The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

Former CIO Bruce Morrison spoke of how People- Soft, the largest commercial provider of business software for human resource management, has improved person- nel management after a multiyear investment. “I think the department has a much better grasp of who has lan- guage skills, who has training and experience for a job. It’s also now much easier to use the Internet and Web tech- nologies for all kinds of HR activities, from assignments to retirement to functions like changing your dependent sta- tus. The old system would never have adapted to the Internet.” The department recently used its integrated databases to quickly identify team members in response to the Asian tsunami of December 2004. The vision is to enable all management data to be shared, mixed and matched. For example, embassy pur- chase orders can update the global financial accounting database, and can also feed supply chain software. This is the Valhalla of most large organizations. And like most bureaucracies, State remains far from that goal, partly as a result of uncoordinated and poorly-conceived software decisions made over the previous 15 years. Centralized or Federated? Federal legislation, notably the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and the E-Government Act of 2002, required every agency to name a chief information officer and to central- ize information technology under government-wide stan- dards. But State’s CIO is no czar. The position controls less than half of the relevant outlays, which reside mostly in the accounts of regional bureaus and management bureaus like Consular Affairs, Administration and Diplo- matic Security. New projects require approval by a department-wide executive board, which has not so far been able to secure a comprehensive accounting of bureaus’ expenditures from their operations and mainte- nance budgets. Fulfilling congressional mandates, says former CIO Morrison, “very much colored my tenure, as did the sub- sequent President’s Management Agenda. Compared to prior decades, the department is very centralized.” Morrison recalls an era when each region and bureau spent money on IT entirely as it saw fit. Foreign Service officers often had to learn different equipment when transferring from one post to another, State lost out on economies of scale, and connecting everyone together in a network was impossible. This is a common concern throughout the federal government. During confirmation hearings last October for John Grimes, the president’s nominee for chief infor- mation officer at the Defense Department, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked Grimes to report on whether cen- tralizing DOD’s information technology spending would make the diverse armed services work together better. Levin complained, “We hear constant references to technical difficulties.” The Next Challenge: Reaching Out Arguably, a core challenge in conducting foreign rela- tions in this era is to coordinate more than a score of fed- eral agencies that engage in international operations. Today’s embassies are, in effect, federal buildings where State employees are sometimes in the minority. As the lead foreign affairs agency, State must track DEA agents, Library of Congress functionaries, and military attaches and their support staff in the U.S. at the same time that they handle State’s internal business. That is where the solutions are not all in view, despite the Overseas Presence Advisory Panel’s call for “electronic communica- tions across [departmental] lines.” Not surprisingly, USAID is the agency most closely tied to State through information technology. The two agencies have begun joint infrastructure planning, and last year linked their networks. State employees can now view USAID’s intranet from their OpenNet screens, and vice versa. This has eased electronic communication between all personnel and opened new sources of information to both agencies. It may also enable (if not lead to) shared administrative functions in the future. Other extra-agency business is harder. Paul Christy, deputy CIO for the Foreign Commercial Service, was unsuccessful this year in getting Commerce Department software approved for use on State’s OpenNet computers. At 11 embassies, State Department personnel are carry- ing out commercial services and programs in conjunction with FCS, but they are doing it on individual computers that link back to Commerce’s network. Nevertheless, Christy is upbeat about his experience at State: “State is 10 times bigger than FCS. That means a lot more process and less flexibility in managing the desk- top.” Christy’s office is modifying its applications so that they can be accessed from common Web browsers, which would enable more economic sections to use the com- mercial tools. State needs a way to conduct business with more than F O C U S 24 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5