GSA can compete with IT's 'big boys'
Shereen G. Remez has served in her post as the chief information officer at the
General Services Administration for less than a year, but she has quickly become involved
in the government information technology community.
She is active in the CIO Council and is co-chairwoman of its Capital Planning and IT
Investment Committee.
Remez said she believes technology plays an important role in helping GSA fulfill its
mission. Because agencies use many of GSAs services as they would those of a vendor,
Remez said, she is pushing GSA to operate more like a business.
We need to play like the big boys, she said. GSA needs to use IT to its
advantage in an increasingly competitive federal systems marketplace, she said.
To sell agencies on its services, GSA uses them itself. Next year, for instance, it
will be the first agency to try out the new Seat Management Program.
Remez originally planned a career in psychology. She earned a bachelors degree in
psychology and a masters in education from American University. She also has a
doctorate in human development from the University of Maryland.
But she was drawn into IT through her federal service. She worked at the former Health,
Education and Welfare Department, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National
Archives and Records Administration before joining GSA in 1977 as media director of the
agencys Consumer Information Center. From there she moved to public affairs and then
to the now-defunct IRM Service.
Prior to taking the CIO post, Remez directed GSAs Capital Planning and IT
Investment Program and helped with the agencys year 2000 efforts.
GCN staff writer Christopher J. Dorobek interviewed Remez in her office at GSA
headquarters.
Whats more | | | | | | | | | | | GCN: The Chief Information Officers Council has been around for more than two years now. Are you happy with its direction?
REMEZ: The council has great promise to provide the kind of leadership that is needed in the information technology arena in government. Yes, I think it is the right way to go, and I do think it is on the right track.
Having said that, I think the key to the councils success will be making sure that we focus on those issues that will give the greatest leverage. Theres always a danger in trying to do too many things.
The key is having the right leadership, and I think that the CIOs who have been selected to chair the various committees have provided a great deal of excellent leadership. The strategy is to do most of the work of the CIO Council through the various committees. Its very important that CIOs volunteer to serve in leadership roles in the community. The CIO is a leadership role in the agency, but the CIO Council members are leaders in the government.
Government has certain challenges, and our committees need to be organized around those challenges so that we focus our attention to get the greatest leverage. Our strategic plan needs to reflect the highest priorities within those issues. Thats the key to our success, to make sure all those things line up.
GCN: How do you figure out which areas take priority? For example, the archiving community has always been frustrated that archiving of electronic records never makes the cut. Is that something that should be a priority?
REMEZ: I think dealing with electronic records will be a growing concern. But if you put that up with Y2K or security, you can see why more attention goes to those subjects. It isnt a question of making the cut. Its a question of putting the scarce resources of the CIO Council to work on problems. NARA has done an excellent job leading on the solutions for the electronic record-keeping issue, but we have a long way to go in that area.
Its not a black-and-white, either-or question. Its, where do you get the most leverage? This whole idea of interoperability in government is of particular interest to the CIO Council. You can get a lot of gains if youre able to get systems that traditionally have not talked to one another to exchange information.
GCN: What about the CIO Councils Conceptual Framework for a Governmentwide IT Architecture? How important is it?
REMEZ: At the General Services Administration, we couldnt do what were planning to dodevelop CyberGSAunless we had an architecture. Over a year ago, we got a group to talk about how we could standardize our architecture, align it with our business goals and put a blueprint together so we know how were going to go forward in the next several years.
Government as a whole needs to do this, too. They need to do this not only with the individual bureaus in mind, but they need to do it with an eye toward making the whole government work better and work faster and offer cyberservice to the taxpayers. So I see it as a symbolic and important step that the CIO Council has endorsed a governmentwide initiative in IT architecture.
However, it is going to be impossible to deliver a completely standardized IT architecture across all the departments. What we have to hope for is that we can move toward greater interoperability between the departments and not try to completely develop cookie cutters for the whole government because thats not going to happennot in the near term because of the budget process.
GCN: So you see this as a broad framework for interoperability and then individual agency architectures.
REMEZ: Before we took this look at our agency, each business line had its own architecture. So we would end up with problems when wed try to do something across the whole agency. The same is true with the government.
If we dont work together as CIOs to develop some common agreements and standards on certain technologies that will impact how we reach taxpayers and how they reach us, were always going to come up against these barriers when were trying to deliver something across government.
We want to move toward a vision of a governmentwide architecture. Its not that you can say that the CIO Council endorses a governmentwide architecture and overnight you will see a vast difference in how technology is bought and installed. Its not going to happen that way.
GCN: How do you folks deal with systems security issues?
REMEZ: We have doubled our security efforts in the last year. We are consulting with experts. We are tightening security at the same time we are opening up our agency to communicate better with our vendors and our customers. Its a hard thing, but its not antithetical.
Its like a rubber band being pulled from both ends. Let me go back to this idea of CyberGSA, especially in light of security. Our vision of CyberGSA is that all of our customers will order many of our services through a Web site. Our customers could then pay us and we could pay our vendors electronically.
So were talking about a complete system, soup to nuts. The Federal Technology Service has rolled outon an experimental basisa system called IT Solutions that will do just what Im talking about, and, of course, we have GSA Advantage for ordering products online. So thats our vision for a future where people move electronically through our products and services the same way they move through Amazon.com, although we have many more products and services.
GCN: How do you see GSA changing in the future?
REMEZ: We will be more open. We have three initiatives related to the CyberGSA concept: CyberWork, CyberLearn and CyberShop.
CyberWork means that we are going to be encouraging more telework. Its working any place thats not your traditional office. We are pushing this concept strongly throughout GSA because we can be closer to our customers.
With CyberLearn, were finding that the traditional classroom is not the only way that people learn. Because were all so busy, we dont often have time to take two days out of our schedule to take a course.
Were not going to eliminate traditional classrooms or traditional offices. But with CyberLearn, we are installing a virtual university working with the private sector. Were going to allow our employees to click on courses either on work time or on their own time. They also can be assigned by a manager to take a particular course. The course will allow them to get credit, not just college credit but credit in their personnel files. Many of the courses have exams where you can sign on and take your exam and get your results back immediately. Its much cheaper than going through a traditional process.
CyberShop is all of our activities with GSA Advantage. GSA Advantage program manager Ed OHare is working to expand that. Whats going to happen over the next several years is that online buying is going to grow really big.
We are moving to the future. By not being a mandatory organization anymore, we need to act just like the big boys. This simply means looking around and seeing how theyre dealing with the marketplacethen we do it the same way.
All these ideas did not originate in GSA or within my head, but they come from respected Fortune 500 companies and what theyre doing.
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