This year I was lucky enough to be allowed to be one of the Workshop Co-Chairs for the Management of Change Conference, sponsored by ACT-IAC; with two wonderful co-chairs Goldy Kamali, the Goddess of FedScoop!, and Valarie Burks, from the Department of Agriculture.
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.