Government Executive - Authors - James Colvard

The Human Factor

James Colvard — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Numbers don't tell much about how well workers perform.

In almost 50 years of working for and being associated with the federal government, I've read perhaps 100 articles that say government is finally going to get tough and demand rigorous performance evaluations that fit the statistical "normal distribution curve." Yet little has changed. Why? Because humans have not changed.

Normal distributions apply to inanimate objects, not to people. There is nothing normal about humans. About 75 percent of workers feel they are in the top 25 percent in terms of ability and performance. But government continually tries to design personnel systems that place a significant percentage in the bottom half. Consequently, people are unhappy.

The attempt to objectify what is a subjective by using numbers and scales has been a universal quest. It is how managers try to absolve themselves of the responsibility of judging another's performance. And work that involves the invisible process of intellectual activity cannot be easily quantified or accurately measured.

Because a scale has five levels, as opposed to the two in the vilified "pass/fail" setup, does not mean it provides a more accurate evaluation. Actually, it results in a less satisfied workforce. When I came into the system in 1958, the ratings were "outstanding," "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory." In those years, about 5 percent were rated "outstanding," about 1 percent "unsatisfactory," and the remaining 94 percent "satisfactory." I did not sense much dissatisfaction with the process-which de facto was pass/fail with 99 percent passing.

Management specialists began to say some employees are more than satisfactory but not outstanding and some are below satisfactory but not unsatisfactory, so the system should recognize those differences by having a five-part scale. The assumption was that supervisors could accurately determine those differences. But they can't. The results were disastrous. People rated "satisfactory" in a system in which only 5 percent were "outstanding," considered themselves close to the top group. In the five-part system, they found themselves in the middle, the 50 percent range, and thus were unhappy because they thought they should be in the top 25 percent.

Performance evaluations based on such schemes are accepted in the private sector because supervisors can rationalize the objectivity of their decisions by referring to the bottom line of profit and loss. There is no such parameter in the public sector. Performance evaluation for pay purposes never works, yet the country values an association between the two. What can be done?

The civil service should consider the military model. Officers are evaluated every year, but development and performance is linked to future promotions. This combines career counseling and performance evaluation. Pay among officers of the same rank and the same time in rank is equal and advances through longevity and congressionally approved raises. Officers jump to a higher pay range when they are pro-moted, and must serve some minimum time in each rank. The promotion decision is made by a board of the officer's superiors, which moderates the friction that occurs when one individual evaluates another individual. The process still has the desired effect of promoting the best qualified, based on performance.

In the National Security Personnel System, for example, suppose an employee at the entry level band were given annual pay increases as voted by Congress and annual performance evaluations. At the end of some period-say, three to five years-the worker could be considered by a promotion board of his superiors who would look at his cumulative evaluations. If found qualified, the employee could move to the next level and enter a higher pay range. This process could be repeated through the next bands, with minimum time required before promotion increased for the higher bands. Longevity increases could be added to each band.

Under such a scheme, the assessment would take on the character of career counseling, mentoring and performance evaluation. It would allow managers to communicate expectations and provide feedback to employees. And since the promotion decision would be made by an impartial board, friction would be reduced. Pay for performance would come through promotions to higher bands, not annual raises.

To motivate the workforce and give managers discretion, the first five years on the job would be deemed employment-at-will, in which a person could be dismissed. This is not unlike the tenure process for college professors. At the other end of the career path, an employee would become eligible for optional retirement, much like the military's time limits on careers.

Managers might exert effort to retain retirement-eligible employees who are contributing effectively. But they could retire those whose performance has dropped off or whose expertise is no longer important to the organization. Age discrimination is not a factor because optional retirement is not mandatory. It might even give senior employees the incentive to remain current and productive if they want to stay, thus avoiding the "retired on the job" syndrome.

Employment-at-will and optional retirement would allow managers to tailor the workforce without reductions in force, which tend to get rid of the youngest employees. Such a system would retain the most productive employees through the career cycle and avoid ill-fated systems that attempt to treat humans as "normal."

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Stop Outsourcing Know-How

James Colvard — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The loss of in-house smarts leaves agencies too weak to effectively oversee contractors.

Since World War II, the nature of the private sector and its relationship to government has been changing. During the Cold War, the United States developed a permanent military industrial base with the federal government as the predominant customer. With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, U.S. military spending declined. As a result, private-sector defense companies combined and consolidated to gain and hold a significant share of the market. This consolidation reduced competition.

The decline in spending also resulted in a drawdown of the Defense Department's technical infrastructure. With the goal of saving even more money, Defense began to contract out more work and do less internally. As a result, the private sector began to provide capability, not just capacity, and to perform what were inherently governmental functions.

The implications of this shift are twofold. First, the government loses capability to perform its basic functions of deciding what the problem is, selecting the approach to solve the problem and validating the solution. The second effect is that certain critical industries, such as shipbuilding, become indispensable, and the government begins to budget on the basis of keeping those businesses alive rather than meeting mission needs.

The reduction of in-house technical functions has eroded government's "decision competence." Thus, government's historical role of "deciding" and industry's of "providing" what's needed have become distorted. This trend is most pronounced in the engineering arena. Engineering competence must be developed through "doing," not "watching." Agencies such as Defense and NASA, which depend on engineering products, lose their ability to effectively oversee contractors' technical performance and take on the functions of prime contractor and systems engineer. The government has paid a heavy price in oversight disasters such as the Challenger accident and the collapse of the Navy's multibillion-dollar A-12 aircraft contract.

Over the past 50 years, this pervasive trend has left critical government agencies ill-prepared to use the capacity of industry effectively. To reverse this trend, agencies must focus on performing sufficient technical work in-house to prepare the decision-makers who interact with industry to make the right choices.

Defense and NASA have been going in the opposite direction, focusing on the administrative side of contracting rather than technical decisions. No system has ever failed because of an administrative breakdown, but many have failed because of bad decisions and incompetent technical oversight. A properly administered contract that results in a technically deficient product is still a disaster.

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Managers vs. Leaders

James Colvard — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

e often talk of management and leadership as if they are the same thing. They are not. The two are related, but their central functions are different. Managers provide leadership, and leaders perform management functions. But managers don't perform the unique functions of leaders.

Here are some key differences:

A manager takes care of where you are; a leader takes you to a new place.
A manager deals with complexity; a leader deals with uncertainty.
A manager is concerned with finding the facts; a leader makes decisions.
A manager is concerned with doing things right; a leader is concerned with doing the right things.
A manager's critical concern is efficiency; a leader focuses on effectiveness.
A manager creates policies; a leader establishes principles.
A manager sees and hears what is going on; a leader hears when there is no sound and sees when there is no light.
A manager finds answers and solutions; a leader formulates the questions and identifies the problems.
A manager looks for similarities between current and previous problems; a leader looks for differences.
A manager thinks that a successful solution to a management problem can be used again; a leader wonders whether the problem in a new environment might require a different solution.

Multiple functions, limited resources and conflicting demands for time and resources, require management. It involves setting priorities, establishing processes, overseeing the execution of tasks and measuring progress against expectations. Management is focused on the short term, ensuring that resources are expended and progress is made within time frames of days, weeks and months. Leadership, which deals with uncertainty, is focused on the long term. The effects of a policy decision to invest in staff development, for example, might never be objectively determined or, at best, might only be seen after many years.

Management involves looking at the facts and assessing status, which can be aided by technical tools, such as spreadsheets, PERT (program evaluation and review technique) charts, and the like. Leadership involves looking at inadequate or nonexistent information and then making a decision. Leaders must have the courage to act and the humility to listen. They must be open to new data, but at some point act with the data available.

Management's concern with efficiency means doing things right to conserve resources. Leadership is focused on effectiveness-doing the right thing. For example, the military must manage its resources well to maximize efficiency. But in waging war, the military's critical responsibility is to be effective and win the war regardless of the resources required. Getting a bargain does not reflect effective leadership if it means losing the war. Good management is important, but good leadership is essential.

The public sector develops a lot of good managers, but very few leaders. Government focuses too much on abstract or formal education, rather than experience. The Senior Executive Service has provisions for mobility and development through experience, but they are rarely used.

DEVELOPING LEADERS

Developing managers and leaders involves stages of understanding, not prescriptively, but conceptually.

Phase 1 is higher education or academic training that focuses on abstract learning, in which solutions to problems are provided in textbooks.

Phase 2 applies that abstract process to the actual workplace, in which there are often no right or wrong answers. This is the critical phase in which a future manager or leader develops the confidence to make decisions without knowing the right answers. This requires attempting tasks that are challenging, so that success will demonstrate competence.

Phase 3 involves social and political dimensions, as a performer moves from working independently to working with others as a supervisor or member of a product or process team. It is no longer enough to simply know the facts, since the process now includes others and involves subjectivity.

Phase 4 replaces simpler tasks that involve teams or small groups with complex tasks that involve independent, but often interrelated, large groups. In this pivotal stage, managers accept responsibility for things outside their expertise and rely on someone else to provide the facts. The manager may have more authority, but has become more dependent upon others. This might be the time to get more formal training, such as seminars or academic programs in management, to develop skills that weren't addressed in earlier education. There is no turning back after this transition from performing objective tasks to subjective decision-making and problem solving.

Phase 5 separates leaders from managers. The management role changes from maintaining an organization's values to creating them. Leaders establish the principles upon which their subordinates formulate policies.

BUILDING ON STRENGTHS

Becoming a leader requires understanding oneself. There are many tools available, such as the Meyers Briggs profile, to help with that assessment. Recognizing personal characteristics is important in learning how to deal with others, recognizing strengths and weaknesses, and adopting an appropriate leadership style. An extrovert must learn to listen more and talk less. An introvert must speak up more and get heard. A manager who is more comfortable knowing all the details and giving explicit orders should not adopt a participative management style, but rather recognize the limitations of an authoritative style. Adopting a style that is inconsistent with one's personality not only creates stress but it often leads to failure.

Leaders also must understand their professional traits. One useful tool is the 360-degree feedback survey, which allows managers to get the perspectives of their bosses, peers and subordinates. Such a total view is valuable because managers tend to assess their behavior in terms of their intent, not the effect.

Today the federal system, both its structure and processes, is changing. New agencies, such as the Homeland Security Department, are being formed. The federal personnel system is being modified significantly. Outsourcing has become a household word in the government. Civil servants are going to a new place, and it will take leaders-not just managers-to get them there.

James Colvard, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management under President Reagan, later was associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He teaches at Indiana University.

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The Numbers Game

James Colvard — Wed, 01 May 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Reality is complex and does not lend itself to neat abstract quantification when it comes to relating budgets to agency goals.

hat does our use of thermobaric superbombs in Afghanistan have to do with the president's management agenda? The answer is plenty, and two management issues being discussed in Washington explain why.

A collection of good government groups met recently at the National Press Club to discuss the president's agenda. They talked about the relationship of performance and budget set out in the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, and they discussed human capital management. The general agreement was that GPRA is only minimally successful and would work much better if agencies would get on with defining their performance goals and linking them to their budgets. Analysts and budget officials at the forum said the analytical tools are in place to evaluate agency performance. Complex public service issues, they said, can be quantified and reduced to manageable abstractions that represent reality. Let's get real. The reason GPRA has not yet a-chieved what its creators hoped is not the reluctance of agencies to define their goals and relate them to budgets, although there is some of that. The problem is that reality is complex and messy and does not lend itself to neat abstract quantification. Take the Defense Department. How do you define its goals and relate them to its budget? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently declared that we must be prepared to fight an unknown enemy at an unknown time in an unknown place. How do you plan for that? You don't, in terms of quantifiable budget goals. You prepare yourself to respond quickly to the unknown and improvise when a problem develops. You hope that your planning and budgeting have given you that capability, but you won't know until something happens. So, you plan for more than what you need, not less.If you plan for two major conflicts and none occurs, will the Office of Management and Budget give you a red light on its management scorecard? The last major war we lost, in Vietnam, was run by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his analyst whiz kids who thought you could project the outcome with equations on paper. It turned out that their neat projections (which had Congress salivating), did not work out in reality as they did in abstraction. When officials got real, they found that people resist getting killed with a passion that defies quantification.On the human capital front, the consensus at the forum was that civil servants should be paid better and respected more. True, but it is even more important that they be given challenging jobs. The way to attract and retain good people is to give them meaningful problems to solve. These two management issues have everything to do with the thermobaric weapons used in Afghanistan. Defense is an ongoing function and demands constant preparedness that isn't easily quantifiable under GPRA. But the need is real and has been demonstrated throughout our history. It took years of research to produce those weapons, first at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in White Oak, Md., and now at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head Division in Indian Head, Md. The capability to produce the explosive for those weapons existed only at the Indian Head facility, because Defense had spent many years testing and perfecting a variety of explosives. No private firm had the ability to produce thermobaric weapons. The specific application of the explosive was not envisioned, but still the Navy conducted the research over many years. Defense leaders understood the need to be constantly prepared for military conflicts.The reason the Navy has brilliant scientists who can synthesize explosive molecules like the ones in thermobaric weapons is that it offers challenging work. If those experts went to work for industry, government would be the loser. The government neither generates nor retains knowledge in its ranks when it contracts with industry for goods or services. The profit of production must go to the private sector, but knowledge of a problem, the recognition of who can solve it, and the ability to recognize the right solution are inherently governmental functions.The example of thermobaric explosives is but one of many in which the Defense Department has invested in readiness in anticipation of a need that couldn't be neatly quantified in the agency's performance plan. Thinking through goals and objectives and relating them to agency budgets is good, but eventually agencies have to get real. And reality is messy. If we are going to have competent civil servants who can meet the future demands of challenges yet unknown, we must anticipate the work they should be doing. The government is reaping the benefits of preliminary investments in resources and people. Let's hope we leave our successors with the same kind of capable public servants and facilities that were left to us-even if they can't be quantified.

James Colvard, formerly technical director of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, served as deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management under President Reagan and later was the associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He teaches at Indiana University. ]]>

Effectiveness vs. efficiency

James Colvard — Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 -0500

The private sector performance model drives businesses to make profits in a competitive market. Competition sharpens company executives. Industry demands this efficiency; otherwise, the economy would fail.

In contrast, the performance model in the public sector is based on effectiveness. Public sector organizations are usually monopolies. The Defense Department, for example, is charged with defending the country, and no alternative organization performs that function. Efficiency should be a concern for officials who use public funds, but effectiveness is paramount. Trying to cut costs in a war, for example, is useless if the outcome means losing the battle.

When the government shifts gears and tries to become more businesslike, as it frequently does, it starts contracting out every function in sight. The result is publicly visible failure, from which the government learns nothing. The latest example is NASA's Mars landing debacle. With the best intentions, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin launched a push to get things done "faster, better, cheaper" by moving work to private industry and minimizing government oversight. He reduced NASA's infrastructure to the point that the agency's role shifted from mainly technical support to contract administration. Since only one NASA exists, it should focus on effectiveness rather than cost savings. But following business's efficiency model for the Mars landing program resulted in failure, albeit at a reduced price. More testing and technical oversight, which would have made the program less efficient, may have made it successful.

A NASA study of the "faster, better, cheaper" policy from July 1999 to February 2000 said the agency is too focused on cost. "We need to slow down some, not rush too quickly into important programs and projects, plan and implement them more carefully, and move away from fixations on cost and near-term gain," the report said.

In sharp contrast to NASA's approach, the Defense Department used the effectiveness model in the Gulf War. Before executing their strategy, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made sure overwhelming forces were in place. This led to a decisive outcome. Could they have done it more efficiently by massing fewer forces and moving sooner? Perhaps, but while they tried to minimize costs, they were chiefly concerned with winning the war.

Despite lessons such as these, federal agencies insist on using the efficiency model as the touchstone of public management. The Defense Department is focused on becoming more businesslike, slashing its infrastructure as quickly as the process will allow. But NASA's study addressed the perils of shrinking the size and competence of in-house workforces. "NASA mission centers must retain the expertise to do in-house projects. This 'corporate history' represents a sustaining expertise that is the foundation for space exploration," the report said. The study suggests one way to retain expertise would be to stabilize funding for the mission centers. Defense officials should consider this recommendation as they try to define and sustain core competencies.

Saving taxpayer dollars is always desirable, but agencies must remember that performing the mission is mandatory.

Restore the Human Touch

James Colvard — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 -0500

he huge institutions of American government are often depicted as populated by nameless, faceless bureaucrats. The problem is that there's truth in this characterization-largely as a result of hoary policies that have depersonalized the civil service. These policies have not been good for civil servants, nor for the public they serve, and it is time to cast them aside.

The civil service system was depersonalized at its inception when rank was based on position rather than the employee. For more than 100 years, classifiers have ruled the human resource domain of the civil service. Decisions about status and pay were made by someone employees didn't even work for and were based on an impersonal standard. In such a system, employees have status only as long as they occupy the position that rates the status. This is in contrast with the military and the Foreign Service, where rank is carried by the individual.

In the civil service system, professional development is predominantly left up to the individual, whereas in career systems, such as the military, the institution assumes responsibility for developing in people the skills they will need. Thus, the federal system was developed as a "job" system rather than a "career" system. The intent may have been objective decision-making and fairness, but the result was depersonalization.

Torn Apart by Technology

Modern technology, which gives us such tools as voice mail and e-mail, further isolates employees and depersonalizes organizations. It is possible today to interact with an organization and never talk to a live human. Even when interacting with a human, people mostly deal with impersonal messages on modern machines. The sense of individual accountability and responsibility is lost in such an environment. Meetings now can be conducted by phone or video-conferencing.
While this is more efficient, it is less personal and perhaps less effective. Also, technology today allows significant telecommuting that can estrange individuals in the same organization.

At the turn of the century, work in this country was dominated by farming. People who farmed worked in isolation all week and congregated for social purposes on the weekend. This led to the popularity of Saturday night at the movies, church picnics and other social functions. Modern employment, starting with factories, created a situation in which people worked together all week and fled each other on the weekend. This has led to the popularity of RVs and going to the beach or other places where families can be alone. As we turn the century, modern technology may re-create the isolation we had at the beginning of the century.

Mismanagement Practices

Modern management practices involving matrix management, integrated teams and contracting out, may well add to the problem. The concept of matrix management is to make special talent available for more than one task. This creates a situation where the talented individual has more than one boss. The task manager worries about the short term, and the supervisor worries about the long term. The employee is caught in the middle. Reporting to more than one person not only creates tension, but also reduces personal association.

Integrated teams, the current rage, are matrix management writ large. These teams apply an employee's expertise to problems that are removed from the individual's core work unit. This objectifies the employee and diminishes the human association of an integral unit. Further, integrated teams reduce the sense of accountability and responsibility for outcomes. This in turn reduces motivation by making the employee feel more an object of expertise than a person.

The rapid movement to contract out government functions has made government employees and contract employees indistinguishable. This reduces the sense of uniqueness and association among federal employees. While federal employees have always dealt with lower pay than their private-sector counterparts and negative public opinion, they share a sense of camaraderie and devotion to public service. This blurring of lines between public and private service further reduces the sense of belonging within the civil service.

Results Rut

A major manifestation of the depersonalization trend is the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. The law is intended to get agencies to define their goals and objectives in a long-term and strategic manner, but in reality it will become a budget control mechanism that further abstracts and depersonalizes operations. It will have the same effect on strategic thinking that position classification had on human resource management. It will become a simple objective abstraction for a complex and subjective process.

The problem is not unique to government. One indicator in society at large is free agents in sports. In the past, local sports teams would develop young players through their farm systems, and fans would become familiar with them as their careers developed. The fans would agonize over their failures and delight in their achievements. Now with free agency, players simply market themselves as a capability. Fans literally need a reference guide to know the players. Further, fans are much less tolerant of failure because they don't see players as individuals but rather as high-priced talent that is supposed to produce-period.

Another societal symptom of depersonalization is road rage. The anonymity that an automobile provides allows behavior that most people would not exhibit if they were recognized and accountable for their actions. The frustration of highway congestion fosters this behavior, and it is becoming the social norm for all too many people.

Meeting the Challenge

Government's management problems trace their origins back to Frederick Taylor's scientific management concept, which is based on the premise that all actions can be quantified and thus everything becomes objective. Humans do not react well to being treated as objects. The challenge within government is to take human institutions that are supposed to serve the needs of other humans-the citizens of the nation-and re-personalize them to make them more effective. Technology compounds the situation and has its own imperative. Future managers must learn to utilize modern technology but give it a human touch. There are no simple answers or quick solutions, but some things can be done.

Organizations should take more responsibility for developing their employees. Their approach must comprise more than supporting employee wishes for training and development opportunities. Agencies must provide employees guidance on what types of career development are consistent with the organization's needs. The agency's commitment must be balanced by employee commitment-a mutual association that further personalizes the organization.

Another initiative would be to replace the current classification system with the Navy-proven broad-banding approach. This system strengthens the relationship between employees and managers by giving the manager more control over the employee's status and pay. This forces a direct personal relationship between the two. While this may not initially be easy for managers who have grown accustomed to hiding behind the depersonalized classification system, experience has shown that it results in better morale and improved working relationships.

Along with broad-banding, competency-based pay should be the basis for raises and promotions. Competency-based pay focuses on employees' skills and abilities rather than the requirements of their positions. An employee may be in a position that merits certain pay and status but not be capable of performing in that position. Once it is established that an individual has the capabilities the organization needs, it is up to the agency to assign the employee tasks that require those skills. But this concept requires agencies to develop new ways of determining employee competency. Such techniques as using assessment centers and promotion boards to evaluate employee records and performance are examples of the tools available.

General management approaches must move away from the hierarchy-based concept with its emphasis on positions rather than individuals. The world of management has changed, and the federal government is going to a new place. But it must develop new leaders to take it to the right place.

James Colvard spent 30 years in research and development for the Navy and was deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management during the Reagan administration. After leaving government, he became associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and he now teaches at Indiana University.

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Savings Can Have a High Price

James Colvard — Sun, 01 Nov 1998 00:00:00 -0500

he current rage in the federal government is to contract out as many functions as possible to save money. The result might be savings, although that isn't always the case, but the concept ignores government's primary requisites-to be effective and efficient. In war, for example, it's useless to lose at half the cost it would have taken to win.

In the high-tech world of defense, decisions about what functions to contract out and what to retain as inherently governmental should be considered carefully. But in this post-Cold War era of downsizing, contracting out has become the preferred solution. While downsizing is a clear necessity and contracting out is a useful and key element in the process, caution is in order.

Not Always a Savings

Public-private competitions are a primary strategy of the Pentagon's Defense Reform Initiative to reduce defense infrastructure costs. But some say DoD is too confident that outsourcing saves money. Depot managers believe contractors low-ball their bids in order to get the work and raise their prices once the competition is eliminated, says Federal Managers Association President Michael Styles.

Managers at 21 Defense depots around the country are protesting an outsourcing initiative aimed at putting 220,000 civilian jobs up for competition with private firms. The services' headquarters told managers to tap more jobs for possible outsourcing this year.

Managers are concerned DoD is jeopardizing its ability to meet its national security mission, Styles says. "The manner in which the commercial activity inventories are being conducted does not instill great confidence in us that efficiency is the paramount goal of this effort," Styles wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary William Cohen.

"There's definitely a misperception that privatization and outsourcing are going to arbitrarily save you a large amount of money," says Patricia Armstrong, a management analyst at the Naval Aviation Depot in Cherry Point, N.C. "Private industry is in business to make a profit. Outsourcing is not always the best deal."

In fact, federal employees recently beat private contractors in a competition for depot maintenance work at a closing Air Force base in California because they could perform the work cheaper. Pending the result of a contractor protest, Ogden Air Logistics Center in Utah won the nine-year, $1.1 billion contract for depot work from Sacramento Air Logistics Center. Over nine years, savings will total $638 million, says Darleen Druyun, Air Force principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management.

In the technically complex world of defense, the inherently governmental functions encompass more than just policy decisions about force structure and missions. They require three key elements: Government employees who can understand military problems in technical terms, who know someone potentially capable of solving them and who can recognize valid technical solutions. The government should promote research and development in its laboratories and centers to help employees understand technology that could be used to solve military problems.

The military program managers who deal with the private sector on engineering development need this knowledge to weigh acquisition decisions. The government should keep enough internal work to sustain its technical capability.

The critical and difficult decision is how much internal activity is needed to sustain technical expertise.

Some argue that the government doesn't need such expertise, because research can be done by universities and development by private industry. They suggest the government needs only to know how to write specifications and oversee contracts. It is not quite so simple. Buying a system that will take years to develop and produce--one that your life may depend on--requires people who can reasonably project performance based on their technical understanding. Thus, government oversight requires more than the ability to read monthly contractor progress reports and evaluate expenditure summaries.

Others argue that the government should maintain, in addition to its research and development capability, extensive in-service engineering and repair capability to ensure their availability in the event of war.

Out of Control

Historical evidence proves there are serious consequences when technical capability is lost or technical advice ignored:

ValuJet lost technical control of its fleet and was grounded after one of its jets crashed in the Florida Everglades in 1996. The company had contracted out all maintenance and lost the ability to recognize its technical troubles. Further, there are reports that the government inspector who monitored ValuJet was not technically qualified.
NASA decided to go through with the doomed Challenger launch in 1986, despite technical advice to delay it because of cold weather's effects on the space shuttle's O-rings. The decision was managerial, not technical. It was reported that the contractor's regional manager suggested to the engineer who provided the technical advice that the company not appear uncooperative, since the contract was coming up for rebid. Barbara Romzek and Melvin Dubnick, authors of American Public Administration: Politics and the Management of Expectations (MacMillan, 1991), say "there has been a shift in NASA from a system of professional accountability, which emphasizes deference to expertise within the agency, to a management system incorporating bureaucratic accountability."
The Navy lost its surface-launched missile engineering capability, at least for the short term, in a defense industry shakeout that followed the Cold War. General Dynamics Corp. operated the Navy Industrial Reserve Ordnance Plant in Pomona, Calif., for years. The organization ultimately moved to Tucson, Ariz., after being shifted from General Dynamics to General Electric to Raytheon. Many people who had worked for years building Navy missiles did not relocate.

General Dynamics' move may have been a sound business decision, but the Navy was left to reconstruct a technical capability that had cost the government billions.

Problems can be devastating when an agency that depends on sophisticated technology moves from a technical focus to a contractual and administrative focus--which appears to be happening at DoD. The Defense Department must be careful not to risk losing control of its technical destiny by jumping too quickly at the politically attractive option of contracting out. Alternative airlines are available to the public, but no alternative Defense Department is available to our country. --Brian Friel contributed to this article.

James Colvard spent 30 years in research and development for the Navy and was deputy director for the Office of Personnel Management during the Reagan administration. After leaving government, he became associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and he now teaches at Indiana University.

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