Advice on Improving IT Workforce

The Obama administration's fiscal 2011 budget proposal laid out several priorities for the federal IT workforce, including hiring reform, boosting recruitment and retention, replacing retiring workers and implementing a governmentwide collaboration platform.

Norm Lorentz, a director in the global public sector practice at Grant Thornton and former chief technology officer at the Office of Management and Budget, told Wired Workplace on Thursday that the top issue to ensure a top-notch federal IT workforce is reforming the federal hiring process, and noted that he was pleased to see a commitment by the administration in the budget to accomplish the goal. "I'm concerned about whether we can actually hire the people we need," he said. "It's still extraordinary difficult and for a lot of different reasons."

Lorentz recommended that the Office of Personnel Management partner with OMB and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra to tackle hiring reform, both to ensure consistency in job descriptions and salaries for similar jobs across government and to ensure hiring reform efforts keep up with the changing pace of technology. "It's OK to do a tech update on an existing process but it doesn't fix the root causes," he said. "It's going to require a significant partnership between OPM and OMB to get that done, and I think they're on the right track."

The former CTO also recommended that federal agencies leverage the capabilities of both the younger and older IT workforces. Older workers who are nearing retirement, for example, can mentor younger workers on concepts like management and accountability, he said, while younger workers can share their knowledge of new technologies. "Younger workers have to come in believing they have something to learn, and the folks leaving have to be willing to share what they know," he said.

Lorentz also highlighted the administration's plans to create a governmentwide collaboration platform to help federal workers collaborate and share information, but cautioned that any effort to implement such tools must be accompanied by an education campaign to ensure federal workers are well-versed on how to best leverage such tools to fundamentally improve government. "The government's problems are inherently not tech problems," he said. "They are inherently mission, governance and alignment problems."