Editor's Notebook

ere at Government Executive, our business is providing information about managing in government. On the printed page, we give our readers tools they can use in conducting the government's business. On the World Wide Web, our Govexec.com service contains more resources for readers, enabling them to keep up with current news every day, search our extensive archive of articles, and link to other useful sites. And in conferences and seminars we offer personal training for federal executives and managers.

In this last endeavor, we have joined with the Brookings Institution to present seminars this fall on managing the federal employee discipline and performance process. The seminars proved useful and will be repeated early next year. Last spring, we joined Brookings, the National Performance Review and the George Washington University in producing the second annual Reinvention Revolution conference for federal innovators. The third such conference will be held in late April.

Next month, the same team is producing another venture in continuing education: The Government Technology Leadership Institute. This initiative springs from our conclusion that generalist managers desperately need to know more than they now do about evaluating, initiating and managing information technology projects. One reason is that their agencies depend on the success of these projects to stay on top of their missions. Another is that the law now requires managers to be responsible for IT planning and execution.

In an article titled "Get Wired" (September 1996), we covered new pressures on generalist managers to become deeply involved in IT planning and oversight. Renato DiPentima, for years the Social Security Administration's top IT management expert, told us then: "As I sit here today, close to 200,000 people have actually left government. The pressure on government managers in controlling budget and positions is such that the only thing they can do is to make the people they have left more efficient. They have to substitute capital for labor. The only game is the intelligent use of information technology."

But the game is hard to win, as recent headlines attest. This fall, officials admitted that the pricey Medicare Transaction System wasn't working, and they fired the contractor. We learned about problems with the IRS' Tax Systems Modernization plan, and the Social Security Administration's on-and-off and back-on efforts to make benefits information available on the World Wide Web.

Such systems represent key management challenges for agencies. But too often, the executives and program officials don't know enough to really manage such big projects and smaller ones. That's the knowledge gap the Government Technology Leadership Institute has undertaken to fill. We will give managers the tools they need to be more comfortable in a role increasingly central to the future of every agency-the intelligent application of technology.