The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 he position description of the Office Management Specialist (known in the private sector as an administrative assistant, and for- merly known in the Foreign Service as a secretary) is on the verge of a major shift that will shape how OMS personnel are utilized — and treated — for decades to come. That pre- diction should not be surprising for, with the exception of the Information Management specialty, the OMS func- tion has already changed more than any other Foreign Service track over the past 20 years. To be sure, some things remain basically the same. Office Management Specialists still make copies, send faxes, pick up the mail, answer the phones, handle correspon- dence, make appointments, meet and escort visitors, run errands, and do pretty much anything else needed to keep their section running smoothly. But as with their IM colleagues, the ubiquitous desktop computer has transformed OMS work in a crucial respect. Until well into the 1980s — and even today at some posts — most officers hand-wrote cables, memcons and airgrams, which a secretary then typed and sent out on any of many different forms which, every few years, were modified or changed completely. (Senior-level officers sometimes dictated their letters and other documents for a secretary to type.) If the secretary was lucky, she had a self-correcting typewriter to minimize the drudgery; oth- erwise, she had to use correction tape or whiteout. Given how much time Foreign Service secretaries spent typing, until recently it wasn’t unusual for a politi- cal or economic section at even a medium-size embassy to have as many as eight secretaries. By contrast, today even a section in a huge Western European embassy might have just two or three OMSs, as FSOs are now accustomed to doing most of their own drafting. Now Office Management Specialists spend that time on other duties, such as coordinating the annual Mission Program Plan process, tracking reporting and demarche requests, and organizing the Fourth of July guest list. They also have more time to step back and look at how their office functions. Where can efficiencies be gained? Do we need to keep the same procedures in place we have used since the Truman administration? (Surprisingly, often we do.) In short, liberated from the tyranny of the typewriter, Office Management Specialists can make a real institutional dif- ference. Yet More Specialization In the future I see the possi- bility of the Office Management Specialty splitting into two distinct parts: One, the Office Manager, will be the section expert on computer applications such as Excel, Access, Outlook, FrontPage, tags and terms, CableXpress and SIPRnet, Intranet and — perhaps most of all — the Internet. (While the IM staff may be expert on programming and network administration, other personnel still need to be expert in the use of the office software currently avail- able.) One of the most important skills is online research — whether to compile media reports, U.N. “white papers,” congressional biographies or contact informa- tion for host country officials — and information man- agement. More than anything else, an OMS needs to be F O C U S O N F S S P E C I A L I S T S T HE E VOLUTION OF THE OMS F UNCTION B Y L LYWELYN C. G RAEME L IBERATED FROM THE TYRANNY OF THE TYPEWRITER , OMS S CAN MAKE A REAL INSTITUTIONAL DIFFERENCE . T