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Conversation between agencies and industry evolves beyond sequestration

Sequestration and the government shutdown dominated the focus of agency and business leaders in 2013 when Rick Holgate became president of the American Council ...

Michael O'Connell@moconnellWFED

May 19, 2015 5:36 pm

4 min read

A lot has changed since Rick Holgate took over as president of the American Council of Technology two years ago.

“We were faced with a government shutdown, sequestration, a lot of stress and discomfort on both parts of the relationship, between government and industry,” he told In Depth with Francis Rose Monday. “It caused a pause in the conversation.”

At the time, ACT and the Industry Advisory Council (IAC) even contemplated canceling the 2013 Executive Leadership Conference, because employees had just returned to work after the shutdown.

“It was a very disruptive influence to the whole dialogue at all, because it gave us another topic of conversation that was not strategic,” he said. “It was not something that we have a daily interest in. It was just a big distraction.”

Two years later, Holgate, who’s the chief information officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is about to step down as ACT’s president.

The fundamental change that’s occurred over Holgate’s tenure is how government leaders and industry have moved beyond sequestration and the shutdown.

“We’ve been able to focus more on the substantive issues that face us as a community,” he said. “We’ve been able to work together on the problems in terms of supporting the administration’s initiative in terms of how to move us forward.”

HealthCare.gov and its aftermath

The other big issue of interest for the technology community was the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov.

“That spawned a whole new generation of different ways of thinking about delivering IT, approaching the talent in the workforce to support technology-related projects and initiatives, the creation of digital services, GSA 18-F,” Holgate said. “So, that’s given us a whole new agenda for conversations with the government and problems to solve. And so, that’s also transformed a lot of the conversation we’ve been involved in.”

ACT-IAC has also altered its approach to conferences in the aftermath of the government shutdown. In spring 2014, for example, it gave the chairmen of the Management of Change Conference 2014 greater latitude to make the conference more engaging, interactive and outcome oriented.

“They really set the stage for continued evolution of our approach to conferences, which, I think, continued our relevance to the community in terms of giving them some place to come to discuss issues of importance,” he said. “It’s also reinforced our value that we added to the administration in terms of getting them substantive feedback, a forum for engagement, non-partisan, non-biased, objective forum to have those conversations,”

Helping to break down barriers to shared services adoption

During Holgate’s tenure, ACT-IAC was able to impact the concept of digital services. It was able to use the “7- S for Success” framework to influence the notion of how to approach a project differently to ensure its success. Many of the same tenets in that framework showed up in the Digital Services Playbook the Office of Management and Budget issued.

“We had a chance to influence their thinking about digital services, approaches to projects, and they undertook the digital services initiative to address the change in philosophy and talent that we use on projects,” Holgate said. “It caused a lot of concern both in the industry side and the government side of the uncertainty about what the digital services were going to do to us or for us.”

As agencies become more comfortable with adopting digital services, that opens the possibility of sharing those services agencywide. Holgate pointed to the General Services Administration’s 18F innovation lab as an example.

“They’re looking to reuse capabilities and solutions they’ve already developed across agencies,” he said. “The eRegulations platform is a great example. They developed that for CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. … They’re looking to make it available to all the regulatory agencies, so they’re able to reuse the solution over and over again, as opposed to having each of have to invent it on our own.” Recognizing that adopting certain shared services would make processes easier combined with the pressure to maximize agency resources are making managers more amenable to implementing a shared services approach.

Even so, Holgate said impediments to greater adoption remain.

“While people intuitively understand the long-term benefits of a shared services model, getting over the hurdles of adopting shared services are not trivial,” he said. “Having agencies be able to talk through those challenges, depress the barriers to adoption is something we’ve contributed to over the last couple of years. I’d like to think that’s helped with the gradual adoption of shared services.”