The GPO: Living Up to Its “Great and Glorious History”: An Interview with Bruce James and Mike Wash Part 1

By Cary Sherburne, Senior WTT Editor

July 22, 2004 -- As we head into the second half of the year, WhatTheyThink took the time to catch up with Bruce James at the GPO to see how he was faring in his mission of leading the Government Printing Office (GPO) from the 19th to the 21st Century. James was pleased to announce that he had been able to convince Mike Wash to join his staff as Chief Technology Officer and co- director of the Office of Innovation and New Technology. Wash joined in our discussion as well.

Prior to joining the GPO, Mike Wash was the Executive Director of Product Management and Marketing at Gerber Scientific Products. Wash joined Gerber after spending 26 years at Eastman Kodak Company, a world leader in photographic and digital imaging. At Kodak he directed the company's digital photo finishing equipment business and was responsible for developing the system to deliver Kodak Perfect Touch Processing for the consumer photo market in North America and Europe. He also held positions at Colorado Memory Systems, Loveland, CO, as Director of Engineering; and as a founder at Combyte, Inc., Fort Collins, CO, a manufacturer and developer of storage devices for the personal computer market, as Vice President of Engineering.

Also prompting our interview at this time were reports of two significant GPO-related events:

• In April, Public Printer Bruce James made the following comment before the Committee on House Administration and the House Legislative Appropriations Subcommittee relative to the restructuring of the Government Printing Office:

"From this point forward we will complete a strategic plan for the future of the GPO as the Government's primary resource for gathering, cataloging, producing, providing, and preserving its published information in all forms," James said.  "The GPO is at the very epicenter of technological change that is upending virtually every aspect of Federal information policy.  There is no time for us to rest on our laurels from successes achieved long ago.  The 19th century is not coming back."

• In early July, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a government oversight agency, suggested a series of options for GPO to consider in its strategic planning developed in conjunction with a panel of printing and information dissemination experts. The panel suggested that GPO:
  
  • develop a business plan to focus its mission on information dissemination as its primary goal, rather than printing;
  • demonstrate to its customers the value it can provide;
  • improve and extend partnerships with agencies to help establish itself as an information disseminator; and
  • ensure that its internal operations are adequate for efficient and effective management of core business functions and for service to its customers

In this two-part Special Feature, WhatTheyThink speaks with James and Wash to gain more insight into the current state of the Government Printing Office, an update on the restructuring currently underway, and an understanding of what James sees happening going forward.

Part One

• Mike Wash: his background and his charter
• Developing a government information system of the future

Part Two

• Growing GPO print volumes through exceptional customer service
• Gain sharing compensation: Is it in the cards for GPO staff?
• The GAO and the GPO: How do their strategies stack up?
• The new Office of the Chief of Staff
• Where does it go from here? The Key Priorities

WTT: Mr. James and Mr. Wash, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today. I understand that you have recently added Mr. Wash to your staff as Chief Technology Officer. Can provide a little background relative to him personally and his charter at the GPO?

BJ: Mike has a good technical background and has worked in large companies with bureaucratic backgrounds where he has been able to lead breakthrough projects with incredible success. That makes him a good fit here. Mike started with us June 14th, and in addition to being CTO, he is co-director of the Office of Innovation and New Technology with Scott Stovall.

The two of them provide exactly the balance I was looking for. Scott came to us directly out of school and has kept himself abreast of developments in technology. He has had an opportunity to lead teams at GPO and really prepare himself for a technology leadership role. He knows the GPO, he knows Government, he knows technology and our customers. Mike is a seasoned technologist and can help guide Scott into some of the more advanced technologies that are out there in the real world, while Scott can help Mike learn more about how things operate in the Government. It is a nice mix and they are working well together. Things are starting to happen the way I want them to.

WTT: Mike, what is your charter?

MW: My charter is threefold: to build the next generation of information systems for the GPO; to evaluate new technologies that are available and offered to the GPO; and the third, which is a little more long-term in nature, is to build an R&D team at the GPO. That is new for us. While we have scientists that work for us here, they haven’t really maximized their talent due to the organizational structure and the particular jobs they have been assigned to.

BJ: What we want to do is draw talent from inside of the GPO and couple it with talented people from the outside, and then begin to pursue applied research—not pure research, but looking at our customer requirements, particularly for security documents for the government, and being in a position to understand the underlying technology as well as to develop solutions for our government customers. The resulting end point vision is a government information system that will gather documents, authenticate them, do version control, create the ability to repurpose information for print-on-demand or electronic delivery, and then to preserve that digital data in perpetuity.

WTT: Mike, how long are you committed to serving in this role and how much staff do you have supporting you?

MW: When I accepted the position, I committed to Bruce that I would deliver the new system that he needs, which is no a small undertaking. But my commitment is to get this job done and deliver a leadership system for the GPO. Currently the staff is small. That staff has pulled together a nice list of candidate technologies. Over the course of the next several months as we further define requirements, we will be adding staff from within the GPO to start to detail those requirements, drawing from the skill base we have in-house that has been developed over the past year. That will be the basis for the development of the system in the coming months.

WTT: What is the process you will be following from this point forward?

MW: With the list of candidate technologies that has been accumulated by the staff as a base, the first document we will deliver will be the Concept of Operations document, based on an IEEE standard that is typically used in software intensive projects. This will be a software intensive digital data repository system that has versioning, authentication, preservation and broad access capabilities. The Concept of Operations document will be a high level description of what this system needs to do. The process will be approached very globally and from a user perspective as we define what is needed to develop and deliver this system to meet the needs of today as well as the needs of the future. Critical to that will be its flexibility and extensibility. The Concept of Operations document will be completed in the next two and a half to three months.

WTT: Will the Concept of Operations document be a public document?

BJ: I think everything we do here belongs to the public and it needs to stand the test of public scrutiny. I would certainly expect it to be public, unless there are national security reasons that would prevent that.

WTT: What comes after the Concept of Operations document?

MW: We are using a classic phases and gates approach. Phase One was the accumulation of the list of candidate technologies and development of the basic system concept; Phase Two, which we are now in, is requirements definition, communicated through the Concept of Operations document. Phase Three is where system development starts, which will entail prototyping and decisions about how we are going to actually deliver the requirements as defined.

Another key deliverable will be a much more detailed project plan under which we will create the system of the future for the government that has been Bruce’s vision since he stepped into the role of Public Printer—that is, a system that allows authentication, versioning, preservation and public access in perpetuity.

For more information, please visit www.gpo.gov

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This Interview was conducted by Cary Sherburne. She can be reached via email at cary@sherburneassociates.com, online at www.sherburneassociates.com and by telephone at 603-430-5463.