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  Government Computer News

Paul Strassmann  “Government computerization projects always try to fit information technologies into the framework of existing organizational structures, thus accomplishing little more than welding in the status quo by hard-to-change code.”

—Paul Strassmann

Information Management at NASA -

Paul A. Strassmann





By Nancy Ferris
Special to GCN


When NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe appointed Paul A. Strassmann his special assistant for information management earlier this year, he noted that “Paul has been a key contributor in shaping business and information technology systems.”

Strassmann is an innovative thinker regarded by some as a gadfly and by others as the developer of important ideas about the relationship between business success and IT.

Strassmann was a corporate CIO for General Foods, Kraft and Xerox before joining Defense, first as an adviser to the deputy secretary and then as director of Defense information in 1991. He spearheaded the Corporate Information Management program, which sought to impose an architectural discipline on the thousands of redundant and mismatched systems in DOD. After leaving the Pentagon in 1993, he returned to his consulting and writing work in Connecticut.

Architecture will be his focus at NASA, where he recently became acting CIO. O’Keefe has asked him to develop an agencywide vision for IT and help get the agency's troubled financial systems modernization program on track.

Strassmann’s thoughts: “One way of summarizing the last 20 years is to label them as an era of lost opportunities. As private-sector firms came to realize that IT could be one of their most potent weapons in economic contests—just look at Wal-Mart and FedEx—government computing just kept plodding along in pursuit of so-called efficiencies and effectiveness, sometimes regressing into just paperwork reduction.

“None of the above should be seen as a denial that progress was made in getting the wheels of government to move faster and often better. Certainly the steadily rising IT budgets demonstrate that the government was steadily buying more computing power.

“But, did we buy a widely acknowledged superiority, as seen from the taxpayers’ point of view? I doubt it. Government computing has lost its elite ranking since the 1960s, relative to the private sector, going from a position of leadership to a position of straining to catch up with prompt services that consumers now expect to receive as a matter of everyday routine.

“To make further progress we must examine some of the fundamental causes of being a laggard. There are many causes, but I locate them primarily in the denials of government agencies to deal with the resolution of governance, that is, intramural politics, conflicts prior to launching yet another computerization episode.

“Governmental computerization efforts can be characterized as avoiding a confrontation with the reality that information technology projects are nothing more than a continuation of bureaucratic power struggles pursued by other and more expensive means.

“Government computerization projects always try to fit information technologies into the framework of existing organizational structures, thus accomplishing little more than welding in the status quo by hard-to-change code. Here and there the existing workflow within the existing bureaucracy is tweaked to demonstrate marginal gains, but the results are only rarely visible as remarkable improvements.

“Commercial firms seeking competitive superiority do not act like that. They reshape their organizational structures to take advantage of how to realign the relationships with suppliers, employees and customers in innovative ways. They always seek competitive advantages that a customer can recognize as a demonstration of excellence in delivery of attractive solutions.

“Is there any hope that the lost opportunities can be regained? I think so. I am particularly encouraged by the e-government initiatives of the President’s Management Agenda pursued by the current administration. This is the first time that reformation in how to manage information technologies has become one of the key objectives of OMB.

“If as little as one-quarter of all new IT development funds can be shifted into one of the e-gov programs before the next change in administration, there is hope that what has been lost could commence to be regained.”



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