This years winner of the Franke Award was recently retired from Government service Jim Williams. Independent of his obsessive Red Sox fandom (is there any other kind of Red Sox fandom come to think of it?), Jim is one of the wonderful people. Jim has represented the best qualities of Government service at least to me. He has been consummate professional, dedicated to achieving the highest possible results, and at the same time a good partner to work with for the private community that supports Federal programs.

I was lucky to get to know him during my time at the US Department of Transportation and am proud to have him as a friend. Now, if we could only cure him of his Red Sox’ism.

Dan Heath’s talk was an interesting one, I am sure my memory and this short summary will not do it justice.

He basically said that there are two aspects to how people react to change. First, there is a rationale perspective which he likens to a rider sitting on an elephant. Second, there is an emotional component which he likens to the elephant the rider is sitting on. He notes when push comes to shove which one is the powerful, the answer being the elephant.

His opinion is that we focus too much on the rider, emphasizing the logic of change. Though we cannot ignore the rider, we need to make sure we pay attention to the elephant.

In simple terms it is important that we explain the reasons for the change in explicit terms so the rider understands. But it is critical that we illustrate for the elephant why it is advantageous to change. He pointed out that the elephant needs that information often in an illustrative fashion.

One example he used was a financial executive who showed using spreadsheets how a billion dollars could be saved over ten years by centralizing purchasing. Almost everyone at the company he worked at ignored him. To prove his point he had his staff go out and get an example of every type of work glove they bought in each of the many divisions in the company. Attached to each work glove he attached the price paid for the glove, which varied not just between different types but even the same type bought by different divisions. He then had all of these gloves dumped in a conference room and invited all of the corporate executives to come to the room. A few months later he was given the authority to centralize purchasing.

I think his points were cogent. The challenge, as usual, is to apply those generic principals to my (or your) specific situations. The value however is that they do provide a context for thinking through what steps to take to cause change.

In this entry I wanted to give a Workshop committee update, encouraging readers to either comment here or send me an email, and also talk a little bit about ACT-IAC.

Management of Change Workshops

Each year Government and Industry IT and associated functional leadership get together to discuss key challenges facing the Government usage of IT. This year the conference is being held in Philadelphia, May 23-25, http://www.actgov.org/EVENTS/MANAGEMENTOFCHANGE/MOC%202010/Pages/default.aspx.

Monday afternoon there will be four workshops, two per session. Our current thinking is to focus on the following four topics:

Panel 1: Increasing Citizen Engagement

One of President Obama’s Technology Guiding Principles is “restoring a culture of accountability through openness and transparency of government operations and information.”  Part of this initiative involves opening communication and increasing engagement with citizens..This panel will bring together individuals from different lines of business and organizations, who have had experience with these efforts to not only discuss their efforts and the technologies used, but also best practices and lessons learned and how to measure whether these efforts have actually resulted in the desired results. 

Panel 2: Top Commercial Practices by the Global 500; Organizer

This panel will present CIOs from global, industry-leading companies discussing their solutions to challenges common to CIOs everywhere. Our plan is to select 3 or 4 topics from the following list to focus on:

• Program management, program managers, project failures
• Budgeting, budget justification, capital planning
• Interactions with executive managers, bringing value to product managers
• Recruiting staff, training staff, retaining staff
• IT Security, balancing risk and cost, publicizing breaches
• Standards, policy enforcement, working with component CIOs
• Oversight, audits, transparency 
• Cloud versus CoBOL – Risk of implementing new versus risk of maintaining old 

Panel 3: Human Capital: To Insource Or Not To Insource?

Today’s political climate has the President and the Congress putting pressure on Agencies to insource contractor jobs, in particular those jobs having to do with acquisition.  OMB is providing new guidelines on what is inherently governmental.  Join panel members as they consider the value added (or not) of increasing the federal workforce.  Gain insight into the challenges associated with altering the federal employee /contractor employee staffing proportions.  Consider the operational and cultural adaptations necessary to effectively move professionals from the private to the public workplace.  Share insights concerning how a partnership of government and industry can contribute to efficiently accomplishing a major workforce transition.  Perhaps, most importantly join the panel in examining possible and probable impacts to agency mission and how to mitigate potential risk to high profile projects.

Panel 4: Innovation and Performance focusing on Sustainability/Green IT focused

The Green IT track provides a forum for presentation and discussion of planned and ongoing Green IT initiatives designed to provide new services, improve operations, and reduce the cost of IT. Topics of discussion include energy efficiency improvement of data centers, green computing initiatives, new communication tools, improved operations of legacy systems, and leveraging new technology.” 

Our Thoughts 

We want these to be much more interactive than in the past. Typically these panels have a moderator and three-to-four panelists. Each speaks for 10-15 minutes, then the audience gets to answer a few questions, with the moderator having a question handy in case everyone is too shy to ask anything. 

We are thinking of doing a debate for Panel 3 picking speakers who will be on different sides of the premise of the panel. For some of the other panels we are thinking about posting a summary of the panelists opinions and pass copies out before and at the workshops. There would be no formal presentation, rather the entire interaction would consist of the audience asking questions or presenting arguments and having the panelists respond. 

What Are Yours? 

What do you think about the topics as well as the areas of focus for Panel 2? Any comments on format? Suggested panelists for any of the panelists? Questions about the Management of Change conference or as it is popularly referred to as MOC? 

If so, feel free to add a comment here or send me an email at dmintz@powertekcorporation.com and I’ll pass your comments on to the organizers of each of the panelists. 

A Final Word About ACT-IAC 

For those of you who have not heard of ACT-IAC, it is a great organization to join if your company hasn’t joined; and participate in if you have not done so. 

You get to interact with great people, learn from serious practitioners inside and outside Government what the real issues are, and how they are grappling to deal with them. 

Perhaps most important you have the chance to make some great new friends. 

http://www.actgov.org/Pages/default.aspx