Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government is finding its campaign to reinvent 32 high-impact agencies requires a firm but delicate touch and lots of collaboration, NPR Deputy Director Bob Stone told GovExec.com in a recent interview.
Last year, the NPR picked 32 agencies for special attention as reinvention impact centers. The NPR vowed to monitor the agencies and help them achieve "stretch goals" to be incorporated into their strategic and performance plans required by the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act.
By the beginning of 1998, NPR had renamed the centers "high-impact agencies," recognizing their high level of interaction with the public and businesses. Vice President Al Gore asked the agencies to set tough goals for themselves in labor-management partnership, information technology use and customer service. The goals appeared in President Clinton's governmentwide performance plan for fiscal 1999 and form the centerpiece of the NPR's new plan to focus 80 percent of its energy on reinventing the high-impact agencies.
Recently, GovExec.com sent writer Jan-Peter Bartels to explore the details of the high-impact campaign with NPR Deputy Director Bob Stone.
Q: How are you going to devote 80 percent of your efforts to high-impact agencies?
A: All of the agencies have committed themselves to performance goals. By the year 2000, for example, OSHA will reduce worker injuries in the 50,000 most dangerous workplaces by 25 percent. The Food and Drug Administration will take a year of the time to approve drugs. The Postal Service will deliver 92 percent of local first class mail overnight. The IRS will have 24 hour day seven days a week tax advice on the phone.
There are for these 32 agencies probably over a 100 of these performance promises. They are all in the budget, most are on the Web sites and they are supposed to be in the agencies' Government Performance and Results Act strategic and performance plans. So, if you say how are we going to deliver, on the promise, primarily, the agencies are going to deliver. So what are we going to do? At NPR, our primary goal, our primary expenditure is in helping.
We have a number of things that we are working on. One is what we call REGO ["reinventing government"] University, which is short-hand for executive learning. There's been some interest from IRS, some interest from Customs, to start with, there's been some interest from EPA, to take senior people through a learning course. That would be one of the techniques.
Q: So, basically, you want to educate their leaders?
A: "Educate" sounds like we know what to do and they don't and we're telling them, so it's not quite the right idea. We want to help them learn. They learn a little bit from us, they learn a little bit from practitioners, they learn a little bit from each other. We want to help them create a learning organization. The second thing we do is help them with information technology. NPR has spent a fair amount of time helping the Treasury Department and IRS develop a new IT plan. We're working now with the Veterans Benefits Administration to help them modernize their data processing. And we're working with the Department of Education to help them automate their student loan process. NPR has some information technology talent and we also have a key to the talent across government and even in the private sector.
Q: So you send them a computer specialist who solves all their problems?
A: No, it does not work anything like that. With the Veterans Benefits Administration, we arranged a meeting between Veterans Benefits and a bunch of information technology companies; we just brought them together. The agencies explained what they needed and the companies decided to get together and help them.
With the Department of Education, we went over there and said, "What help do you need?" And they said, "We need help with security." The basic problem they have is a very widespread problem in electronic commerce: How do you know that the person who says he's Bob Stone really is Bob Stone? And how do we keep John Smith from fiddling with the system, from borrowing money under the name of Bob Stone? They need enhancement of security. We're working with them and with the Office of Management and Budget, with the Executive Office of the President, to facilitate the production of an electronic signature.
We consult with them and help them get to people who have the answers. Some of the agencies are farther along than others. Some are anxious to have our help, I think. Not all will be. But these are a couple of tools that we can use.
The Census Bureau has to hire an awful lot of people and open an awful lot of offices to conduct the 2000 census. They need a special kind of assistance from the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. We've been working with them to get that help from GSA and OPM. We can get to the top people and make things happen.
Another kind of thing than we can do is convene groups that need to work together. We have done that with the agencies that cover security at airports: Customs, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We have gathered them together to collaborate on how to speed passengers through without opening up the borders to drug traffic. They're working together on that.
Q: Many of these ideas sound obvious. Shouldn't the agencies be able to do this on their own?
A: When you show somebody the obvious, it wasn't obvious the day before. Look, we have people here who have colleagues in government, who have enormous experience with the software industry. If you go to a particular agency, they may or may not have experience with the software industry. And if they don't have it, you can't just look in the yellow pages for software industry. Who do you go to? Who do you ask for help? It's possible, but in many cases, like Veterans Benefits, we helped them connect within a couple of weeks, I think. On their own it would have taken them months or years to figure out who to connect with, what kind of help to ask for. So, it's not obvious at all.
Q: When does the NPR decide to intervene?
A: Well, part of what we do is go to agencies and ask them what's on their minds. I went to Joe Thompson, the Undersecretary of Veterans Affairs for Benefits. Joe was one of our reinvention heroes. He ran the Veterans Benefits Administration New York field office when it became our first reinvention lab. I said, "What are your big issues? What do you need help on?" He said, "We need help on data processing. Our data processing is twenty years behind the times. We don't have any time, we don't have any money and how do we catch up?"
So we worked with him. We had a similar experience with Census. We said, "What's your issue?" And they said, "Our issue is how to open hundreds of offices, how are we going to staff up with hundreds of thousands of people?" They can do it without us, but I think it takes longer and does not come out as well.
The government is still organized like an industrial-age colossus. If somebody in Census is having a problem in Sacramento finding an office, they report to their boss, who reports to their boss, who reports to their boss and then they go to GSA and then down to the region and then down to the San Francisco office. It can be a long process for people in one organization who have troubles to connect with people in another organization. We can shorten that chain. We can pick up the phone and call the head of GSA or OPM or IRS or whatever. We can sometimes help in a few days, where it might take otherwise a few weeks.
Q: Are you starting on a certain circle of agencies?
A: Well, there are 32 of them and we need them all to succeed. We do not have favored children. With some of them we have experience with the leadership, with some of them we don't. The commitment is that all of them, all 32, are to accomplish the promises they made. We work with the ones that need our help.
Q: Do some high-impact agencies have goals that aren't challenging enough? Are some better than others?
A: Sure. The government is going through a new experience. Here's the way it works: This is an example, and I'll just pick one of my favorite agencies, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. When GPRA was enacted, OSHA people started asking, "What should we put in our plans, what result are we going to produce?" In fact, they were asked that by congressional committees. One congressional committee said, "You're going to reduce workplace injuries in America, right?" OSHA said, "Wait a minute! That's too big a job for us. We only inspect one percent of the workplaces in America, and a fair number of injuries occur independent of any rules. So don't hold us responsible for the workplaces that we can't inspect as for the injuries that don't come under our control."
That was their first answer. And the answer came back from Congress, "Then what do we need you for?" OSHA said, "Well, that's a good question. Let's think about that, then." Now they've made a commitment to cut injuries 20 percent in the 50,000 most hazardous workplaces. So they've gone down this path from saying, "We can't be responsible for this outcome that is beyond our control," to saying "We will be responsible for this outcome that is somewhat beyond control." So, you asked if some are better than others, I think this is one of the best.
The Food and Drug Administration is going to take a year off the drug approval process.
Some of the goals are less ambitious. What we are finding is that people are looking at their own goals and saying "We can do better than that." Somebody says, we are going to raise customer satisfaction from 70 percent to 80 percent. And as they go through the process of the GPRA strategic plan, they say, "Eighty percent, hey, wait a minute, that means 20 percent of our customers do not like us. We can do better than this." So they are constantly revising upwards.
Q: Are all agencies' goals defined as clearly as this?
A: There is a lot of pressure from us, from OMB and the Congress. Somebody says, "We're going to speed up our process," and I said, many times, "That is not good enough. You have to say, 'We're going to speed it up from one week to one day, or one week to six days,' or whatever, but you can't just say we're going to speed it up." Then they might say: "Oh, we're going to speed it up from one week to six days." Now they're in the game and they're saying, "Well, maybe it ought to be four days." Government agencies have never done this before. They have never said this is what we are going to do and this is how much we are going to accomplish, and this is how we are going to measure it.
Q: "Pressure from us" sounds as though you were more than just helping them. Does that mean you exercise direct influence?
A: Well, we try to help them. We try to help each other. I had people from several agencies and OMB and from NPR trying to use our collective knowledge to get to a better result. I am hesitant to say I helped them. We all helped each other. One regulatory agency gave us their goals and their goals were pretty good, but they didn't have anything to do with partnerships. We said, "Wait a minute, the whole brass of reinvention is to begin working in partnerships. You've got to have a goal that talks about partnerships." And they thought about it and said, "We don't think so." We talked about it some more and they said, "OK, here's a goal that involves partnerships." So, we are pushing.
Q: Do you have a contact person in every agency?
A: The way this started is, I met starting over a year ago with the heads of the agencies and we told them we needed some three-year goals that are part of their GPRA plans and they told us who to work with.
Q: What influence can you have on their ideas and goals?
A: The goals are theirs. We don't write them for them. But as I said, we keep pushing. We talk to them, we coach them, we argue with them. Ultimately it's their goal. They don't work for me, they don't report to me. And if I could write a goal, it wouldn't be something they would have committed themselves to.
Q:How many NPR people deal with each high-impact agency?
A: Each of the high-impact agencies is in the responsibility of one of our teams. So we have somebody assigned to all 32 agencies. We have eight teams, and six of the teams have responsibility for a number of agencies. For example, the information technology team is responsible for GSA, the Postal Service and the Veterans Benefits Administration; and the safety and health team is responsible for the Federal Aviation Administration, FDA, EPA and OSHA. So we have clear responsibilities here.
Q: Does the NPR have goals of its own?
A: Yes. Well, our goal is that we are trying to develop more specifics. We are part of this process. One of our goals is to make sure that the agencies deliver. Our ultimate goals are to provide better service across government and to teach these techniques, to lead the agencies towards more streamlined organizations, to create partnerships, safer food, safer air, safer workplaces, fewer people on the welfare rolls. Those are our goals.
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