Defenestrated

Job available: Chief, Financial Standards and Grants Branch at OMB

I see that OMB has posted an announcement an announcement for the position of Branch Chief of the Financial Standards and Grants Branch. There's an ongoing debate about the relationship between financial management and grants management, and this position is the crucible of the issue: where does financial management end and grants management begin? Are they, in fact, the same thing? If they're not the same, how do they differ? Do those differences warrant entirely separate consideration, and how should that be organized?

Malcolm Gladwell's started blogging

[Via BoingBoing] Malcolm Gladwell's books, The Tipping Point and Blink, were extremely compelling, well-informed writing that I think should be mandatory for anyone interested in social change and better decision-making. He's now started a blog to, as he puts it, "elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written."

Technorati : blink, malcolm gladwell, tipping point

Excellence.Gov Awards 2006, Top 5 Award Winners

Back on February 15, I attended the Excellence.Gov Awards which were organized by the Collaboration & Transformation SIG of the Industry Advisory Council. There were 20 finalists this year, with five award winners highlighted. Those five are:

• Bidirectional Health Information Exchange, Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs: Creates a secure, bidirectional, real time exchange of medical data for patients passing between the VA and DOD health systems.
• Geospatial One Stop, Department of the Interior: Makes it faster, easier, and less expensive for all governments to get the geospatial data they need for their missions.
• Interagency Data Exchange Application, Department of State: Facilitates both the issuance of visas and the protection of the United States by checking background information on immigrant and non-immigrant visa applicants.
• National Sex Offender Public Registry, Department of Justice: Citizens can identify sex offenders in their neighborhoods and beyond with a single Internet search.
• Radio Frequency In-Transit Visibility, Department of the Army: Provides the military services and Department of Defense organizations with worldwide visibility of military cargo.

Congressman Tom Davis gave our keynote this year and used a phrase that really resonated with me: "We live in a digital economy with an analog government." All of the award winners demonstrate that government sometimes breaks that perception, and achieves IT solutions that no other organization could hope to take on. Some follow-up articles were posted by GCN, Government Technology, GovExec, and Public CIO, among others .

A panel presentation by these top five winners will be held on March 8. Register to attend at the ACT/IAC web site. See you there!

Technorati : Excellence.Gov, IAC

Congressman Wu: "Federal Dollars Should Benefit The Whole, Not Just Majority" - (Medford Article)

I see that Oregon Congressman David Wu has sent a letter has sent a letter about Grants.gov's Mac compatibility issue to Joshua Bolten, Director of OMB:

I am personally troubled by the overarching discrimination against Mac-users simply because they are considered the minority. This is an issue of simple fairness. Also, worthy projects and undertakings will be affected adversely. A sizeable portion of the research community is Mac-based or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would not have delayed its roll-out. It is good governance to provide equal access to federal grant funding based on fairness and worth, not on operating systems.

Technorati : grants.gov, mac, omb

Grants.gov won't be platform-agnostic

Yesterday I posted about a Washington Post article that was highly critical of Grants.gov's inability to provide e-forms for the Mac platform. One comment on that post (on the TCG version of the post) really set me thinking. Claus Wilkes noted that while a Mac e-forms client would help, the best solution would be a platform-agnostic solution. My response to Claus:

There won't be a platform-agnostic version as long as Grants.gov uses e-forms technology. This is for two reasons. First, I don't know of a single e-forms vendor that (a) has implementations of their product for every platform imaginable, (b) could guarantee that all those platforms could utilize the same form structures, and (c) could provide tools to make it affordable to produce multiple platform-specific flavors of forms for every kind of form used by Grants.gov.  

What's more, Grants.gov has no interest in hosting grantee's data. The RFI notes that "The forms should not require the user to be connected to the Internet in order to be completed." Having off-line access to the forms is very important -- not every grant applicant has reliable Internet access.

So we're left with Grants.gov trying to please as many people as possible, given the constraints of the mission and the technologies available. The FastLane model was rejected early on in the Grants.gov conceptual design. Maybe it will come back as complimentary service to the e-forms...but I don't see it happening soon.

The research community is right to be panicked about this because it's a very real, very serious problem. The needs of the loudest voices in the FDP (MIT, Harvard, etc.), who can afford to invest heavily in IT, have been largely met by Grants.gov through the system-to-system interface. (That said, those folks also have their own complaints.) At the same time, Grants.gov looked at the population of the US as a whole -- the entire pool of potential grant applicants -- and created a solution that works for 90% of them.  Unfortunately that's also meant missing the needs of the 10% Mac/Linux/Unix users who also constitute around 33% of the research community.

Grants.gov isn't going to have a FastLane-like capability as its primary interface because that would ignore those who can't get reliable, cheap Internet access and must work offline a lot of the time.

So I think The Post article was unfair in this respect. It describes a very serious problem but does nothing to address this other half of the discussion -- which is equally serious, and which Grants.gov has done a reasonable job of addressing.

Washington Post slams Grants.gov's Mac Woes

Looks like the mainstream press has caught wind of Grants.gov's electronic forms Mac compatibility problems: The Washington Post's Federal Page features an article about it tomorrow. The article is unfortunately sensationalist and is factually incorrect as a result -- Grants.gov is not costing "tens of billions of dollars" and Northrop Grumman's contract is not for "$22 billion" -- but otherwise it reflects the information I and others have previously reported.

The crux of the problem is that the electronic forms product that Grants.gov is using (provided by IBM which bought the developer, PureEdge, and rebranded them "WorkPlace Forms") are only available on the PC platform. They've been promising a Mac version since Grants.gov was stood up.

Interestingly, on Friday Grants.gov released an RFI (Request for Information) to potential bidders on the recompete of Northrop Grumman's contract. The RFI includes the following:

The government is open to replacement of some or of all major COTS [commercial off-the-shelf] and/or proprietary components of the current system if that provides the best overall value.

I'm pretty sure that the e-forms/Mac compatibility issue is the major driver behind that statement, and indeed there are several excellent alternatives nowadays. (As I noted back in November, such alternatives weren't available when the Grants.gov systems development contract was first competed.)

Grants.gov remains an excellent solution for those who have the technical capability to use it. I sincerely hope that the successes it has had are not thrown away by some politico looking to demonstrate "hard management". That would effectively eliminate the large investments the 26 grant-making agencies have already invested in Grants.gov, throw the Grants Management Line of Business for a complete loop, and put the whole objective of grants streamlining back to around the year 2000.

Technorati : Grants.gov, Mac, PureEdge, e-forms, grants

Zillow

I heard about Zillow.com on NPR yesterday and gave it a whirl this morning. You plug in any street address in the US and it provides an estimate of the home's sale value based on recent transactions and tax information from the neighborhood. I'm in the process of selling a townhouse and for months I'd been collecting the sale and tax data and putting it into a spreadsheet, so I could generate a market valuation myself. Well, this just replaced that effort and spreadsheet!  It's important to note that many might feel that having all this information so easily accessible is a little scary, but that this isn't newly-available information -- you could go to your county's tax web site yourself and get this data. Zillow just makes it fantastically easy.

GCN: OMB to name grants service providers

[Originally posted on Behind the Curtain at TCG]

Now that the FY2007 budget is released, everyone can talk freely about the Grants Management Line of Business shared service providers (SSPs) that have already been chosen:

• Department of Education
• Department of Health and Human Services / Administration for Children and Families
• National Science Foundation

GCN has an article about this, which quotes me, Jerry Fralick of DOJ OJP, and Charles Havekost of HHS. This quote succinctly describes why the whole initiative is important for every Federal agency:

The administration will limit how much money agencies can spend on developing, modernizing and enhancing current grant management systems, sources said. In 2005, agencies spent about $144 million on DME [development, modernization, enhancement] for grant systems. All requests for funding to update grant management systems must be justified, sources said, and will be allowed if agencies are expected to apply to become a center of excellence. All other requests to update grant management systems likely would be denied, sources said. [My emphasis]

This is a great step forward for the GMLOB and potentially the beginning of an enormous change in how government manages grants. The true test, however, is to come: how will agencies respond?

    Technorati : Line of Business, OMB, grants, grants management

NationMaster

Thanks to digg, I just found NationMaster.com. This thing is going to eat into my life. It's a massive collection of statistics and facts about nations around the world, including maps, how often constitutions have changed, corruption indices, and a whole lot more. The data comes from the CIA FactBook and a whole bunch of other places. Like Wikipedia, this site is invaluable -- bookmark it now!