be intuitive because it's easy and quick." One benefit of decision automation is once a system is in place, making decisions based on data becomes nearly as easy as following intuition.

In building decision systems (which are sometimes called "expert systems"), organizations seek to train computer systems to make accurate snap judgments. They do this by extracting the criteria for a decision-the collected knowledge of a group of human experts, patterns culled through data mining, the statutory requirements of a government program, or other factors-and translating them into a set of rules.

In the Marine Corps' CACE, for instance, one rule might be that each pilot must fly at least 20 hours per month. In Homeland Security's ATS, a rule could be to recommend inspection of all containers that share characteristics with containers that have been found to carry heroin.

WRITING THE RULES

Few decision automation projects have gone as smoothly as one the Small Business Administration launched in 1999. SBA established a program the previous year to encourage business development in historically underutilized business zones. The HUBZone Empowerment Contracting Program gives preference to companies from these areas when they compete for federal contracts as long as they meet certain criteria.

"The original plan [for processing applications to the program] was to follow the paper process that SBA would usually follow," says Michael P. McHale, associate administrator for the program. But the agency expected many applications for HUBZone certification. McHale didn't know how his 10-person office would meet its requirement to evaluate applications within 30 days. "We realized with our staff we could never do it," he says.

Like the Homeland Security Department, the HUBZone office needed a tool to help it do more with limited resources. But instead of a system like the Automated Targeting System, which would bring more data into decision-making, or a system like the Marine Corps' CACE that would find solutions to meet many requirements, McHale and his team needed a tool that could reduce their workload by making routine decisions for them.

They built a system that verifies whether or not firms meet the program's eligibility rules. Companies first use an Internet screening tool to determine whether they are located within a HUBZone. If so, they complete an online application. The system automatically checks whether a company matches the requirements and notifies the applicant of potential problems. It sends an assessment to analysts in the HUBZone office, who review the findings.

By automating, the HUBZone office has been able to notify companies of decisions within 20 days on average. Since 1999, the program has grown to include more than 13,000 firms. When the office stopped giving companies the option to submit paper-based applications four years ago, McHale worried that some would object. "We found just the opposite," he says. The office hasn't had a single complaint about the system.

The ease of HUBZone's automation can be explained in part by the short, simple list of eligibility criteria. Firms must be located within one of the zones and at least 35 percent of their employees must reside there. They must be owned or controlled by U.S. citizens, and qualify as small businesses. These are the kind of black-and-white questions most easily translated into terms computers can understand.

But when the criteria are more complex or less clear, translating them into rules becomes far more difficult. After HUBZone's success, for example, SBA asked McHale to help automate the application for the 8(a) Business Development and Small Disadvantaged Business certification, which helps small firms run by "socially and economically disadvantaged individuals." In the past, companies submitted a narrative explaining why they should be given the certification.

To automate the decision, SBA had to capture in yes or no questions all relevant factors. The project was successful. SBA built a system that reduces the workload, speeds the application process and ensures consistent decisions, but it was more difficult and time-consuming than the HUBZone automation.

Writing the rules for a decision requires a much higher level of expertise than making the decision on a case-by-case basis. Consider computerized grammar programs, for example. You might know when to use a semicolon. But could you write a formula to tell a computer when a semicolon is appropriate? Because of how difficult and time-consuming it can be to capture all the rules, experts say automation usually pays off only for decisions that require faster-than-human response times, such as when to make adjustments to stop a blackout from spreading across the power grid.

Sometimes the criteria we use to make judgments aren't clear at all. Gladwell writes, for example, about a tennis coach who knows when a player will double fault-but he doesn't know how he knows.

And consider the process of choosing a mate or a new car. Some Web sites have tools that ask your criteria and offer a match, but they often cause people to rethink their parameters, says Robert Neches, director of the distributed scalable systems division at USC's Information Sciences Institute, which is working on CACE, along with a number of other organizations. "The computer tells us to buy the Volvo station wagon and the first thing most people want to know is, 'How do I change my inputs so I get the red Miata, because that's what I really want,' " he says. "Computers are good at coming up with the best plan to meet your priorities, but they can't tell you what your priorities should be. A person has to do that."

STAYING IN THE LOOP

What happens when the rules change? Federal agencies such as the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have used systems to make routine decisions for many years, but updating them to reflect policy changes has been a slow and complicated process.

New business rules management software, which allows nontechnical people to revise rules, has made decision automation more flexible. Homeland Security's ATS, for instance, is designed to quickly adapt to new intelligence.

Still, decision systems can consider only what they've been programmed for. "There are very few decisions where it's possible to get all the factors into the machine and even fewer where the machine alone can weigh them," Neches says. "My experience of 20-something years is that for anything that's hard enough that people need help with it, there's usually one more factor than you've put into the machine." Another problem: The quality of the decisions depends on the quality of the data the system uses. The Government Accountability Office has criticized ATS because it relies heavily on shipping information that often isn't accurate.

For those reasons, systems that handle all but the most basic, quantifiable decisions typically stop one step short of complete automation. "If you cannot guarantee 100 percent reliability, it's better to keep the human in the decision-making loop," says Raja Parasuraman, a professor at George Mason University and an expert on decision automation. When the HUBZone system doesn't recognize a rural address, for example, an analyst will research the location.

In battlefield situations, the time between detection of a threat and action is called the sensor-to-shooter loop. Automating the decision to attack a target could shorten the loop. "There's a caveat," Parasuraman says. "If the computer is wrong, then there is a significant cost." Keeping a person in the loop to sign off on the system's recommendation is slower, but more accurate.

When organizations require review of automated decisions, they face the challenge of keeping workers trained and motivated to assess the computer's interpretation of raw data.

But automation can cause employees to lose familiarity with the many factors required to make a decision. Parasuraman's research into aviation and warfare automation shows that people also come to rely on and trust less-than-perfect systems, especially when they are under pressure. "When people are simply given a recommendation, sometimes they don't even look at the information," he says. "It's a kind of laziness." That's one shortcoming computers don't have.

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Out of the Ruins

Denise Kersten — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

FEMA branches out into a new service- helping storm-torn communities plan their futures.

One of the best days in Mark Peters' life came just 48 hours after one of the worst.

First, the worst: On May 4, 2003, a storm system moving across the middle of the country turned violent. It spat hail, whipped up winds and spawned more than 80 tornadoes that ripped across Kansas, Missouri and Tennessee.

The twisters turned houses into splintered wrecks, scattered trees and telephone poles and killed dozens of people. Pierce City, Mo., a town of 1,500 where Peters serves as part-time mayor, nearly was wiped out when a tornado roared down the main street. "Our entire downtown-end to end-was destroyed," he says. "The tornado blew off the bandstand roof like a Frisbee, and it landed right in the middle of the library."

Two days later, something happened that seemed almost a miracle. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency contacted Peters and offered to organize an interdisciplinary team to help Pierce City make the most of recovery programs and to develop a comprehensive plan for its future. "That was one of the best days of my life," Peters says.

If not for FEMA, Peters would have faced the prospect of guiding his community through a maze of state and federal programs. "We had a tremendous number of offers of help," he says. But there were too few local officials to research assistance options, coordinate rebuilding projects and file grant applications to take advantage of all those offers. The FEMA recovery experts "became a great, big administrative team at the city's service, and a great, big lobbying team at the city's service," Peters says.

'Something Extra'

In the days following the 2003 tornado outbreak, disaster recovery experts from all levels of government turned their attention to the areas that were hardest hit. The immediate needs included searching for missing people, restoring utilities, and providing medical care and temporary housing.

Dick Hainje, a FEMA regional director, surveyed the damage by helicopter. Most of the buildings in the historic downtown were brick structures dating from the late 1880s. Virtually all of them suffered fatal damage. Forty of the town's 60 antique shops, flea markets and other businesses had to be shut down. Sixty miles north, the town of Stockton also was devastated.

The situation reminded him of Spencer, S.D., another small town, after it practically was demolished by a tornado in 1998. Residents there received assistance from federal and state agencies and other sources, yet Spencer never fully recovered. "Having seen that town not fully rebuilt, I realized there was more to it," Hainje says.

In a federal disaster area, FEMA typically administers three recovery programs: individual assistance, public assistance and hazard mitigation. These provide financial help for medical costs and other individual needs, rebuilding homes and community infrastructure and for building disaster-resistant structures.

But in Pierce City and Stockton, Hainje and others set out to do something beyond the agency's traditional programs. They wanted to give storm-torn towns comprehensive help with bigger-picture issues: housing, transportation, infrastructure, job creation and more. At first it seemed they would have to start from scratch. "We had a committee that was trying to come up with good ideas . . . but then I became aware that [FEMA] had done this before," Hainje says.

Man With a Plan

In 1999, Hurricane Floyd flooded Princeville, N.C., the first town incorporated by black citizens after the Civil War. Because of Princeville's history and the extreme damage (all the buildings were underwater), President Clinton created a special council with representatives from a dozen federal agencies to help the town recover. FEMA sent Federal Coordinating Officer Brad Gair to bring together the strategy for Princeville.

Working closely with residents, Gair and a team of architects, engineers, city planners, economists, housing specialists and other experts developed a plan for the town's future. The group identified high-priority recovery projects, such as building a new town hall and converting the old one into a museum, and presented all the information needed to apply for grants.

The federal team's guidance has been critical, says Samuel Knight, the town manager. "We had about 40 people from FEMA assisting us with recovery," he says. "They decided they were going to make things happen in Princeville." Work remains, but all the residents are now back in permanent homes-many of them brand new-and the town has its first park. "The future is unlimited for us," Knight says.

When Hainje heard about Gair's work, he asked him to help in Pierce City and Stockton. Gair set out to apply what he had learned in Princeville to this new challenge. The centerpiece became an intensive planning period. After a disaster, communities typically work with consultants for six to nine months to create a master plan. "We developed what we call speed planning," Gair says. "We wanted to take that process and compress it into 30 days."

In order to do so, FEMA brings in 10 to 15 experts from federal agencies and departments (including Commerce, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and others) plus private consultants. They are "people who can come in and look at massive destruction and have a vision for how the community can be better than it was before the disaster," Gair says. They work long hours and live in the community for a month, collecting input from residents and designing a set of prioritized recovery projects.

Shortening the planning period to a month hastens recovery, but Gair doesn't advocate speed at all costs. "The opportunity is to actually have a planning process and think about it," he says. In Stockton, for example, residents chose to rebuild with brick rather than slapping up buildings with a material that's less expensive and faster to use. In Pierce City, an architect on the recovery team designed a new city hall inspired by a photograph of the old Pierce City train station, which had been demolished 20 years earlier. It sets the tone of the architecture for the new downtown.

Gair further refined the planning process last year in Utica, Ill., after it, too, nearly was destroyed by a tornado, which killed eight of the city's 800 residents. "Everybody knew all eight people, so the community was physically and emotionally devastated," Gair says. Together with the recovery team, community members designed a plan that could attract tourists visiting a nearby state park. By rerouting a state highway a few blocks out of the way, Utica will have a quieter downtown for outdoor cafes and other attractions.

It Takes a Village

FEMA's Hainje remembers the look of relief on Mayor Peters' face when he offered to help with Pierce City's long-term recovery. "What he was happy about was the promise that we would work creatively with them," Hainje says, not that FEMA simply would take over. "He already had obviously intended that he would commit himself to this effort." Even with the federal team's leadership, creating a long-range plan requires the dedication of local officials and residents.

"I always imagined what the last Pierce City Council meeting looked like before the tornado, because they probably did a building permit on occasion," Hainje says. "Suddenly they had to do 400 to 500 building permits, and they had to figure out how they were going to do street improvements and utility improvements." The city had to set building restrictions, pass ordinances, establish zoning regulations-all of which required tough decisions.

One of the most difficult choices was to raze the historic buildings that had not been completely demolished. The structures were still standing, but the residents determined they couldn't be repaired. They had to design a new town from the ground up. "We just aren't going to be a town of the 1800s anymore," Peters says. "Our thrust is to create a very walkable, livable place."

The FEMA-led team held three town hall meetings-a system that had become an essential part of recovery planning elsewhere. They asked residents to write comments on Post-it notes and stick them to presentations that outlined potential projects. They also used an electronic voting system to get an accurate assessment of audience members' opinions. "They never came in and dictated," Peters says. "I thought that was key to FEMA's success here."

The community's involvement has a downside, though. Local officials are responsible for securing funding for most of the projects. Some will take years to finance, others may never become reality.

At the end of the planning month, the recovery team presents the community with a document Gair calls a "walking grant application." The community can "literally tear out a page and send it in," he says, comparing it to a Denny's menu. "You see a picture of what you're going to order, you see the cost of it and you see a good description of what you're getting." FEMA also assigns a long-term recovery manager to work with the community for a year following the disaster.

But Utica Mayor Fred Esmond says that even with this help, securing grants has been slow and frustrating. "We still need the high-level FEMA people," he says. "They are the ones who know the right people to call. They could probably get something done." And the timing of Utica's tornado couldn't have been worse, Esmond says. Shortly after FEMA experts had finished the town's long-range plan, they turned their attention hundreds of miles away to their biggest recovery project yet.

Real Test

"Our real test came in Florida last year," Gair says. On Aug. 13, 2004, Hurricane Charley brought chaos to Charlotte, De-Soto and Hardee counties in southwestern Florida. "We were tasked with going in and doing [recovery planning] for three counties simultaneously while more hurricanes were still coming on shore," he recalls. And when Hurricane Ivan slammed into the Florida Panhandle a month later, FEMA officials began the planning process for Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, too.

In southwestern Florida, the recovery team took a new approach, looking at the counties as a region. A river that runs through all three could draw tourists, and the recovery team saw opportunities for regional branding and marketing. The counties also share a highway, which would be widened under the plans. In Santa Rosa County, the recovery team designed community centers that would include business incubator space. "The process has proven to be unique for every community," says Steve Castaner, a FEMA long-term recovery specialist who will help the southwestern counties put their plans into action. "Florida is a little different because we're working with communities that have more staff resources, more political resources and more financial resources." The state agencies have played a significant role.

Still, FEMA's planning help was essential, says Tracy Suber, special projects coordinator for the Florida Department of Community Affairs. "This stretched our resources beyond what we could have done," she says. "FEMA had a really well-shaped model for doing long-term recovery, which they continue to improve."

In fact, FEMA's hitherto informal recovery planning pro-cess was included in the Homeland Security De-partment's National Re-sponse Plan, which took effect in April. Gair and others are working on an assessment tool to help determine which communities need sweeping assistance, and on a recovery guide ("long-term recovery for dummies," Gair jokes) to assist communities in managing the process on their own.

Much work remains for the communities FEMA has helped with long-range planning. "The planning process is one thing, but the implementation is another," says Todd Davison, FEMA's mitigation division director for the region that includes Florida. "By the nature of the projects, some were immediate and some were in the five- to 10-year range."

The mood among officials working on hurricane recovery seems optimistic. "The plans express the communities' visions for their future," Florida's Suber says. "What's going to make them effective is the community partnership that came out of the planning process."

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Invisible Wounds

Denise Kersten — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Soldiers are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder and other problems. Is the Veterans Affairs Department ready?

Abbie Pickett got home last April. During 11 months serving in Iraq as a specialist with the Wisconsin National Guard, the 22-year-old managed to avoid physical injury. But she didn't make it out unscathed. One event haunts her.

It happened late in October 2003, at a base near Baquabah, about 40 miles northeast of Baghdad. She quickly left a building when it shook under a mortar attack. "Someone ran out of the building yelling for a medic, and I ran in," says Pickett, who was a combat support engineer. "I was probably the first person in there." A soldier she hadn't met before was badly hurt; she tried to give him first aid, but it seemed certain he would lose his arm.

Pickett learned months later that the soldier had fully recovered and gone back to war, but the memory stayed with her. "I was very jumpy," she says. "I'd have panic or anxiety attacks at weird places where it was crowded, like the grocery store. Something just didn't feel right." Thoughts of the attack flooded her mind when she didn't want to think about it. She felt depressed. At times, she couldn't summon any emotion at all, while at other times she would become upset for no reason.

Last summer, Pickett sought help at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Madison, Wis. She saw a psychologist and a psychiatrist and in July was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The condition causes people to relive a life-threatening or otherwise violent event to the point where it impairs their ability to function. Post-traumatic stress can last indefinitely and sometimes doesn't begin until long after the triggering event. People who suffer from the condition have high rates of depression, substance abuse, divorce, unemployment and other problems.

As soldiers return from Iraq, the Veterans Affairs Department is getting ready to treat many who have post-traumatic stress and other combat-related mental health problems. "We are preparing for an increase," says Dr. Terrence Keane, director of the behavioral science division at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a research consortium of seven VA facilities. "We hope we prepare without reason."

Unknown Toll

Veterans like Pickett aren't coming to VA for mental health treatment in large numbers-yet. "It's at best a trickle at this point," says Dr. Bruce Kagan, a staff psychiatrist at the Greater Los Angeles VA Health Care System. "Our experience from Vietnam and the first Persian Gulf war is consistent with this. We're seeing a relatively small number of people looking for treatment in the immediate aftermath of the war."

By mid-March, about 17,000 veterans, or 6 percent of those back from Iraq and Afghanistan, had sought psychological services at VA health facilities nationwide. Of those, 7,000 were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress; others experienced general anxiety disorder, depression, substance abuse, difficulty adjusting to life at home and other problems. Because VA provides treatment for post-traumatic stress to about 250,000 veterans annually, the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans represented only a small increase in the workload. Others get help at VA's community-based veteran centers.

This could change. "The most powerful predictor of mental health problems is the intensity of the war, and this is a very intense war," Keane says. Another factor: Improved surgical techniques and field hospitals located closer to combat mean more soldiers are surviving life-threatening injuries and then developing psychiatric disorders.

Seventeen percent of soldiers who served in Iraq and 12 percent who served in Afghanistan showed signs of major depression, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2004. More than 1 million troops have served thus far in those operations.

An editorial in the journal argued that the report might have underestimated the problem because the nature of the war shifted and not all disorders are immediately apparent. Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group based in Silver Spring, Md., agrees. "That study was done at a time when combat was relatively flat and stable and the insurgency had not kicked in," he says.

On the other hand, the study surveyed only combat infantry units. Not all soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan are as likely as they are to experience intense combat. And because soldiers were surveyed shortly after deployment, it's possible that not all conditions detected will persist. "Many people exposed to events such as combat will experience these symptoms initially," says Richard J. McNally, a psychology professor at Harvard University and a post-traumatic stress expert. "Most of the time, the symptoms will eventually wane, weeks or months afterward."

Still, the numbers in the New England Journal of Medicine are the most authoritative available, and VA is using them as a guide. The department expects about 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to experience post-traumatic stress and other combat-related mental health problems, according to Dr. Mark Shelhorse, VA's acting deputy chief patient care services officer for mental health. Many veterans seek care outside VA through their private insurance, but the department still expects a large influx of mental health patients.

Vietnam's Lessons

In medical terms, post-traumatic stress disorder is relatively new. "I think people have been describing post-combat trauma back to the 'Iliad,' and even in the Bible," says Dr. Joseph Westermeyer, chief of psychiatry at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. But rigorous scientific study of the disorder, which began after World War II, didn't gain much attention until after the Vietnam War. "It was only in the diagnostic nomenclature since the 1980s," Westermeyer says.

It was the generation of veterans who had faced guerrilla-style warfare in Vietnam, and hostility at home, that raised awareness of the psychological wounds combat can inflict. "When Vietnam veterans first came back in the '70s, we didn't really know what [post-traumatic stress disorder] was," says VA's Kagan in Los Angeles. "After a lot of initial mistakes, VA eventually developed a lot of treatment programs." By then, however, many Vietnam veterans had slipped through the cracks.

Between 1986 and 1988, VA conducted its National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey of more than 3,000 veterans. Roughly half had "clinically serious stress reaction symptoms" and nearly one-third had post-traumatic stress disorder at some point. Fifteen percent of men and 8 percent of women were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the survey-more than a decade after coming home.

"The consequences of that were so horrendous that everybody wants to try to do better," Westermeyer says. Nearly half the male veterans with post-traumatic stress at the time of the survey had been arrested at least once; more than 10 percent had been convicted of felonies. Four out of 10 had problems with alcohol, and four out of 10 had been divorced. "We still feel it today," says National Gulf War Resource Center's Robinson. "You go to any VA medical center and the majority of people you're going to see right now are Vietnam veterans."

Among the lessons VA learned was the importance of outreach and of treating people as soon as possible. Veterans of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are entitled to two years of VA medical care, regardless of whether they have a service-related condition. They can seek treatment for mental health problems at VA hospitals and outpatient clinics, or receive readjustment counseling at the 206 veteran centers staffed by interdisciplinary teams. For the most severe cases, VA operates five inpatient post-traumatic stress disorder units and 14 residential rehabilitation programs.

"The secretary has mailed hundreds of thousands of letters telling [Iraq and Afghanistan veterans] about things they might experience, how they can access services, how to go to the VA Web site," VA's Shelhorse says. Veterans who visit any VA health facility are screened for mental health problems. In addition, each facility has a coordinator for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and mental health providers say there is an unofficial policy of giving priority to recent veterans-if not on the same day they call or come in, at least within the week.

Stretched Thin

Despite the unofficial policy, Iraq veteran Pickett has had difficulty getting in to see her psychiatrist. "I missed an appointment at the beginning of the year, and they said they would contact me with another appointment," she says. By May, she still did not have an appointment scheduled. Research shows that the most effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder involves 10 to 20 therapy sessions over the course of about three months, says Harvard's McNally. Between July and May, Pickett saw her psychiatrist about three times.

A 2004 report by the undersecretary for Health's Special Committee on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder indicates such problems might be widespread. "VA must meet the needs of new combat veterans while still providing for veterans of past wars," the report stated. "Unfortunately, VA does not have sufficient capacity to do this . . . PTSD services had been steadily losing capacity even before [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars] began."

The Government Accountability Office found in a September report that officials at six out of seven VA medical facilities expressed concern about their ability to treat more patients with post-traumatic stress. The report (GAO-04-1069) said VA lacks adequate data to accurately project the future need for counseling and psychiatric treatment. VA officials dispute this finding. "We've got pretty good ideas from Vietnam on what to expect in terms of percentages," Shelhorse says.

He points out that VA allocated an additional $100 million this year and $200 million in fiscal 2006 for mental health, including $5 million each year for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and millions more for post-traumatic stress teams and substance abuse treatment. "Our ultimate goal will be to have a clinical team at each medical facility," he says. Critics say that's overdue.

Veterans advocates and some VA employees say the department lacks the resources it needs to expand mental health treatment to a new population of veterans. "Very few people on [Capitol Hill] want to spend money on veterans' issues at this time," says Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran from the Army Reserve and founder of Operation Truth, an advocacy organization based in New York for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. "I think they're having a hard time admitting the amount of damage that is being inflicted on the American soldiers and their brains."

Giving priority to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans without adequate resources has meant longer waits and fewer appointments for veterans from other wars, Robinson says. "Everywhere I've been, there's been a reduction in services." He has met recently with veterans and VA health care providers in Oregon, Florida, Georgia, New York and California.

"We've got our head barely above water," says a psychiatric nurse specialist at a VA facility in California who asked to remain anonymous. "If you get a couple of [Iraq and Afghanistan veterans], you basically have to send your scheduled patient home, which doesn't make any sense because your scheduled patient might be suicidal," he says. "What has really dramatically changed is how often patients are seen. I have patients who should be seen more often who I can't see." His facility also has trimmed costs by limiting certain expensive medications and relying more on group therapy.

"This has been a difficult time," says VA's Kagan in Los Angeles. "There has been significant budgetary pressure on us, and we're trying to do more with less-to see more patients with fewer resources."

At the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, the psychiatry staff has shrunk about 10 percent through attrition in the past two years and the workload has grown about 5 percent in fiscal 2005. "The staff just works harder," says Westermeyer, the chief of psychiatry. "If we don't get funding, I don't know what we'll do."

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Packing Heat

Denise Kersten — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

A new software program will help federal agencies plan for wildfires.

What does packing a knapsack have to do with planning for wildfires? Both tasks involve selecting the best mix of tools and resources that fit within certain constraints-whether it's the size of the knapsack or the size of federal appropriations.

So in developing a new software program that will aid in planning and budgeting for firefighting, experts at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, drew on solutions to a classic set of puzzles called "knapsack problems."

A hiker has to pick the most effective tools that will fit within size and weight constraints. Is it better to take the warm sleeping bag, or the light one? Is the gas stove worth the extra space, or will a box of matches suffice? And how do the answers change when the knapsack gets bigger or smaller, and the maximum load heavier or lighter?

In planning for wildfires, managers have to determine which are the most effective resources-including vehicles, aircraft, ground crew, support staff and managers-while staying within their budgets and making sure they can protect a given area. Fire Program Analysis, an example of "optimization software," takes input such as the terrain, climate and size of fires from previous years and computes the best possible combination of personnel and equipment. It also factors in priority areas, such as homes and habitats for endangered species.

"Some resources cost more, some produce more, some are faster," says Andy Kirsch, a program analyst working on Fire Program Analysis. "We're trying to maximize our effectiveness by quantifying the differences between resources." The airline industry uses similar optimization software to set prices and flight schedules, and the U.S. Postal Service is working with IBM on a system that will calculate the most efficient way to deliver the mail.

Fire Program Analysis has been in the works since 2002, and was conceived in response to calls from Congress and the White House for better cost analysis and interagency coordination. Five agencies respond to wildfires: the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Each has its own budgeting software-all of which will be replaced by Fire Program Analysis-which has forced Congress to review five budget requests in fivedifferent formats.

The new system shows the best choice of tools and the number of acres that can be protected under different budget scenarios.

Another innovation: Rather than divvying up resources by agency, the program was designed to serve 147 new fire planning units, geographic regions that will share resources and collaborate across agencies. "Each agency has a specific mission," says Venetia Gempler, a spokeswoman for the project. For example, the Park Service responds primarily to fires on parkland. But nature doesn't always stay within these artificial para-meters. "When fires start, they don't necessarily burn on just one ownership," Gempler says.

Fire Program Analysis is being built and deployed in two stages. The first, which aids in planning for the "initial response" phase of fires (the first 18 hours after ignition), is being rolled out now to the 147 regional units and slated to be fully operational in 2007.

The second stage is scheduled for completion in 2008. It will cover all other aspects of fire management, including large fires, extended response, fuels management, emergency stabilization and restoration, and prevention and education.

To design the program, the agencies assembled an interagency team of more than 20 people and drew on the expertise of economists, ecologists and other experts. IBM is building the first phase of the software. The contract for the second phase has not yet been awarded.

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Police chiefs say national security strategy ignores local officials

Denise Kersten — Wed, 18 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The International Association of Chiefs of Police, a nonprofit organization based in Alexandria, Va., published a report this week after completing a series of discussions with law enforcement officials from across the United States.

The discussions began with the intention of pinpointing suggestions to improve national security, but a single concern dominated the conversation, said Joseph Estey, chief of police in Hartford, Vt. and the association's president.

Estey said the current anti-terrorism approach fails to incorporate the perspective and experience of leaders in state and local law enforcement, and does not adequately engage the more than 700,000 police officers nationwide in intelligence-gathering and terrorism prevention. "This is more of a federal strategy than a national strategy," Estey said.

State and local law enforcement officials view federal policies as "overly prescriptive, burdensome and sometimes impractical," the report stated. Bringing them into policy discussions could help change that. "We're looking for a place at the table," Estey said.

In addition to giving input for national policies, Estey said there are other ways state and local law enforcement officials to contribute. For example, members of his group could develop best practices for various situations, based on their experience protecting cities, sporting events, college campuses and railroads. "We don't want to just complain about what's happening, but we want to highlight that we have expertise and a willingness to help," he said.

The report also called for continued federal funding for state and local police departments, including areas not considered prime terrorist targets. According to the report, reductions in three federal grant programs have "significantly reduced the ability of law enforcement agencies to combat both crime and terrorism."

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Funding for VA medical computing system in jeopardy

Denise Kersten — Mon, 16 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

A House Appropriations subcommittee recommended last week that the department receive just $11 million in fiscal 2006 for the new system, far short of the $311 million President Bush requested. The full committee will vote on the bill Wednesday.

The proposed system, called HealtheVet, would include Web-based electronic medical records, a data repository for longitudinal and population studies, management and administrative tools and other functions. The $311 million request would have been the first installment of a 10-year, $3.5 billion plan.

VA did not provide the subcommittee with an adequate explanation for the expense, said John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. "We typically receive fairly detailed justification material," he said. "There was no information whatsoever on what the new money for this program would be spent on."

VA officials declined to comment for this article.

Two other factors likely hurt the HealtheVet cause. First, VA stopped implementation last year of its Core Financial and Logistics System after an unsuccessful pilot in Bay Pines, Fla. That termination raised concerns about VA's ability to manage the larger-scale HealtheVet system.

Then, in order to avoid another late-in-the-game failure, VA Chief Information Officer Robert MacFarland hired Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute to evaluate the plans for HealtheVet. In its April report, the institute said the system was risky and poorly planned.

Despite the funding cut for HealtheVet, the subcommittee's recommendation for the overall VA budget added $1.1 billion over the president's request. "We put the money where our priorities are, and that's medical services," Scofield said. The subcommittee added $1 billion for medical services and did not approve instituting fees for such services, as the president proposed.

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Case Solvers

Denise Kersten — Sun, 15 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Three Social Security employees harvest ingenuity and software to improve the disability payment process.

In December, the Social Security Administration finished its rollout of eWork, a system for tracking the earnings of Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries. It is based in large part on the efforts of three field office employees who worked on their own time and without a budget. They developed a program called Modernized Return to Work, which helps address a multibillion-dollar problem facing the agency: overpayments to people who receive disability benefits while holding jobs.

The story behind Modernized Return to Work started in Wisconsin. In 1998, managers assessing staff productivity in the Social Security Administration's Madison field office reviewed the tasks employees were expected to perform. One stood out as the most onerous: telling people on disability insurance to repay benefits that should have been stopped, but weren't. Demanding repayment-often large sums-from people with disabilities was not the kind of work most Social Security claims representatives had envisioned when they joined the civil service. "It was the most anti-mission thing they had to do," says Ron Konkol, one-third of the team that built the program.

The managers asked, "Why do these overpayments occur in the first place?" The answer: Employees weren't conducting reviews of beneficiaries' work activity when they were supposed to. The reason: They had neither a standardized process nor a computer program with which to do them.

Reviews occur at the end of a trial period, during which beneficiaries can work without losing their benefits. After that, the agency is supposed to review their earnings to determine whether they exceeded the threshold, after the deduction of such things as travel costs, additional supervision, training and more. The formula is so complex that beneficiaries have no way to do the calculations themselves or anticipate how work will affect their benefits. Without realizing it, many have received payments from the agency long after their benefits should have stopped. "People get these letters saying 'You owe us $35,000,' " says Terri Uttermohlen, technical assistance liaison for the Benefits Assistance Resource Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. "It scares the hell out of them."

Doreen Haug, then a claims representative in Madison, launched an effort to standardize the review process. Konkol was a state liaison at the time, and he met often with advocates for beneficiaries. He gathered their feedback, and made use of his talent for selling ideas. Haug and Konkol spearheaded the development of a set of protocols for collecting earnings information and conducting reviews using basic desktop software. "We considered it to be a done deal," Konkol says. "We didn't see any vision beyond fixing the problem in this office."

But other offices were struggling with the problem, too, and word of what the Madison team had achieved spread. In 1999, Congress passed the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Act, aimed at getting people off disability benefits and back into the workplace. Among other things, the law would make work reviews even more complex by creating new deductions.

If the law was successful, it would increase the volume of the reviews, too. Konkol was asked to serve on an SSA committee convened to meet the law's new demands, and he became chairman of a subcommittee for systems and technology.

The IT department at SSA headquarters in Baltimore was focused on building systems to meet the law's new requirements. But Konkol wanted to launch a PC-based program for the work reviews. He got the green light, but no budget, for the unofficial project. "It was at that point that we hit the ground running," Konkol says. He began searching for a programmer who would volunteer to transform the cobbled-together Madison program into an automated system for other field offices. He had heard of a programmer in SSA's St. Paul, Minn., field office named Dave Broomell. "He had done some inventive things," Konkol says. "It took me about a month and a half to screw up my courage to ask him." Broomell said yes.

The team clicked. "All of us came from field offices, so we could really relate to this process," Broomell says. Still serving in their regular full-time positions, they worked on the project on weekends, sometimes late into the night, and communicated by phone and e-mail, especially after Haug moved to Seattle, where she now serves as a disability policy analyst. They built their system to work with another PC program created in 1990 to help determine whether benefits should continue. It was designed by a colleague from Dallas, Bruce Lacomette. The final product, Modernized Return to Work, automates forms and notices, prioritizes cases for reviews, uses built-in process controls and calculates earnings.

After Konkol gave briefings on Capitol Hill in the fall of 2002, one of the program's innovations-a receipt that was given to beneficiaries as proof that they had reported their earnings-was written into federal law. Then the Social Security brass decided to incorporate Modernized Return to Work's innovations into eWork. "You could have told me something like this would happen, and I never would have believed you," Konkol says.

Last fall, Haug, Broomell and Konkol received the "Suggester of the Year" award at Social Security's headquarters. It was Konkol's second, but he's not finished yet. Now in the works is "Son of MRTW," which Konkol says will help people get back on disability insurance as soon as they stop working. "We've got some solutions," he says, "and the will to see them through."

Growing Pains

Social Security Disability Insurance, which provides financial assistance to citizens unable to work because of long-term physical or mental disabilities, has been growing fast. From 1982 to 2002, the number of beneficiaries doubled while payments quadrupled, according to the Government Accountability Office. In fiscal 2003, the program provided $70 billion to 7.5 million beneficiaries and family members.

Since disability insurance was created in 1965, social and economic changes have improved employment opportunities for disabled people. Congress has passed legislation enacting a series of complex incentives to encourage the program's beneficiaries to return to work. Still, each year less than 1 percent leave the rolls because they rejoined the workforce.

The prospect of receiving an overpayment is one deterrent, say advocates for people with disabilities. An audit by the Social Security inspector general in July estimated that 171,620 people who receive disability benefits had been overpaid $3.15 billion because of work income. The largest overpayments have topped $100,000.

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Flight Plan

Denise Kersten — Sun, 15 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Down two dozen large air tankers, the Interior Department and the Forest Service get their firefighting fleets ready to go.

On April 20, a multiengine air tanker owned by Aer0 Union of Chico, Calif., crashed into Northern California's Lassen National Forest during a training mission. The plane, a retired Navy P-3B built for anti-submarine warfare in 1966, was slated to begin serving in firefighting missions for the Forest Service and Interior Department in May. Three pilots were on board, including Aero Union's chief pilot. All three died.

The cause is unclear, but the crash heightens concerns surrounding an entire fleet of firefighting air tankers. Last May, the Forest Service and Interior Department canceled contracts for 33 multiengine tankers used to fight wildfires, citing safety issues outlined in a National Transportation Safety Board report.

All the tankers are owned and operated by private companies. Most are retired military planes retrofitted to carry between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons of water or fire retardant. The fleet has an average age approaching 50 years. In three tanker crashes that NTSB investigated, one or both wings fell off the planes.

Last year's decision to terminate the contracts sparked an outcry. The governors of Arizona and Montana wrote to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman in protest, Congress held hearings, and newspaper editorials expressed doubts about the agencies' ability to manage fires without the large planes.

But the agencies went to war against wildfires with the air force they had. By mid-summer, seven of the tankers-all Aero Union P-3s-were flying again. The absence of the others did not prove insurmountable; the agencies said they controlled 99 percent of fires shortly after ignition.

Fire experts say the large tankers are the most visible firefighting aircraft, but not always the most effective. "We reconfigured the aerial fleet to rely more on large helicopters," says Tony Kern, who was then the Forest Service's aviation manager and now works in the private sector. The largest helicopters, called helitankers, carry up to 2,000 gallons and are easier to maneuver than tankers. "We found in many cases that it was the preferred tool," Kern says. The agencies also had contracts with companies that provided single-engine air tankers, which are smaller than the multi- engine tankers and typically carry 500 to 800 gallons.

This year the fleet will include 26 single-engine air tankers and more than 500 helicopters, plus two "Super Scoopers"-fixed-wing amphibious aircraft that can skim water from lakes or rivers to dump on fires-and at least a few multiengine tankers. The Forest Service has contracts with Aero Union for six of its remaining P-3s and could negotiate for a seventh. Three other tanker companies will provide one plane each to fly with monitoring devices to collect data on the stresses of firefighting missions. A contractor's assessment of nine Lockheed P2Vs, the Navy's predecessor to the P-3, due in early June could clear them to fly as well.

Rose Davis, a Forest Service spokeswoman, says the agencies will wait for NTSB to determine the cause of the April crash before making any changes. "It could have been the weather," she says. "There's no point in jumping the gun."

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Firefighting air tanker crashes in California

Denise Kersten — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Rescue workers spent the night clearing a place for a helicopter to land and finally reached the crash site, which is inaccessible by roads, early Thursday morning. It is not clear yet what caused the crash.

The tanker, which was owned and operated by Aero Union of Chico, Calif., was one of just a handful of the large planes that had been cleared to fly in wildfire missions for the Forest Service and Interior Department this year.

The three pilots were participating in a training flight-the plane's seventh flight that day-in which they dropped fire retardant. They included Aero Union's chief pilot and two captains. "There was a lot of experience in that plane," said Alan Ross, Aero Union's director of Washington operations.

The crash ignited a fire covering about two acres. Because the fire had not spread overnight, managers at the forest headquarters said they do not expect it to grow.

Last spring, the agencies canceled contracts with eight companies that provided 33 large tankers following a report by the National Transportation Safety Board that found the planes lacked adequate safety and inspection records.

Most of the tankers are retired military planes retrofitted to carry water and fire retardant. The fleet has an average age approaching 50 years.

Aero Union was the only company to get its tankers back into service last year. The P3s it operates still are used by the Navy, which made obtaining maintenance information easier.

Aero Union already had negotiated 2005 contracts for seven of its eight P3 Orions. The contract for this particular plane, which was manufactured in 1966, was scheduled to begin in May. "We don't know what the implications of this will be," said Dave Dash, aviation group manager for the Bureau of Land Management.

The National Transportation Safety Board dispatched a team to investigate the crash. The plane was not carrying a "black box" flight recording device. During firefighting missions, tanker crews check in with a dispatcher at regular intervals. But because this was a training flight, the crew had not been in communication by radio.

In addition to Aero Union's seven P3 Orions, the Forest Service and Interior Department likely will have contracts with three other companies to provide one tanker each. These planes, which have not yet met the recommendations of the NTSB report, will be equipped with sensors to collect data on the stresses of wildfire missions and will fly only in sparsely populated areas.

"We're short on tankers compared to previous years," said Matt Mathes, a spokesperson for the Forest Service in California. "What we've done is to make up the difference with helicopters." The federal agencies will have contracts that give them exclusive use of more than 500 helicopters and will be able to call in about 200 more if necessary.

Mathes said most of the incident commanders in California prefer helicopters to the large tankers because they are easy to maneuver in rugged terrain and usually newer. The largest helitankers can carry almost as much water or retardant as the large tankers and can make return trips much faster.

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The Paper Paradox

Denise Kersten — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Despite the push to toss paper, federal agencies are using more of it than ever.

When Bruce James took the helm at the Government Printing Office two years ago, he considered changing the agency's name. "We're doing less printing each year," he says. The demand for printing from GPO's clients-the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government-has dropped 8 percent to 10 percent each year for the past 10 years.

It's not that the agency is becoming obsolete. People still want the information it disseminates; they just want it in a different format. While demand for printing has fallen, the agency has seen a corresponding increase of 8 percent to 10 percent annually in the number of documents downloaded from its Web site, Gpoaccess.com, which now gets more than 1 million downloads daily. "People prefer to get their information from the Internet," James says.

From his standpoint, that's not a bad thing. "Digital publishing is a lot more efficient," James says. Because printing demand dropped, he was able to cut costs by offering buyouts for early retirement. The agency went from a $33 million net loss in 2003 to an $11 million net gain in 2004. James plans to move GPO out of its 1.5-million-square-foot printing plant, the largest in the world, where 50 years ago about 10,000 people worked. Today, there are fewer than 2,500 workers in the facility. And now that costs are down, James is exploring new lines of business using digital technologies, including sound and video.

GPO's shift from paper to electronic publishing reflects a growing demand for digital information that is changing the way government operates. The examples are numerous: electronic tax forms, digital case files, automated personnel forms, personal digital assistants, self-service Web sites, searchable archives and much, much more.

But what's puzzling about all this reliance on bits and bytes is that it hasn't cut down on federal agencies' use of old-fashioned office paper. "Five to 10 years ago, the belief was that all the paper was going to go away, and that belief has come full circle," says Craig Haskins, vice president for the public sector of Xerox Global Services, a consulting service based in Rochester, N.Y. In fact, offices are using more pa-per than ever.

Paper Piles Up

"A lot of organizations want to show that they're looking into the future," says Abigail J. Sellen, a Microsoft researcher and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT Press, 2003). One way they do that is by adopting technologies designed to replace paper, "which is often symbolic of being stuck in the old ways." Sellen says. Yet the influx of information technology hasn't curbed office workers' appetites for paper.

In 2004, the federal government used about 108,600 tons of office paper, up 12 percent from 1996, according to Merilyn E. Dunn, the director of the communication supplies consulting service at InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, a market research and consulting firm based in Weymouth, Mass. Dunn projects a continued increase, putting the federal total for 2008 at 114,360 tons. That's roughly the weight of 72,000 Toyota Camrys.

The private sector is no less paper-bound. In 2004, the total U.S. consumption of office paper weighed in at more than 8 million tons, up 19 percent from 1996, according to Dunn. She estimates that in 2008, the United States will use 8.8 million tons of office stock, roughly the weight of 88 aircraft carriers. Ironically, paper consumption has accelerated right along with the adoption of digital technologies. Between 1992 and 1996, U.S. office paper use increased 4.6 percent. During the next four years, the pace of growth picked up to 7.8 percent. And between 2000 and 2004, it grew 10.3 percent.

Experts say there's a simple explanation for the correlation between technology adoption and paper consumption: the rise of the printer. More often than ever, workers are hitting the "print" button. Dunn's research shows that the use of photocopiers and fax machines peaked around 1996 and then began to decline, and typewriters have been waning since 1988. But the use of inkjet and laser printers has exploded, more than doubling between 1996 and 2004.

Why? Information stored digitally is faster and easier to obtain, and there's more of it. And while people often get information from e-mail, the Web or their organizations' networks, many still want paper copies. They don't have to send away for copies of the federal budget printed by GPO; they can download it and print it themselves-as often as they want. "In the 1950s, if you wanted to make a copy, you needed to have a big copy machine that cost you about $10 a copy," says Johannes Scholtes, CEO of ZyLAB, a Vienna, Va.-based company that helps organizations manage paper documents. "Because it's easy to print now, people generate more paper."

Going Electronic

In their book, Sellen and co-author Richard H.R. Harper, a Xerox researcher, trace the goal of paperlessness to the early 19th century, when the telegraph, telephone and phonograph were invented. These devices seemed to their proponents superior to paper for storing and, especially, transferring information.

Despite the important advantages those technologies provided, they couldn't replicate the benefits of paper. And replacing paper still hasn't proved viable. "We have heard stories of paperless offices, but we have never seen one," write Sellen and Harper. In one office they describe, mana-gers attempted to modernize by banning filing cabinets. Workers began storing paper in their cars and homes rather than getting rid of it.

Still, there are examples of systems that have succeeded in cutting through paper. One is the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a federal agency that takes over failed pension plans and currently manages nearly 3,500 plans with more than 1 million participants. Before PBGC completed an electronic system for storing and processing information about its beneficiaries in 1996, it kept 20 to 30 pages per participant on average, estimates PBGC's deputy chief technology officer, Jon Baake.

Relying on paper caused a number of problems. When a large pension plan failed, PBGC had to open a field office nearby. After Eastern Airlines closed in 1991, for example, the agency opened a Miami office. "We had these little islands of documents," Baake says. People would check out files, copy parts of them, add new documents, fax information to headquarters, or send paperwork to the beneficiary. "Pretty soon, we had multiple copies of the files going around with different content," Baake says. "Sometimes you didn't know which was the original, correct copy." And the agency had no backup files. If a fire or other disaster had destroyed the papers in a field office, PBGC couldn't have recovered information provided by the employer, by then out of business.

Creating an electronic system gave PBGC a central repository of official documents that could be updated from any of its offices and stored at a backup facility. It also freed up lots of space. "We used to have huge file rooms," Baake says. Now that the agency can destroy papers 90 days after they're scanned into its system, it uses that storage space for offices. Baake says the agency still sends printouts to beneficiaries and workers occasionally use printers, but the agency works with far less paper than it used to.

So why was PBGC able to cut way back while other offices are using more and more?

"We're seeing a lot of the more routine processes going electronic," Sellen says. Working in electronic formats is easiest for tasks that are fairly simple, such as processing transactions or filling out forms. Baake says PBGC workers often access documents to find just one or two pieces of straightforward information, such as a participant's date of birth. For these tasks, paper isn't an ideal medium. In fact, it's pretty lousy. Searching paper for a specific bit of information takes too long. Storing paper takes up too much space, and paper deteriorates over time. Paper is impossible to access remotely, cumbersome to transport, and lets you update only one copy at a time.

By contrast, storing information electronically has lots of well-known benefits. You can search it, cut it, paste it, update it in real time, or e-mail it. You can create audit trails, restrict access to sensitive data, automate processes, build in controls and otherwise revamp the operation in ways that paper-based systems don't allow. "Once we get the paper out and we get the data in, we can do all sorts of things," says Tim Hoechst, a senior vice president with Oracle, a technology firm headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif.

But there's one big job for which paper is still the best medium.

Thinking on Paper

GPO's James is enthusiastic about technology; he gets his news online and sends and receives hundreds of e-mails each day. Yet he still prints certain kinds of documents. "I use paper when it involves numbers," he says. "I comprehend it a lot easier if it's on paper in front of me." James likes to print three or four pages from a database to pore over them at home or while he's in transit. He scans the numbers, looking for trends and making notes in the margins. "It's just the way I work," he says. "It's a personal thing."

Actually, it's not just a personal thing. This behavior is typical. Even in agencies with well-designed computer systems, people typically use paper to help them think. They print documents to read, mark up, highlight, spread out, or stack in meaningful piles. This use of paper becomes part of the thought process; the printed documents are temporary sources from which the office worker draws while creating or revising a permanent product, which then is stored in electronic form and can be printed over and over in the future. When the task is finished, people throw away the paper. "The trash can becomes a symbol of how much knowledge work you're doing," Sellen says.

People use paper this way for a couple reasons. Many feel more comfortable reading on paper than on computer screens, which can fatigue the eyes. Paper enables readers to flip through many pages quickly, and few computer screens let you view as many documents at one time as a desk covered with printed pages. Papers spread over a desk make cross-referencing easy and help you quickly reorient yourself after a break. "You can come back and at a glance see where you were and what you were doing," Sellen says. And then there's the fact that we're used to working with paper, since desktop computers are still relatively new. "People cling to it because it's a learned behavior," says Haskins, of Xerox Global Services.

Paper also is important for collaboration. When groups meet to discuss a project, they usually take notes on paper and look at copies of the same printed document so they are literally on the same page. Typing on a keyboard during a conversation "interrupts the delicate flow of the social interaction," Sellen says. For some reason, writing on a notepad is less disruptive.

Think about which would more effectively catch your attention: a document your boss left on your chair or one sent as an e-mail attachment. Paper's physical presence sends a message. And paper has other good qualities. It's lightweight, inexpensive, portable, foldable, shred-dable, easy to use, and it doesn't crash or require electricity.

Younger workers who grew up using computers may be less dependent on paper, and several new technologies attempt to replicate paper's good qualities, so it might eventually lose some of its appeal. Electronic paper consists of thin, lightweight sheets on which one can write with a penlike instrument. It has a feel similar to paper, but stores all information digitally so it can be downloaded. Tablet computers also have potential to re-create the pen-on-paper feeling. But these technologies certainly are not the first designed to make the old-fashioned stuff go away, and it's debatable whether they will succeed where others have failed. "Until people are as comfortable working on a computer screen as they are working on paper," says Oracle's Hoechst, "it will always be around."

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