The February 23 Forum panel featured:

Ira Hobbs, CIO, Treasury (Hobbs Complete Comments)

Barry West, the Chief Information Officer, Director of Information Technology Services Division at FEMA (West Complete Comments)

Jack Penkoske, Director for Manpower, Personnel and Security at the Defense Information Systems Agency (Penkoske Complete Comments)

Glenn Schlarman, Chief of Information Policy and Technology Branch, Office of Management and Budget (Schlarman Complete Comments)

Lou Anne Brossman, Director of Marketing at Juniper Federal Systems.  (Brossman Complete Comments)

Jim Flyzik, The Flyzik Group: Moderator
 

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COOP Within Federal Government

Mobilizing and Organizing Your Organization

Coordinating With The Private Sector

Telework

Virtual Headquarters

The Future

COOP Within Federal Government

Jim Flyzik: During today’s show we will first discuss critical issues facing government and industry leaders in the area of contingency planning and disaster recovery and then some issues around teleworking. We will then explore the idea of telework as a means of addressing continuity of operations planning.

With me on the show today are Ira Hobbs, the CIO of the Treasury Department, Barry West, the Chief Information Officer, Director of Information Technology Services Division at FEMA, Jack Penkoske, the Director for Manpower, Personnel and Security at the Defense Information Systems Agency, Glenn Schlarman, the Chief of Information Policy and Technology branch, Office of Management and Budget, and Lou Anne Brossman the Director of Marketing at Juniper Federal Systems.

Let’s kick off with the issue of continuity of operations planning within federal agencies today. First we had 9/11 and the terrorist attacks, then a series of presidential directives requiring agencies to develop continuity of operations, continuity of government plans. Then the devastation of the hurricanes this past summer/fall.  How are agencies doing in preparing themselves for future episodes such as these? Let’s ask each of our panelists. Let’s start with Ira. Ira, tell us a little bit about Treasury and how Treasury is doing in preparing for disasters such as these.

Ira Hobbs: Good afternoon, it’s a pleasure to be participating on this panel. We are probably never as good as we think we are but clearly over the last couple of years, I’ve seen an increased effort in the area of continuity of operations and planning. Clearly more effort is being put into planning, but not just planning itself in terms of sterile documents that are on the shelf, but in terms of actually practicing what it is that we are planning. People are really taking the time and the effort to understand their roles and the criticality of it. I think the workforce as a whole has come to understand that this is going to be a part of our future. Not near term but long term and the better we are at it, the better we are going to be able to respond and instill a sense of confidence in the American public that we know exactly what we are doing, that we are doing it well, and that we are looking out for those things that are essential. So I think that continuity of operations planning is becoming one of those areas that we are going to excel in, that we will do very, very well and that we are practicing to make sure that when that emergency, or that situation comes, that we can respond in a way that reflects well on the planning and thought that have gone into this area within our department.

Jim Flyzik: Well thanks Ira, well said. Glenn, what is OMB’s role in continuity of operations and I guess your government oversight role combined with looking at these issues on a government wide basis?         

Glenn Schlarman: Yes, that’s right Jim, thank you for inviting me. This is a terrific opportunity for the government to get the story out. I have to add, though, to some of the things that Ira said. Certainly there is a lot of activity, a lot of planning, and I agree, some testing. All the plans in the world, as you know, aren’t any good unless you do test them and in a potential operational realistic environment, can you still conduct business? Whether it’s though a remote location, home, or outside centers, I think that’s where we just don’t know. And across government we do see a lot of planning; we do see a mixed bag.

Jim Flyzik: Barry West, obviously FEMA, there’s an awful lot of churn (??)   Around FEMA and the overall role that FEMA plays, and I’m sure it’s a major priority for you. Can you tell us a little bit about inside FEMA and how this issue is being addressed?          

Barry West: Good morning Jim. Our national security group within FEMA is actually the lead in this area, and we actually go through various exercises. In fact this morning going into work we actually did a test and I got paged, so we actually go through tests quite a bit. We have our executives issued government issued computers and we actually have two COOP facilities off site that we actually go to. So we do look at ourselves as one of the leaders in government not only showing what you can do with COOP but also making sure agencies have the information and provide the framework to make COOP happen.

Jim Flyzik: That’s great. You and Lou Anne both brought up that testing issue and if we have time later, we can go back and re-explore that but  I have some statistics up here talking about the fact that a lot of companies talk about this issue as being a priority, but yet fall short in terms of resources and testing and so forth. But anyway, talking about industry, Lou Anne, perhaps you can give us a private sector take on all this. Can you tell us a little bit about things from your perspective?

Lou Anne Brossman: Thanks Jim and Juniper is very pleased to be involved in this panel of very distinguished individuals, so we are happy to be here. Juniper Networks is fortunate just because of the technology that we develop that we have the secure systems, secure remote redundancy systems be it routers, or firewalls so that specifically when it comes to continuity of operations, we’ve got remote access that we use across the company, globally.

Also because Juniper is a global company and we do have people that are out of our office more than in our office, then we obviously have got the systems installed that work very well from secure standards of letting people work remotely, which is really what it is all about when I stop and think about COOP.

So Juniper has a very solid foundation there. We also spend a lot of time looking at what the industry is doing, we do a lot of surveys, taking a look at both private and pubic sectors as far as what they are doing today for their continuity of operations and then we provide that information back out to the federal government agencies to help them as well.

Jim Flyzik: Great, great, we need that public-private partnership in everything we do. Jack, this has played a major role across all of the DOD elements and components. I’m sure this issue is high on your list of priorities also. Can you give us a little insight into the DISA plans in this area?

Jack Penkoske: Be glad to. Good afternoon Jim. If I can echo some of what the other panel members have said we have a number of COOP facilities and we have placed a really high priority on that and I think the key thing is since September 11 it has become much more real. Before that, probably unfortunately, management and the workforce didn’t pay as much attention to it. But now as we test things everybody is extremely involved. We have sophisticated evacuation plans; we have a shelter in place program for the workforce. We also have some experiences with hurricane Katrina, we have a workforce in Slidale (??), where we had to provide safe havens and things like that, so I think we have increased dramatically and have come up with a lot of lessons learned. Probably the one down side is that we probably learn the most when there is a real disaster and we find out where we have the gaps in things and we incorporate those into our plans but I think we are on the right track. We still have to continue to re-enforce all the time but the programs that we have in place have already been well tested.

Mobilizing and Organizing Your Organization 

Jim Flyzik: Well said, thanks. Let’s explore a couple of the points that we are bringing out. I know I’ve read some data center manager surveys, I’ve seen some statistics where some of the difficulty around this issue is it takes pretty much the entire organization mobilized, when you think about lifting your organization up and reconstituting operations elsewhere, it takes an effort across an entire agency and the question then of who’s in charge and who’s leading the effort and so forth, gets to be one that’s difficult to sort out. But I wonder if the panelists wouldn’t mind addressing that. Let’s go in the opposite direction this time. Let’s start this time with you Jack and we’ll work our way back across the table. In DISA, is this an issue or is there a clear idea of how to go about pulling this together for the whole organization.

Jack Penkoske: I think that’s a good question Jim. Without being able to go into a lot of real specifics on it, I think we do have it clearly defined. We have clearly defined roles and responsibilities regardless of which location it might be, as you said, who is in charge, what the functions are, and even related to that we try to practice that too, to do it from time to time. If I had answered that question prior to 9/11 I’d probably give you a different answer, but now, at least in our agency, those roles and responsibilities are pretty well established and I think we would be able to respond quite well.

Jim Flyzik: I think you made a very good point there, that proactive/reactive role, I think we grew complacent and that things like 9/11 and the hurricane season have shifted it from a reactionary position to a more proactive stand point. Lou Anne, do you have anything to add to that from Juniper? Is there a clear idea on how we go about doing this?

Lou Anne Brossman: Absolutely. One of the things that I recognized recently when I was putting together thought leadership plans for COOP within the federal market, I realized that there wasn’t a good study available in the federal government today that offered best practices across the country, and even globally for that matter, of how private organizations and sectors are taking care of these plans and so we will be launching at IPIC?? in March a study that I think will help everybody in the federal government because it talks about how the private sector is putting together these COOP plans. So Juniper, as I mentioned earlier, really spends a lot of time in providing that value in best practices.

Jim Flyzik: We’ll look forward to that study. We’re going to take a short break and then we’ll hear from our other panelists on this subject matter.   

(break)

Jim Flyzik: Prior to the break we were discussing the issue of continuity of operations and disaster recovery planning and the fact that it is often times difficult to mobilize across an agency because it takes pretty much all components of an agency to really put a plan in place. It’s not something that’s done with any one component and we were getting some perspectives on this from our various panelists. We were up to Barry West. Barry can you address that issue and give us an idea of how FEMA would address this?

Barry West: Yes, Jim, we actually went through this about a year and a half ago when we lost an isolated transformer at our FEMA headquarters and we actually had to COOP our entire organization, the power was out for two days. So we actually COOPed to our Mount Weather facility and within six hours with the efforts of our national security group, the facility’s HR and IT we had everybody up and running. This was a lot of effort, a lot of planning clear down to busing the folks to the actual facility and getting them back to a certain location at night. We did have plans in place, we had practiced these, but this was a case where we actually had to follow through and do it. And it worked.

Jim Flyzik: That is so true that trial by fire can actually…. That reminds me of the old fire drill. When you hear about the fire drill it’s going to be later on at 2 o’clock, everybody is positioned and ready to go, but when the alarm goes off and you don’t know it’s a drill, it’s a little bit different issue. So, nothing like testing under fire. Glenn, I guess from OMB perspective the issue within OMB is that you are working across government too. Is there a government lead, or an egovernment program lead in this area?

Glenn Schlarman: Well I think that what Barry said in many respects, FEMA is a continuity of operations lead and I think it’s called Federal Protective Circular 65. I don’t want to get too technical here. Anyway, there are leads for components; I think it’s not the guidance or the lack of leadership I don’t believe that is a problem. Again, going back to what everybody’s saying that they tested the plans. I also want to distinguish between short term recovery and long term operations. I think there’s a big difference.

The national plan has done a terrific job, Ira’s former area, (??) the Department of Agriculture after Katrina, they cut over to their remote data center without missing a beat. No checks were missed, they processed as if nothing had happened. That was terrific. Could that be sustained over an extended period time, weeks, months, a year in the case of contaminated building I suppose or a destroyed building, could the business operations be reconstituted and sustained over time, that’s a question I have.

So if it’s a short term incident recovery, I have no question that we are good with communications that we can continue to operate. Juniper and others have done a terrific job of providing to us the resiliency in our networks, but it’s the people and if we were truly a paperless office anywhere in the government, I’d feel better. If we were truly a meetingless office anywhere within the government I’d feel even better. My issue is long term sustainability when a building is contaminated and cannot be reoccupied.

Jim Flyzik: I like that term resiliency. Perhaps we’ll come back and explore that a little bit as a word other than protection. Because often times it’s difficult to protect everything and so the question is how do you get back to the same state. Before we go there, let’s hear from Ira at the Treasury Department. Ira, how is this coordinated across the Treasury Department with many, many geographically dispersed organizations?

 
Ira Hobbs: I think I’m going to echo some of the same comments that have been made by my colleagues here today, and that is that we do a far better job of coming together and starting to think more holistically about how we would recover from some of these situations both short term and also the long term. It’s more than just coming together.

There’s the recognition that it is the sum total of our individual pieces that make our whole plan strong and so there is more recognition given to understanding not only the business element of what we are trying to reconstitute, but the infrastructure requirements that are necessary to make that work. So what you have is, you are seeing a much better total understanding of the organization as a whole and how it supports itself.

And the other piece that Glenn mentioned that I think is very critical is that we are engaging all of the people, not some of the people, but engaging the entire organization so that everyone is very clear about their role. That level of personal engagement goes beyond the technological aspects, the infrastructure aspects, of what we are trying to do but it really does create a common sense of purpose, a common understanding of what we are trying to do and in most instances for me that is the saving grace in all of this.

The commitment what you see from the people who are involved in this, as they understand their roles and the roles of their colleagues, they are in a  much better position, not only to carry out their tasks, but if there is even more of a catastrophic situation than we may be aware of, they are able also to perform other tasks because they know what should have been done or what needs to be done by other people from a different area and that is the greatest way to help each other.

Coordinating With The Private Sector 

Jim Flyzik; Great, thanks Ira. I want to ask another question here, one which adds even more complexity to this issue. The National Infrastructure Protection Plan is out and it talks about 80% of the nation’s critical assets are actually owned by, in the hands of, the private sector, and if you take a look at what government agencies are doing, we quickly realize that we are relying on the private sector for a lot of critical functions that they place in agencies. So my question for the panel is how is that coordination with the private sector taking place, is it taking place, and how do you go about addressing that dependency going on there, your suppliers and trust in your suppliers and so forth. Let’s go in a random order this time. Barry, do you want to kick that one off for us?

Barry West: Yes, actually Jim what we do, especially in an all hazardous situation or any type of event, if it’s large enough, and it’s a presidentially declared disaster, we actually have the national communications system kick in, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. We work hand in hand with those folks and also GSA gets involved. They have a very close working relationship with the private sector and they keep continuous meetings looking at inventories, assets, communications throughout the year, just not during the time of an event. In our case the NCS is really that armed (??), it reaches down to the private sector.

Jim Flyzik: Jack, let’s jump over to you. What’s going on over at DISA?

Jack Penkoske: I think Jim you used the term dependency on the private sector, we would refer to it as a partnership with the private sector because really everything we do within DISA, we partner with the private sector on every system, in every program that we are working on, and what we are doing in the area of COOP with the infrastructure and that is really just a natural extension of everything else that we are partnering with the private sector. It works very well and fits into our strategy very well.

Jim Flyzik: Great and I like that term partnership too. Thanks for setting the record straight. Better word. Ira, how do you work with the private sector?

Ira Hobbs: Well, clearly, one of the issues that OMB keeps our feet to the fire on is this notion of critical structure retention (hard to hear) and so I think that one of the things that’s very critical that you pointed out is knowing and understanding who does what, where, when, and that is very critical as we, on the federal government side, reach out to our industry partners. We are partners but there is an interdependency that exists between us and so it’s a very helpful relationship in terms of knowing who we have to work with in ensuring that the lines of communication and collaboration that are necessary to make sure that we are able to be each others’ helpmates in that partnership are established.  I think that we do a very effective job with that, the critical infrastructure protection program is growing, I think we have a much better understanding of it, which again I believe is key to everything we do, that understanding, and so there is a tremendous effort on our part to reach out and we are seeing the same response coming from our industry partners.

Jim Flyzik: Great. Glenn, got any perspective on this?

Glenn Schlarman: I think we are all singing Kumbaya here. I think there really is. I’ll term it critical infrastructure (hard to hear)…resources whether it’s owned by or used by the government and provided by industry. I think the agencies are certainly doing a lot of work and some of it is outstanding, terrific, and it has come a long way since presidential directive 63, another number here, and it’s because of the recognition that getting an inventory of information that people with technology to help the people move and use the information and so we have a complete picture and we see what the architecture looks like now, and the architecture is the entire business process, and I think that agencies large and small, we shouldn’t ignore the small agencies because they do a lot of business that’s extremely important, but I think by and large we are light years ahead of where we were five years ago.

Jim Flyzik: Lou Anne, a slightly different way to look at it, how would Juniper, in secure supply chains and trusted partners and these kinds of issues. Is there some process, some procedure, can you add some thoughts to this matter?

Lou Anne Brossman: Yes, as I was sitting here and hearing your panelists the thing that came across my mind, and this is not unique to Juniper by any means, I think it’s safe to say across the board for the larger technology organizations as well as the smaller companies is that there are three words that come to mind: partnership, relationships and collaborations. So the way that we look at our customers is as a relationship because obviously it’s not going to be successful it’s not, both at a professional level and it’s sometimes at a personal level and knowing that you can pick up that 4 by 7 phone and have that person on the other end from the manufacturer come in and help you. There have been many, many times that I have met with engineers that have camped out with a sleeping bag at the customer site, helping them to get through whatever issues they are having to get through in those moments of crisis. So I think that across the board that’s the safe thing that I think the government should know is that the vendor community is your partner and we are in tight collaboration. We know your systems because a lot of times we built them and we are there for you.

Jim Flyzik: Well said. Well done. We are going to shift the discussion over to telework but before we do that we are going to take a short break.

Telework

Jim Flyzik: (welcome back, repeat of intro of panelists) We’ve been talking about the continuity of operations and I’m going to shift the subject over to talk a little bit about teleworking and the concept of telework. It seems like such an obvious good idea and it seems intuitively obvious that the business case is strong that telework makes sense. In the private sector I hear stories all the time about compelling and major success stories, yet in my opinion, and you can correct me if you think I’m wrong panelists, in my opinion it seems like the government is constantly reenergizing this issue, trying to push it forward, we are just struggling to take full advantages of telework. Panelists, I’d like to get your thoughts on that, if you agree with me first of all and if you don’t, or if you do, tell me what’s holding it back, let’s hear your comments. Let’s start with Jack.

Jack Penkoske: Yes Jim, we are real excited about what we are doing in DISA on telework. We have had a program in place for a long period of time but we have just recently expanded it to where, with supervisory approval, employees can telework two days a week. And that is also open to supervisors and managers and if you factor in alternate work schedules, that means that employees, again with supervisory approval, can be away from their work site for 5 days out of every 10 days. And we view this as a big part of our recruitment and retention strategy for the future.

One of the things that we are facing is that our headquarters in Arlington is going to be relocating to Fort Meade. That seems like a short distance but commuting is a big thing, as everybody knows, in the national capital region.

So if we can offer these kinds of alternative ways for employees to work, with more teleworking, and teleworking can be at another distant location, it can be at home, an established telework center, we think that it’s going to make it very attractive for our workforce to stay with us, and to bring new people into the workforce.

Actually, and we are very excited about this, this is only an interim step, the two days a week. We are looking at other options to expand it beyond that. We are also looking at different ways, can we put more high speed systems into the employees’ homes as a next step, teleworking in a classified environment, so we are trying to open it up.

Because again I think for the federal government to be competitive in the future, we are going to have to do a lot more of this kind of alternative opportunities for the workforce. So we are real excited about it in DISA. The new policy that I mentioned, two days a week, is in its infancy stage, the workforce is ecstatic about it and we are just excited about what it’s going to do for the agency for the future.

Jim Flyzik: Boy, that’s great Jack, and I like your enthusiasm too. I think that’s what we need is that sort of positive attitude towards this issue. Barry, how about FEMA? FEMA has some very interesting issues you need to have people deployed in all kinds of locations from time to time. Does telework make sense there, is there anything going on?

Barry West: As a matter of fact there is, there are things going on. We actually do have teleworking I think it depends on the job that’s doing the teleworking, but surrounding this are key issues. One is policy. You’ve got to have a solid policy in place for your employees to fall back on. Also union issues, you’ve got to get your union engaged in something like this.

Some other things that have come up with us, with FEMA, is that we’ve decided to go with only government issued computers for folks that telework because of some of the security issues with people using home computers versus government issued. So we’ve actually had some good success with that. It’s been an expenditure that we’ve had to build in, obviously, having to buy a computer for every employee.

We use a remote access tool called an I-pass (??) which is encrypted, we use a three tier architecture for getting into our network and we feel that it’s a very solid network and it’s a way to go when you are doing something like teleworking.

Jim Flyzik: Great. Ira you’ve been known, I think, as being a leader in workforce issues across government for quite some time now. I know you have a passion for the people and you have a passion for workforce issues and how about telework in the Treasury Department?

Ira Hobbs: Jim, I think the jury is still out on telework for the federal government. And I say that for a couple of reasons. Number one I think that there are pockets within the government where teleworking is working very well and I think that there are other pockets of the government where portions of telework like what they call where people on special projects may work at home for a while but the firm regular set schedule has not yet become a staple in the government’s program with respect to telework.

I think that it will and I think for the reasons that were mentioned as well by the colleague from DISA and as the government seeks to become the employer of choice, these are options that are readily available in other segments of our society and the economy, and we are going to have to adapt if we are going to get the right kinds of people and be able to keep the right kinds of people. This is an incentive area that we are going to have to do a lot more work in.

I think by and large there is a desire and a will but you know the government is not necessarily always a leading edge changer but we come up strongly in the rear. That’s generally our strong suit that once we do firmly make that commitment to implement you are going to see there is a big wave across government. It’s going to need some retraining especially for supervisors and managers who are accustomed to having everyone clustered. It’s going to be different in terms of how we evaluate, how we provide support, how we infuse technology.

I think that the government tends to move slowly, but the government tends to get it down, and the government tends to do it right. So I think that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface with respect to telework but that it will become a very important part of the government toolbox with respect to recruitment and how it deals with the retention of its work force.

Jim Flyzik: Very well said. Glen is there any kind of government wide look at this? Is your office involved in anything of this type in this area?

Glenn Schlarman: Well, I have two ways to answer this, one is professionally and one is personally, and the latter being far more important than the former. A government wide look certainly to promote telework and a lot of the issues that Ira has worked on as co chair of the CIO council workforce committee and chief human capital officers, that’s where the leadership comes from, the folks that understand the people and understand the programs that need to be supported, either telework or in the office, so there’s no lack of leadership.

Ira mentioned a couple of important things and one I’d put in is culture. Middle management, we haven’t bred risk takers in the government, in the middle management ranks, and until they are willing to take the risks, invest in the opportunity, to give their employees the opportunity, then it’s not going to happen on a regular basis.

Now, personally I teleworked for the entire summer of 1998 after I adopted my two boys. I worked at OMB and OMB was a great advocate of this except that at noon they say, hey, you come in at one for a meeting. It’s kind of tough when you are 20 miles away. Anyway, I did it and it was really, really difficult for me. Fortunately my boss at the time (name) was a risk taker and it worked for our relationship and it worked for our particular needs. Whether it works for all I can’t say, but personally it worked, but it was tough, and professionally I now have a different perspective when people say well we can’t do it. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t.

Jim Flyzik: Good point. Your personal experience. I’ve had conversations with Bruce and with others when I was in government and we used to say,  people talk about that trust issue and the adage I used to like was if you want trustworthy employees, the first thing you have to do is trust them. It always seemed to be that culture issue got in the way. Lou Anne, do people at Juniper telework?

Lou Anne Brossman: Absolutely. We are fortunate that the products that we sell allow us to do that very easily and remotely and seamlessly and securely and so we do. And I just want to add on to what all these gentleman have said and say that I held a focus group a few months back with midlevel managers and right across the board, all of them agreed that they weren’t in favor of teleworking as they would lose control. So it is obvious that some education needed to happen.

So going back to our leadership discussions, something that is needed, something that we are bringing to the market today is that, is tool kits specifically geared towards federal midlevel managers talking about that you don’t need to worry, that the information is secure coming from that end solution, but more importantly, here are the benefits, here are the statistics, it’s proven by statistics that workers are more productive at home because they are happy workers.

So that is something that we are putting a lot of emphasis and a lot of focus on right now and because Juniper is a global company, we are all over the world using our Blackberries wherever we can and also teleworking very effectively.

Jim Flyzik: Great. Well it seems like we are in violent agreement up here that it makes sense, it’s just a matter of moving the ball a little further and getting some momentum behind the issue. When we come back we are going to now blend together the two topics we have been talking about. We are talking about continuity of operations and we will be talking about telework as a means to address those continuity of operations plans and we’ll do that right after we take a short break….

Virtual Headquarters

Jim Flyzik: Welcome back. We’ve been talking about continuity of operations planning and we’ve been talking about telework and now we are going to explore the blending of the two issues. A story I like to tell, as I remember in Washington DC here when we have predictions of snow storms and everyone jumps in their car and you have traffic tie ups going to work and everyone gets to work late and then it snows a little more and OPM goes through its dismissal process, letting some folks out early and so forth. And of course the entire time that people are at work, what do they do, they talk about the snow storm. So in actuality, if you look at the productivity on a day like that, and you contrast that with what the productivity could be on a day when you said this is a work at home day, what the difference in productivity might be for the government. Then let’s take this into a disaster scenario, or an event happening, where perhaps a headquarters location is not available for whatever reason.

And if we look today at what is going on in telecommunications and with internet protocol and converge communications, it seems like a likely next step in addressing COOP issues would be that in the event that we have a problem at a  primary location, could we reconstruct a virtual office, if you will, from home locations. I think that idea is getting a lot of thought in the private sector. I’m hearing a lot of forums and discussions about a virtual headquarters with individuals from home. I’d like to get the panelists perspectives on that. Is that something that’s been on the table for you? Is that something you’ve been talking about? Let’s start this time with Glenn from OMB.

Glenn Schlarman: Well, I think it’s a great question and it’s good to wrap up with it because it does take into consideration everything we’ve said and it does get back to my short term versus the long term issue that I don’t think the problem, if there is  a problem, I don’t think the problem is short term, I think it is long term, and we’ve all discussed testing the plan and we’ve all discussed telework as a general theme, so isn’t the test of the long term plan to conduct business over telework every day, 365?

That’s your test, to conduct business remotely, when an event happens, it’s just like every other day. I mean without the personal losses and things like that. If you telework as a routine thing, when an event happens then you know you are ready.

Jim Flyzik: Jack, tell us about DISA.

Jack Penkoske: Jim I like your analogy about the snow days except for the lack of productivity. We do something related to that. We do have people who telework on an established  regular basis but then we also have what we call Ad Hoc telework where on a snow day or some other kind of situation the employees can telework and it’s already pre-established that they just do it, it’s been put into place in advance.

And that fits nicely into our COOP planning too because with that we do have some people who have pre-established responsibilities but then a good portion of the workforce would just be at home. We do have some experience with that. Probably just a microcosm, but during hurricane Katrina we have a facility in Slidell that was impacted and we had to do some of that. Some of our employees stayed in the facility to ensure the central operations, but we had some other employees that were in safe havens in another government facility or some place else within DISA and then we had other employees that were at home for an extended period of time. It fits in. Teleworking and COOP, you have to have both in order to be effective for the future and test it, but then try doing some of it now, real life.

Jim Flyzik: Ira, how about Treasury. When we speak about COOP and teleworkers, is anyone thinking about how they are inter-related, how one might be able to support the other?

Ira Hobbs: Jim, I think that it’s not an issue that people are thinking about, it’s an issue that people are doing something about. Clearly teleworkers are a very important tool in the arsenal when you start to think about when you have a headquarters building with 1500 - 3000 employees and all of a sudden something goes wrong there, you can’t just redeploy all those people to another building across town. Number one, we don’t have the time or the money to maintain that kind of duality in facility, so teleworking becomes very important.

I’d like to take Glenn’s point though, and that is, the more we practice teleworking, the easier it will be to integrate telework as part of our COOP programming -- because we are building that infrastructure.

Right now we’ve done a good job, Barry mentioned a little earlier this morning about how he was sitting in the back room there and the phone went off and it was the FEMA emergency network calling and saying, had there been an actual emergency you would have been directed what to do. I think we’ve done a good job in terms of utilizing devices in that sense. I think that the next evolution in that step is really creating it so that when you get that notification you can immediately become productive in terms of dealing with whatever that situation is as opposed to going out and getting in a car and driving 15-20 miles into town or to some other remote location.

I don’t think we will ever be able to cut that out because you’re going to have some people come together in a face to face environment but as far as how we handle it, the whole workforce, the full workforce, what a lot of us used to call the essential employees, I think we are going to be doing more of that from a networked dispersed environment that’s akin to telework as opposed to everybody driving to a single facility.

Jim Flyzik: Great. Barry, before I ask you, we are going to take another short break and then we are going to come back with a wrap up session but I’d like to hear your take on that same issue and then maybe ask the panelists to give a little thought to future ways you see some of these issues going and do we see our country becoming in a better position to be able to reconstitute a steady state whether it be telework or not. But before we do that, we are going to take a break…

(break)

Jim Flyzik: Welcome back. We are talking about continuity of operations and teleworking and perhaps how teleworking can support a continuity of operations plan and before the break we heard from some of our panelists. Before we leave that issue I wanted to hear Barry West. Barry, over at FEMA is this something that’s being looked at?

Barry West: Yes, it’s actually being done, Jim, we look at COOP and telework as two concepts that can work hand in hand. I want to echo some of what the other panelists said about how that should work. We have mandatory folks that do need to face to face when they COOP for whatever reason due to mission requirements, but that can’t be said for all employees. For example, at FEMA we have what we call emergency response groups. We have red teams and blue teams and those teams alternate depending on what month it is. The folks that fall outside of those teams could be the teleworkers. And if you’ve got the proper policy and funding and the security pieces in place, it will work and that’s what we are actually doing now at FEMA when we actually implement COOP, working on our training processes.

The Future
 

Jim Flyzik: Great. What I’d like to do now panelists as we move to where we are wrapping this up this afternoon, talking a little bit about the future and the point that was brought up about resilience is a good place to think about it. When you think the American people a sense of security…. As you look across the awesome task to try to protect everything in a continuity of operations plan, it becomes a daunting task.

Yet I think that what we want is a feeling of security that we are resilient. We can recover and get back to a steady state within a relatively short period of time. In light of the lessons learned from the terrorists attacks and now the hurricanes, I’d like each of the panel to give me your thoughts: are we getting there as a country, looking out to the future, is there anything you can say about that vision of what the future will look like? Ira, let’s start with you, what are your thoughts in this area?

Ira Hobbs: I’m not going to try to talk about the whole country Jim, I’m going to try to talk in the context of my little world and I’m going to try and talk a little bit about disaster recovery. I think the recent events that have happened in our time have made all of us individually much more cognizant about personal safety and safety on the job. And what I tend to see is a much higher level of personal engagement by our employees as it relates to the physical environment that they are in and understanding what it is that they are supposed to do in order to keep that environment safe. So I think that that is a huge step forward in terms of are we going to get there? Are we going to be resilient? Yes I believe that we are. Because people are taking it seriously. Right now it’s a little simple thing to be able to take for granted. Hey, you don’t have your badge on today, how do I know that you are who you say you are? Small things like that. We joke about it but it is evidence that it is on folks’ minds. I believe that we are taking the necessary steps that are humanly possible. That’s not to say that we are going to get everything but we are trying to understand what the priorities are, make plans for those priorities, engage everyone who needs to be engaged and we are practicing. Those are the fundamental keys I believe that will make us much more secure in our organization and hopefully that level of security will spread to others within our organization and we will have that level of resiliency that we will need to make sure that when it comes we can respond and respond in a very effective way.

Jim Flyzik: Great, well said Ira and obviously you are on top of the issue, not too good now, you don’t want to show up that prior CIO over there of the Treasury Department  (laughter). We are down to just a few minutes and I’ll ask each panelist to make just a brief comment on this issue and we will wrap this up. Jack, very quickly.

Jack Penkoske: I would echo what Ira said. We are getting much better, but we can never let our guard down. We have to keep improving in that area and I think we’ve got to foster to do that. Just one quick comment on wrapping up on telework because I think it is a key enabler to all the things we are talking about. There are challenges with it related to systems technology and those things and I think we touched on this, the real issue is breaking down the cultural issues because it can be done, it can be very effective for the future and we’ve even changed our paradigm on the kinds of positions that we can use for telework. If you read “The World is Flat”, help desks were traditionally thought of as having to be in a facility where as now sometimes those help desks are in India and other places. So I’m very optimistic for the future, that we will use this as a key enabler for COOP but then also for having a highly talented work force for the federal government.

Jim Flyzik: Thank you. Lou Anne, very quickly.

Lou Anne Brossman: Really quickly speaking here for all the Juniper community, we are here to support and we are here to provide and we are here to make business as usual for all the CIOs in the federal government and by business as usual I think it means what Glenn said your COOP test is to telework every day and then it’s taken care of.

Jim Flyzik: Barry and Glenn real quick.

Barry West: I think within DHS, I think you are seeing it right now Jim, we’ve got a new preparedness directorate and so we are focusing exclusively on preparedness and that’s what we have to do for the Homeland to move forward.

Jim Flyzik: Glenn?

Glenn Schlarman: Not only is it impossible to protect from all hazards, it’s impossible to predict what they might be therefore, let’s stop planning and now we execute and perform through telework and be ready.

Jim Flyzik: Wow. Well said Glenn and that’s the last word. Let me quickly thank all our panelists here today, they are Ira Hobbs, the CIO of the Treasury Department, Barry West, the Chief Information Officer, Director for Information Technology Services Division at FEMA, Jack Penkoske, the Director for Manpower, Personnel and Security at the Defense Information Systems Agency, Glenn Schlarman, the Chief of Information Policy and Technology branch, Office of Management and Budget, and Lou Anne Brossman the Director of Marketing at Juniper Federal Systems. They are all very, very busy people and have taken time out from their day to share their thoughts on this critical matter with us. I want to thank all the panelists for being here, I want to invite the audience back next month when we will be talking about information sharing with again a panel of experts from the key agencies across the federal government that are involved with this particular issue. Thank you all for listening.