Letters

The president also created the Standing Committee on International Affairs to be chaired by a designee of the secretary of State, in this case, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton is responsible for executive oversight of these activities within the department, and he also sits on President Bush's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. The board is chaired by Richard Clarke, the president's special adviser for cyberspace security.

Robert W. Maggi
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs

THEIR LOSS

As a military intelligence veteran, holder of a security clearance and graduate of the Defense Language Institute's basic Korean course, I assumed my skills would be in high demand at civilian agencies. Instead, it routinely took them up to 12 months to contact me after I had submitted my resume. Moreover, agencies often have polygraph and psychological testing requirements that are outdated and questionable. After one such lifestyle polygraph interview I felt so degraded that I vowed never to work in the intelligence field again.

I still love government work and I still love languages. In addition to maintaining my Korean language skills, I am studying Japanese and hope to start learning Chinese. But I will not offer those services to the government.

Name withheld by request

IMPRESSIVE FIGURES

AMS released a study in late April 2002 by the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality. The study tallied benchmark statistics for about a hundred government call centers at the federal, state and local levels. Where there are differences between the government and the commercial sector, they are often the direct result of conflicting purposes. In two very key areas, public sector call centers score very well. They operate on par with their business-to-business counterparts in completing service for the customer on the first call, beating business-to-consumer centers hands-down. And, in caller satisfaction, the public sector scores 10 percent higher than business-to-business operations and 30 percent higher than business-to-consumer centers.

One of the dilemmas in managing customer service operations by phone and the Web is the inconsistency of measures. It's easy to measure how long a phone call lasts, but it's not nearly as easy to figure out when a customer's session on the Web begins and ends. Such discrepancies make it difficult to prioritize improvements and ensure quality service. Help, however, is on the way. Many believe that the launching of "customer data marts" this year will deliver specific answers to online questions in familiar terms. If data marts become widespread, the focus should be on scoring the value of the service delivered, not the traditional measures now used. The days of such performance measures as average speed of answer and the number of Web site hits could well be numbered.

Jeff Ackerson
CRM Technology Program
AMS Center for Advanced Technologies

CHICKEN FEED

In "Pay Gap Doubts" (Executive Memo, July 2001) Daniels said he wasn't "clear yet" about the public-private pay gap. "There seems to be some question about the reliability and the methodology used to determine" the figure, he said.

But in 1990, Congress and the first President Bush had no such questions when the Pay Comparability Act was passed and signed into law. Congress and the president were well aware that the gap was serious and widening. However, the Clinton administration and the budget-conscious congresses of the 1990s ignored the law.

Government employees had high hopes when Janice Lachance became OPM director. As a former spokeswoman for the American Federation of Government Employees, she surely knew how serious the pay gap was. But today the gap is still there, and even larger than when the Pay Comparability Act was passed 12 years ago.

Now we see Daniels hinting that the son of the president who signed the law will, as President Clinton did before him, ignore it. He can do so with impunity because federal law prohibits federal labor strikes, giving workers zero leverage over such unfair treatment. The tragedy for the nation is that when experienced federal employees retire in droves over the next several years, it will be hard to persuade talented graduates to accept federal job offers at an average of 32 percent less pay than they could make in private sector jobs. Only the lesser talented will accept the government's offers, thus making it easily predictable that soon our government agencies will operate less efficiently.

Name withheld by request