Treasury CIO restructuring for results

The new acting chief information officer at the Treasury Department said she is going to "totally restructure the headquarters operation functions" in an effort to focus on performance and results.

The initiative is part of the Bush administration's plan to open to competition 15 percent of the federal jobs considered commercial viable by the end of fiscal 2003. Mayi Canales, Treasury's acting CIO, said that the department is meeting the fiscal 2002 requirement to open 5 percent of its jobs to competition through its desktop outsourcing initiative using the General Services Administration's Seat Management contract.

But future initiatives will have a broader focus, Canales said at a conference about competitive sourcing and performance-based contracting in Washington, D.C., April 18.

With the focus on the 2003 goals, the department is going to conduct a business re-engineering study, she said. That study will include a look at what the core functions of Treasury's CIO shop should be. "Not what do I have but what they should be," she said. "It will evaluate what the core staffing of those core functions should be," she said.

The study will take about 30 days, and the department will review the results this summer in preparation for a business re-engineering process, she said.

One of the goals of the process is to retain information technology workers, she said. But the work of federal IT workers has changed in recent years. "We no longer need IT workers who do programming," she said.

The department's goal is to seek IT workers who have project management skills, who are business- and results-oriented, and who can assess what is related to Treasury's mission and develop creative ways to streamline operations.

The department is about halfway to that goal in the CIO's office, she said.

"I have a mix of some project managers and techies who are trying to fill in as project managers and are not coming in very happy to work every day. So I need to restructure and realign a little bit," she said.

Canales told the group that she hopes to speak at the conference next year and describe how her organization is different and better and what she did to accomplish that improvement.

The conference was co-sponsored by Potomac Forum Ltd. and Federal Sources Inc., a McLean, Va.-based market research firm.