**2001 IRM Seminar**

**A Telecast Originating from the BLM National Training Center in
Phoenix, Arizona**

**May 23, 2001**

This transcript is from the closed-captioning file produced during the
telecast.

It may contain errors and omissions in transcription.

Announcer: The Bureau of Land Management Satellite Network presents live
from the BLM National Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona, and home of
the 2001 IRM Seminar, The Big Picture, providing leadership for the I.T
future. An interactive forum with BLM\'s top management on the state of
information technology and its future. And now, the host of your
program, Hord Tipton.

H. Tipton: Good morning. Welcome to our broadcast today on the state of
information technology in BLM. We\'re really excited today to be
broadcasting from the 2001 information resource management seminar that
is going on here this week. We wanted to do this broadcast so that
everyone could participate in the event both here and out in our field
offices. Later on in our show, we\'ll be taking questions from our
conference attendees who are watching us live today from NTC\'s
Washington Room. On today\'s show we have some of the top management for
the agency and the Department of the Interior and we\'re going to get
the opportunity to hear from everyone both here in Phoenix and also live
from Washington D.C. So I\'d like to first introduce our panelists in
Phoenix. First up we have Piet deWitt, acting Assistant Secretary for
Lands and Minerals at the department of interior. Good morning, Piet.

P. deWitt: Thank you very much for that invitation to join you here in
Phoenix.

H. Tipton: Also with us today is Michelle Chavez, BLM\'s New Mexico
State Director. Good morning, Michelle.

M. Chavez: Good morning, tip. I am pleased to be here and I understand
we have quite a bit of attendance at the seminar. I\'m looking forward
to interacting with them on preparing ourselves for our future in I.T.

H. Tipton: Next we have Karen Siderelis, the Chief Geographic
Information Officer for the U.S. Geological Survey. Welcome, Karen.

K. Siderelis: It\'s great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to
participate in the BLM/IRM Seminar and have already begun to enjoy
myself and found interesting and valuable things at the seminar.

H. Tipton: We\'re certainly glad to have you. Originally we planned to
have Daryl White, the department\'s chief information officer and Pete
Culp, Assistant Director for Minerals, Realty and Resource Protection
but unfortunately they were not able to attend at the last minute. Now,
also from Washington, D.C. we have Nina Rose Hatfield, BLM\'s Acting
Director. Good morning, Nina Rose.

Dir. Hatfield: Well, good morning. It\'s great to join you all from
Washington and we\'re looking forward to this conversation on a very
important subject for the Bureau.

H. Tipton: With Nina today is Bob Doyle, Assistant Director for business
and fiscal resources and welcome to you, Bob.

B. Doyle: It\'s a pleasure to be here working with you.

H. Tipton: We have Henri Bisson, Assistant Director for Renewable
Resources and Planning. Hi, Henri.

H. Bisson: Glad to be on the broadcast today as well. This is an
extremely important topic for all of us in the resource program areas
and look forward to having this discussion.

H. Tipton: Thanks to all of you and we are looking forward to a great
broadcast. Just first off, real quickly, I thought I would mention
what\'s going on here at the seminar. As Michelle mentioned, we to have
a very high attendance rate, I think there is about 350 people here. We
are coming out at the seams at the NTC and are focussing on some key BLM
issues. Among these are Data Standards, including how we develop, adopt
and enforce them, enterprise architecture, including the GIS, emerging
technology such as wireless communications and telecommuting, IRM
budgets and workforce issues, including skill shortages, retiring
workforce and workforce planning. Also, before we move on, I would like
to take a moment to mention that late or in our Brad cast, we will be
taking or questions and comments. You can participate by either faxing
us a thought or picking up the phone and calling. Please use the numbers
on your screen. We will get to your calls just as quickly as possible.
But now let\'s get started and turn to our acting Assistant Secretary
for Lands and Minerals, Mr. Piet deWitt for opening comments. Piet,
what\'s the view from the sixth floor?

P. deWitt: I know that people in the Bureau are very interested in the
direction the new administration is going to set for us. Unfortunately,
I can\'t shed a lot of light on that topic at this time. I do know,
however, that in the short‑term we are be ‑‑ being asked to do more with
less and that message has been delivered clearly. That message should
resonate throughout the Bureau and have particular relevance for this
conference. I believe information technology is the key to be able to do
more with less in the future. The appropriate technologies in the hands
of well trained people will increase our productivity and quality of the
products they produce. The challenges for the Bureau are to find the
appropriate technologies and train our people in their effective use.
When I say people, I am focussing on the Bureau personnel closest to the
lands we manage. Technologies that don\'t help these people do their
jobs better are a waste of our precious resources. I believe the
so‑called information technology community must maintain a close and
open relationship with our people on the ground and provide the support
they need to do their job better in the future. I understand that the
Bureau is in the process of developing an information technology
architecture to support its future. I strongly support the concept of a
unified architecture. I am personally and painfully aware of the
problems associated with multiple architectures, the Assistant
Secretary\'s office must deal with a separate architecture in each of
its bureaus. The problems associated with communications alone have
taken considerable time and effort to resolve and still others remain.
Superimposed on the Bureau\'s efforts to develop a coherent information
technology architecture is the looming retirement of a significant
portion of the workforce. This presents the Bureau with both a challenge
and an opportunity. The challenge will be to save the valuable
institutional knowledge and insight that the retiring workforce has
accumulated through years of dedicated public service. The opportunity
will be the arrival of the first generation that has grown one
computers, a generation on the whole that will have more ‑‑ be more
comfortable and conversant with information technology than the
predecessors. Our challenge here then is to set the stage for their
success in carrying the bureau oat best they can into the 21st century.
I believe the Bureau has taken the appropriate steps to meet the
challenges of this administration and the future beyond. This conference
is one of those steps. I wish you all well.

H. Tipton: Thanks very much, Piet. Next I would like to turn it over to
our Acting Director, Nina Rose Hatfield, for her view of the big picture
from Washington. Nina?

Dir. Hatfield: Thank you, tip. As I reflect on the sweeping changes in
the information arena that have gone on in BLM over the last few years,
it\'s really exciting to see the strides we\'ve made, and it seems to me
that those are so important because certainly our future is determined
by how successfully we manage our data and our information technology.
Two years ago, as we look at what\'s happened to us, we were meeting
monthly with the appropriations committee, and we were the target of
several GAO investigators who spent almost full time looking at how we
were carrying our programs in terms of information technology. This has
changed for us over the last six months, and there\'s some really good
reasons why. We\'re the first Bureau in the department to have a
full‑time CIO and I think that\'s a recognition of how important that
information technology is to us in the Bureau and the fact it needs full
time attention. We\'re also the first in the department of the interior
to establish an investment board, and the investment board has the job
to assure that we know what it is that we\'re going to spend our money
on and that we stay on track, that when we\'ve committed to making an
investment in a technology application, that it doesn\'t grow beyond
what it is that we want to do with it and how much we want to spend. So
that\'s a very important factor in terms of managing our information
technology. In addition to that, we\'ve really focused on some project
management techniques and we\'ve trained people to do project
management, and we think that\'s going to bode very well for us in the
future as we try to do a more professional job of managing our projects.
And very importantly, I believe, is that we\'ve learned some lessons
from experiences that we\'ve had in the past and so that we are ‑‑ we
try to change our approach to development by emphasizing off‑the‑shelf
software and doing modular improvements, testing those, making sure they
work for our workforce before we move on and before we deploy them. So
all of those, I think, are very key to the track that we\'re on in terms
of making information technology work for us in the Bureau. Certainly a
major initiative for us is the Bureau architecture. Now, I think of the
architecture as being a road map, a pathway that describes what our work
is and then relates the data, the hardware and the software that we\'re
going to need to make the work more efficient for us in the Bureau. So
these are major improvements for us. We\'ve been working on the
architecture now, continue to have some work to do there but we have
made an enormous amount of progress. At the same time, there are some
other areas of improvement we still need to work on. For example, we
want to have an Enterprise GIS system which will create a coherent
Bureauwide design for GIS technology. I can\'t think of anything that\'s
more critical to us when you realize that about 75% of our data has a
spatial component to it. So it\'s a key ingredient to making our data
more useful to our employees. And likewise, we have to apply some
Bureauwide standards. It seems to me that this is absolutely essential
that we describe and adhere to Data Standards. It will enable us to use
our data across data applications, numerous applications and it will
greatly decrease the costs that we have in terms of operations. And
certainly as we move forward and try to do things with the use of the
Internet and with e‑commerce, all of these things will allow us to be
more efficient in things like procurement and allowing our customers
direct access to interact with us. Also allows our customers to do some
of the things that we may have done for them in the past. So this is
going to make us more efficient and much more cost effective. So, Piet,
to me what we\'re trying to do with information technology is to create
the capability where we can use our resources to be much more effective
in what we can do. So from my view, that\'s sort of the big picture of
what\'s going on. We have made enormous progress and I think that we\'re
in a position now to move forward and make a lot more progress.

H. Tipton: Thanks, Nina. That certainly sounds like a lot of work. Next
I\'d like to turn it over to Michelle Chavez, director of New Mexico for
comments. Michelle, how are things down in the land of enchantment?

M. Chavez: Well in the land of enchantment and in the field offices
around the Bureau we\'re facing interesting challenges, both in
preparing ourselves for long‑term I.T. and also dealing with some
short‑term issues that are on our plates right now today. Clearly one of
the things that we\'re all facing and are really seeing significantly in
the field offices is the whole concept of workforce planning and looking
at how our workforce is going to look in the future and what skills we
need there. We certainly recognize that we have to concentrate on
building our technology and have highly qualified employees who can do
that work. But we\'re also having to make some hard decisions about what
kind of work is appropriate for us to have in our staffs and what kind
of work we could better and more efficiently get done through
contracting. Of course, we\'re always going to have to have the skills
to oversee those contractors, and that takes some technical skill as
well. But making those decisions are what we\'re facing right now today.
Along with that, of course, is just generally deciding what we should
continue to be doing as an agency and what we should perhaps not be
doing any longer. Those kinds of questions are very frightening for
employees, especially if there\'s an employee whose work suddenly is
being identified as potential contract work, and their sense of value
for the organization is going to be challenged, and we have to be very
sensitive to that and work to help all of our employees understand that
they are important to us and valuable to us. Along with that, of course,
is going to be some retraining and developing skills in our ‑‑ both in
our I.T. employees as well as users. I think we have some users,
resource specialists in the field, who have become very accustomed to
calling up our GIS folks and saying, \"you know, I need a map of this
wildlife habitat area, could you get it for me,\" and lo and behold a
map is produced and they\'re on their way. What We\'re going to be
asking our resource specialists to do is to spend more time
understanding the nuances of the data and punching those buttons
themselves and making maps for themselves. So user skills are going to
be something we\'re building as well. I think with the fact that the
office of management, budget and this administration is going to be
looking more at reducing our layers and getting more of our capability
right to our customers, we are going to be challenged to make sure that
we meet those needs and continue to do our job well. Nina mentioned the
chief information officer and information technology investment board
concept. We\'re right in the throes of adjusting to that new way of
doing business. It\'s new enough that we\'re a little bit uncomfortable
about it in the field. But I think we recognize that this approach is
going to give us better coordination, especially between the business
side of our organization and the resource side. Nina mentioned we have
some lessons learned from the past and clearly one of the things I think
we\'ve learned is that you can no longer have a situation where you have
systems administrators developing the capability without fully
understanding what the user needs are. I kind of harkin Ken it to the
description of the user sitting on one side of the brick wall, very
busily creating a fantastic system they are convinced works very well,
and throwing it over that brick wall to the user, and the user looks at
and it says, \"gee, this isn\'t at all what I need,\" and throwing back
comments over that brick wall. I think with the CIO, IT2B approach to
things, we are tearing down the brick wall and providing the opportunity
for direct coordination between the users and the systems developers.
Along with this, especially with the IT2B approach, we can look forward
to a much more established funding process, a little more predictable,
focused on more of a strategic approach to building our funding
capability and recognizing where we have to concentrate on continually
updating our technology capability. Nina also mentioned standardization
and I think that\'s going to be one of the areas where we\'re going to
see some significant benefits. It\'s a little hard right now in the
field because everyone has their sense of ownership for their data and
how they collect it and how they record it, and if we can move ourselves
more towards recognizing that standard data is not only going to help us
to do our business internally in the agency, but to help us spread out
our capability, that\'s going to be a key. So I think with that kind of
an approach, we will be able to look at our work processes and
continually be working towards reengineering them so that they are the
most efficient that we can give. One of the other areas that in the
field we\'re certainly having some very direct experience with is this
whole concept of sharing and building partnerships. Throughout the
Bureau there are different little pockets of experiences where we\'re
sitting down with our sister agencies, with state government and trying
to put on the table all of those capabilities that we have and see where
we can fill in the gaps for each other. Service first, of course, is one
of the starting points for that experience, and we\'ve had some
successes in sharing telephone switches, radio towers and those sorts of
things. As a matter of fact, we\'ve ‑‑ in southwest we\'ve built a
telecommunications working group that is bringing National Park Service,
DOD, of all agencies and state government together along with the Fish

&

Wildlife Service and BLM and the Forest Service to see where we can take
advantage of our like systems and gaps in our capability. So there\'s a
lot of that kind of thing that we\'re experiencing right now immediately
and also recognizing that this is a strategic approach to the future of
our Field Offices. So we\'re going to be facing a lot of changes, and,
tip, I think we\'re up to the challenge.

H. Tipton: That\'s really great, Michelle. It\'s really encouraging when
we see our State Directors on top of these type of issues and really
recognizing the need to do that innovation. We have long recognized
Michelle as a leader in the I.T. world and I know she has several
initiatives ongoing down there to further integrating the I.T. Along
with the business and making this generally more efficient. Now I\'d
like to go back to Washington again and hear this time from Bob Doyle.
Bob\'s Assistant Director for Business and Fiscal Resource. Bob, tell us
some good news.

B. Doyle: Ok. Some good news, tip, is the rain has stopped, the skies
have cleared and the Red Sox are still in first place. What I do want to
say, though, in terms of technology is that I.T. has been very
instrumental in a number of things we\'re trying to do in the business
side of things in BLM. As many of you are aware, both OMB and Congress
over the last several years have expressed a strong interest in agencies
managing by performance, and they\'ve lately been talking a great deal
about linking budgets with agency performance. What we\'ve done here in
the business community through I.T., things that we have done with them,
I asked things we\'ve done with finance and cost accounting, position us
very well to respond to the interests of Congress and OMB. There\'s a
great deal of interest in electronic government. The public is demanding
a greater opportunity to participate in the government process. The
public has had experience. They know what technology can do for them
through their experience in the private sector and they expect no less
from their government. So there\'s great opportunity for us to use
technology to expand the public\'s participation in the governmental
process in our decision‑making process and there\'s also an opportunity
here for us to educate the public to be able to expand and broaden their
horizons and to help them better understand what it is we\'re trying to
do as a government, government agency. Right now we\'re doing a great
deal by sharing information on the web, things like the environmental
impact statements and resource management plans and records of decision,
all of that demonstrates our ability and expands our capability to share
information with the public so they can better understand what\'s
underlying our decision and what\'s underlying our actions. All of this
goes towards eye instilling confidence of the public in their
government. But then we need to move beyond just the sharing of
information, and some of the things we\'re trying to do in the business
community is to move from information sharing to transactional
processing so that we can bring government closer to the people. I think
one best illustration of what I\'m talking about is something that
we\'re trying to do in concert with Oregon office in terms of making
recreational permits available over the Internet. The intent here is to
make, allow individual citizens to buy a permit to be able to pay for it
over the Internet and then to be able to print it locally. All without
having to have any manual intervention. I think we\'re well on our way.
We have a few things to work out, but in the end, what it will look like
is a citizen can get on at any time of the day, be able to request a
recreation permit, pay for it through their credit card, that
information is then checked with the bank, information is then fed into
our collection and billing system, which in turn goes to the finance
system, which, in turn, shares information with the recreation system.
All of that is done electronically behind the scenes without any manual
intervention, and it\'s a good illustration of a citizen‑centered public
service and a streamlining of our business process without any human
intervention, as I said. Financial information is recorded. Program
information is collected. All without any manual data entry. And service
is provided to public 24/7. People don\'t need to ‑‑ aren\'t required to
go to the government facility in order to be serviced. That\'s the kind
of thing we need to be thinking about. But to be sure, there are a
number of challenges that we face. We talk about concerns about
security. There are security issues across the government related to our
systems and our equipment and it\'s going to require a great deal of
energy and investment for all the entities to address. Also there\'s
concern about the proprietary information that we have in our systems,
concerns about ‑‑ and challenges about the way we go about collecting
the data, how we use the data, and how we protect it. There\'s a great
deal of citizen concern about that data that we hold. There\'s also a
continuous challenge in terms of expanding our E‑government. We need to
automate not only our existing processes but think about reengineering
the processes, think about doing things differently than we have been
doing. We don\'t want to just simply do them quicker. We want to be
smarter about how we do them. Lastly, there are things we need to be
challenged relative to the acquisition of systems and equipment.
There\'s an opportunity for us if we act as an enterprise to be able to
use the leverage that we have in buying equipment and services as ‑‑ in
a bulk form so that we can capitalize on the economies of scale and the
costs that go along with that. Also, there\'s a need for us to be able
to manage the contracts for the acquisitions of these systems and
services so that we can ensure that whatever contractor we have
providing the services to us are performing and achieving the outcomes
that we want. So we have developed a number of training courses to help
our people better manage contracts and to achieve the results that
we\'re looking for. So I\'m looking forward to the discussions with the
group and your folks there and to talk about some of the challenges and
issues in the business community.

H. Tipton: Those certainly are some large issues, Bob. Coordination must
be a nightmare on all of this. You guys during a great job. Bob and I
have to do a lot of coordinating amongst ourselves, because as most of
you probably know, we really spend a lot of our dollars in the
information technology world and we have to constantly monitor ourselves
just to make sure we\'re getting the best value for that dollar. We have
several questions already being sent in on fax and otherwise. So, again,
I courage in you during the course of the broadcast to go ahead and send
those questions in and we will start addressing those possibly even
after the conclusion of the opening remarks. Today we are very fortunate
in having as our guest, our sister agency I guess is the best way to say
that, we have Karen Siderelis from the U.S. Geological Survey, and Karen
is the Chief Geographic Information Officer. That\'s kind of a tongue
twister, Karen. But could you give us some views on what\'s going over
in the USGS?

K. Siderelis: Certainly, Hord. Let me say thank you for the opportunity
to be here at the IRM Seminar at BLM and I\'m very pleased to be
representing the U.S. Geological Survey. I\'ve been with the Survey now
less than five months, and I\'ve found it to be a fabulous organization
with many opportunities, and I thought I would share with you a little
bit about what USGS is and how that relates to our directions and
information technology and information management. As most of you know,
probably more than I do, USGS is a science agency in the department of
interior. Unlike BLM, it manages land ‑‑ that manage land or other
agencies with regulatory responsibilities, USGS is a science
organization. We are organized along discipline lines. We have four
areas of disciplinary focus, water, biology, geology and geography, our
mapping. We also now are organized into three regions. We have about
10,000 employees, similar, I think, to BLM, and our budget on any given
year approaches about a billion dollars. Over the last year, the USGS
has been putting a lot of energy into an initiative that we\'ve labeled
strategic change. It\'s an effort by the director to position USGS for
the future and try to build the organization that we want to be for the
21st century, and there are three elements of this strategic change have
that a big impact on how we\'re approaching information technology and
information management in the survey, and the first of those is we are
bringing a regional focus to the Survey. Prior to strategic change, USGS
was not ‑‑ has a big field presence, we have about 400 offices across
the country, but we didn\'t have an organization infrastructure with a
regional dimension to support and that the director is pushing for more
support into the field. He\'s also ‑‑ our director, Chip Grode has an
emphasis on science, bringing together the fabulous work we do in the
disciplines and bring an integrated science to the that we deliver to
our users. And lastly, the focus of strategic change is to start to look
at USGS as ‑‑ a science and information agency, and I think that has a
big opportunity for those of us who are working in the information area
in USGS. Now, let me talk a little about the GIO, or the geographic
information office. As Hord said, that is a bit of a tongue twister. In
addition to that, it\'s often a little bit difficult to explain and
I\'ve been asked quite often what is an GIO and why not just a CIO. In
USGS we like to think of the GIO as a CIO‑plus. We see our
responsibilities following out of the Clinger‑Cohen act and are working
to establish the same kind of policy infrastructure you have here in BLM
for information technology and IRM planning. In addition, the leadership
of USGS wanted to provide some focus on the information, the content,
the information resources within the Bureau. It\'s been estimated that
we probably have about a \$20 billion investment in data, and so as we
created the GIO position, we felt it was important to bring a focus to
that resource as well. And lastly, the GIO has ‑‑ will have some
responsibility in the area that we call information services, and that
includes things such as our libraries, our publications and our
information centers, earth science information center is really the
storefront of USGS. That\'s a little about what the GIO is. Some of the
things we have been working on over the last few months are similar in a
way to the kinds of things that are being done here in BLM. We do not
have the history that you have with your CIO and with your information
technology investment board, and we\'re really looking to BLM as a model
as we create that kind of capacity in the Survey. So we\'re building an
office, helping to ‑‑ thinking through the policy infrastructure we
would like to have in place for the Survey. In addition to that, we are
working on three rather large initiatives that are more data oriented or
content related, and the first of those is an effort toward an
Enterprise GIS, and I was delighted to hear director Hatfield mentioning
that as a priority for BLM as well. I\'ve had numerous meetings with
Hord Tipton as I have come into USGS to talk about ways we might work on
Enterprise GIS together and perhaps provide some departmental leadership
in that area. So that\'s an activity that I am quite excited about and
share the director\'s enthusiasm. We\'re also in USGS working on an
initiative called gateway to the earth, which is a portal like project,
an attempt to bring together the information from our disciplines and
our regions in a more coherent and logical, integrated form and to be
able to make that available to the public in ways that are meaning full
to them and to help bring decision‑support tools to the data that USGS
manages. Lastly, another initiative that we\'re working on is the
national spatial data information. This is not solely a USGS thing.
It\'s across ‑‑ it\'s a cross‑agency initiative and involves state and
local government and the private sector as well. As many of you know,
the NSDI is over‑‑ overseen by the Federal geographic data committee,
which is ‑‑ the oversight of that committee is delegated to the
Secretary of the Department of the Interior and has been further housed
in U.S. Geological Survey. The Secretariat is staffed there, and that
FGDC staff has been moved into the geographic information office and I
think bringing a new level of focus to the NSDI and again we are quite
excited about the opportunities there. But one of the things I\'m most
thrilled about is the opportunity, and I mean this sincerely, to work
with BLM. I think they\'re just fabulous in numerous ways that we might
work together to do the kinds of things that our users expect. And as I
started to list those things, it occurred to me that in the short run
this partnership might involve more taking on the behalf of USGS and
hopefully over the long run we will be able to share on the giving side
as well. But we really do see opportunities to try to mirror the work
that you\'re doing with a unified information architecture and see that
as a way to sort of build a capability in USGS and that will enable our
interoperability between the two bureaus in the long run and hopefully
provide some leadership to the department as well. We also are very
impressed with the work you are doing in project management, in your
project management training, I.T. project management training and we
would sort of like to tailgate on that initiative and look to bring that
same kind of capability into USGS to develop a cadre of expertise within
the survey. As I mentioned before, we would like to work with you hand
in hand as we go forward with enterprise GIS. We also have talked, Hord
and I, quite frequently about some opportunities for creating what we
are starting to call a collaboratory, where we would bring technology
and tools and create an environment for sharing our data and our
information in a sort of a storefront setting. And lastly, I think some
of the things that Bob mentioned earlier in the way of E‑government I
believe are fabulous opportunities for us to work together in this whole
goal to have a citizencentric government and to have sort of seamless
interface to the public and I think that those kinds of goals could
really be the ‑‑ begun with strong partnerships between USGS and BLM.
And we\'ll look forward to working with you along those lines. Once
again, I\'m very happy to be here at BLM and look forward to working
with you over the long run.

H. Tipton: Thanks so much, Karen. And thanks particularly for those
acknowledgements and very complementary statements. I am glad now we
invited you to sit on this panel. So many opportunities, so many things
to do, and so little time, and pressure to get that done. Well, now back
to Washington D.C. for the wrap‑up opening remarks of the day. Mr. Henri
Bisson, Assistant Director for Renewable Resources and Planning, just
fresh back from a vacation and ready to go, Henri?

H. Bisson: Well, I think it was the typical vacation. You get really
tired and come back to work to freshen up. It\'s the other way around.
Tip, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you all today. First of
all, I guess what I intend to do this morning is to highlight some of
the activities that are occurring in the Renewable Resources and
Planning directorate. I wish Pete Culp would have been able to be here
today, because there is an awful lot of work going on in his
directorate, in minerals and lands, that would be of interest to the
group. In fact, there\'s as much going on there as there is anywhere in
the Bureau. Let me begin by saying that I view the Bureau architecture
effort as an iterative process and it\'s going to change the way we do
business as we make smarter investments in I.T. that are aligned with
the business of the Bureau. Right now, and someone can correct me if
they have a better figure, I believe we spend well over \$100 million a
year on IRM, data management throughout the Bureau. Karen a few minutes
ago talked about the fact that USGS estimates that they have an
investment of \$20 billion in their data and I guess I would defy
anybody to be able to come up with an estimate how much money the Bureau
has in its data investments. We just don\'t know because the data is all
over the place, and we\'ve never really made an effort, I don\'t
believe, to tabulate it. We know about what we\'re spending, but we
really don\'t know how much we have. So hopefully we will be able to
pull those estimates together. Within our directorate we are actively
engaged in the architecture effort at a number of levels. Members of my
staff are participating in meetings and advising the Bureau architecture
core team, Pat Greene, senior GI ‑‑ I am also the sponsor for GIS within
the Bureau, and through Jim Turner, who is our project manager, we\'re
working on the development and implementation of an Enterprise GIS
system. In the area of business process analysis, we have several
subject matter project teams, expert teams, being led by 8200 staff. One
team is working on the land use process to basically describe what that
process is from a business standpoint and then to look at whether or not
we can change that process and make it more efficient. There is another
team that\'s also working on assessing condition of the public lands.
That team has been active in the last month‑and‑a‑half or so. We also
intend to participate on other process analysis teams that will be
addressing compliance and monitoring. In the area of data management,
again, AD200 is sponsoring the planning management effort which is being
led by Gary Stuckey. That team already prepared one document which will
be coming out shortly entitled data management tools for land use
planning and that should be distributed very soon. Other documents are
expected to follow which will address Data Standards and metadata. AD200
program leads are assuming the role as data stewards and are working to
implement Data Standards for their programs. Particularly I would like
to highlight what the cultural heritage staff has been doing. They\'ve
been involved in building an infrastructure to support extensive data
sharing effort with state historic preservation officers. I don\'t think
any other program has been effective in first of all developing national
data standards and then working with external organizations to ensure
that the data can be used by everybody, not just by BLM. We\'re working
on various applications within our program areas, RAZ, which is tied to
the range program, and RMS, which is tied to the recreation program.
Those systems are currently under development. A review is under way of
other related projects in the clearing house to determine if they\'re
still relevant to accomplishing the Bureau\'s mission, and we have a
team that\'s working on developing a common look and feel for all of our
land use planning websites across the Bureau. We\'re also developing
documentation for approval before the ITIB ‑‑ projects we have proposed,
including IT support for land use planning, GIS transition and the
enterprise GI and we\'re working with AD500 to clarify a number of
issues as related to relicensing. We are concerned that with all of the
work we have going that there\'s going to be a huge training need within
the Bureau, and so we\'re looking at developing training specifically
for implementation of the Data Management Plan, for GIS enhancements
that may come about and for geospatial data. We are all in this
together, I.T professionals and GIS community have to work in concert to
achieve the vision articulated by the Bureau architecture. As we
transition to an Enterprise GIS, we need to design, build and maintain
the infrastructure that we need to provide integrated GIS functionality
toward business processes. This is going to require close involvement of
the I.T. community in future GIS implementation efforts and is going to
force us to work at an even higher level of coordination with the GIS
support personnel and knowledge workers. Thanks, Tip.

H. Tipton: Thank you, Henri. You certainly seem to have a lot on your
plate as well. It really is encouraging when we look at our attendance
and we hear the positions and issues that are coming on from the State
Directors and the Assistant Directors and our partnering agencies and we
see that business really and truly is starting to drive the I.T.
process, and that\'s sort of been the theme of our conference this week
on the ITIB. About 25% of our participants are from the business side of
the house of this conference and it\'s just important that the
conference be recognized as a major step towards integrating these two
things. We hope not to be hoisting any more programs over the brick wall
down to New Mexico to make these things work. Well, we\'ve had some
great comments and we have a number of questions that are in at this
point. I think it would probably be a good idea to make sure that
everyone\'s questions ‑‑ at least we answer as many of these questions
as we can, that we take a couple questions before the break on this. We
have one good question and I\'m kind of interested in the answer myself
on this, and this is from Allen, I\'m not sure where Allen is from, but
it involves energy conservation, and it says: We have been told
previously not to ‑‑ not to power down the networked PCs. Secretary
Norton\'s memo tells us to turn off PCs when idle and save power
whenever possible. So what is the current correct method for management
of PC power? We\'re going to pass that over to Mr. Piet deWitt, our
Assistant Secretary and see what Piet has to say about that.

P. deWitt: Thank you, tip. I was present when Secretary Norton made her
initial statement to the Assistant Secretaries about her desires to
conserve energy in the department. I can tell you that she is very
serious about this effort. Now, there are many options available to each
one of us in the department to reduce our energy consumption, and her
memorandum that she sent out this week identifies a few of those. I know
that it includes the passage on computers. Consider the fact that when
Secretary Norton walks down a hallway in the interior department, she
may pass a dozen empty offices that are fully lit and have computers
running. This in her mind is a waste of energy and I can understand her
feelings. However, I believe that the Secretary would not want to
unnecessarily jeopardize major computer systems by having them shut down
as a routine matter. So I think it\'s up to the Bureaus to look at what
their activities and what activities require the most energy and array
them in a manner that can make significant reductions. The last time I
spoke with the Secretary, she was discussing having a quantitative mesh.
I don\'t know whether she is really ‑‑ she has put that out yet in terms
of a number, but I would assume that she would be glad to give the
Bureaus the flexibility to address that quota as best they can.

H. Tipton: Thanks, Piet. That\'s been a question I\'ve heard several
times. We will probably have some direction after working with the
department on that very soon. We also have a question in on insights on
emerging technologies. Basically: How do you see these changing the way
we do business? Fortunately, that sort of leads into something that I
was kind of anxious to talk about anyway, and that\'s another thing that
we\'re discussing along with many of the participants this week and what
we among other things called our office of the future, and we have a
number of people outside the tech world as well as within the techy
world trying to envision what we are going to look like a few years down
the road. So I am going to take the liberty as the moderator of sort of
answering that question myself, and merely mention that with the
declining resources and fewer dollars and Michelle mentioned this, we
have to find ways through technology, I think, as a serious option in
getting more done with the people that we have and hopefully with the
dollars that we can maintain. I have with me today an instrument that is
sort of an example of the techy world, if you will, that typifies not
just a personal digital assistant at this point, but is actually a
working field tool in the event that we have several states that in what
I call the current office that are out testing devices like this and
other means for ‑‑ means from computers in collecting data. This data
then is collected digitally, and it\'s much easier to store, makes it
much easier to be accessible, and I think it becomes obvious that once
data is collected in any manner other than the form and the paper and
the pencil that it\'s going to be a big advantage to us and we can see
how it will be better quality and ‑‑ so we have ‑‑ we have several
presentations this week on the different types of technologies that are
out there. One of our major ongoing Bureau program initiatives now is
working through the many of the principles with USGS, the Forest Service
and a wonderful program they\'re calling the ‑‑ \"from field to
fabric,\" which takes so much of our land data and will eventually have
that spatially displayed across the country. So we have some major
investments in that. A number of our offices are piloting a number of
these very innovative techniques on their own and I see current office
and the office of the future as collecting these emerging technologies,
piloting and testing those through the new procedures and things that we
have, and making the best decisions for the Bureau on that. So it\'s
really very encouraging. It\'s an exciting time for us to be working on
things like this.

M. Chavez: Tip, are you saying if I take this piece of equipment here I
can plug in a downlink to a satellite, get my GPS position, I can read
my e‑mail, I can check on calendars and see where everybody is in the
office and get messages and all of that?

H. Tipton: See, I knew when I showed that everyone would want one, and
that\'s one of the problems with technology. There are so many tools out
there that are changing so quickly, we have to be really careful about
the decisions that we make because you can have some money invested real
quickly in devices that are great devices, but they might not be the
devices of choice across the board. And, Michelle is right, it\'s
amazing what tools like this can do that. You are correct. This little
device can do the global positioning system, the GPS. There is also an
attachment for a digital camera for this little unit that you can not
only take the picture of the spotted owl nest, you can have the
coordinates, you can have the time and you can pinpoint precisely where
that is. And your digital picture can be stored in a data bank of your
choice, and it can be accessible across the board.

M. Chavez: So what you\'re saying is we need to be careful not to just
focus on the toys, but to make sure that the equipment that we\'re
buying, in fact, can help us to do our job more efficiently and this may
be one in some instances and it may be just a more fun thing to have in
your pocket for others.

H. Tipton: That\'s an excellent point. The initial cost on devices like
this oftentime is just the beginning, and we in the I.T. world recognize
that we have to support these from a service level, and we want to make
sure that we have the right tool, and it has a broad applicability and
fits across the board. So we are excited about changing things, and the
business is really helping used to this, and I will simply point that in
terms of proposals through the new system, the board that we have has
gone from one at our last meeting to 14 at this point. So I think our
business, our ground people, are learning the process and the system,
and they\'re making it work. So we\'re looking forward to an exciting
board meeting next week along with that. Well, as we approach our break
time, I want to remind everyone to remember after we come back we\'re
going to be ready to hear from you. So be ready to call or fax in
additional questions using the numbers provided on your screen, and you
can direct your questions to a particular panel member, if you like. So
this is a very techy event for us. We\'re going to be tuned into the
Washington Room when we get back, and this is just amazing the things
that we can do down here. So stay tuned. We\'ll be back in 15 minutes,
and we will be playing some hardball!

H. Tipton: Hello. Welcome back to The Big Picture coming to you live
from the 2001 IRM Seminar. Again, I\'d like to welcome back our
panelists, both in Phoenix and Washington D.C. Now that we\'ve heard
from everyone on the panel, we\'d like to hear from our most important
participants, and that would be you. We\'ve set aside the next hour to
hear your comments and to try to answer your questions. Now, helping us
today we have two veteran I.T. people who will be taking questions from
the conference floor where they are watching our telecast along with you
in the field. First I would like to introduce Marietta Allen, an IRM
budget analyst from the Washington Office. Hello, Marietta.

M. Allen: Good morning. We truly appreciate the comments and discussion
that has taken place to this point and we look forward to bringing our
audience in on the questions and answers as part of this discussion.
Thank you.

H. Tipton: Thank you, Marietta. On the other side of the room we have
the infamous Chris North, the BLM Arizona state chief information
officer, who didn\'t have to travel very far today. Welcome, Chris.

C. North: Thanks, tip. We are glad to be here. This crowd is fired up
and we\'re going to have some good questions for you this morning.

H. Tipton: It sounds like you all are having a lot of fun up there. Ok.
We have some questions. I am going to start with a fax question that
came in before we go back to the Washington Room. This question is from
Rich Rott and it\'s ‑‑ it\'s two questions. It\'s directed to Bob Doyle
in the Washington Office. Bob, I will give you the first part of this
question, but I think Henri may have to help you out a little bit on
this. The question is: When recreation permits are issued online, first
of all, who checks the EA, which is the environmental analysis for
compliance? Then secondly ‑‑ the second question is some events where
permits are requested for a music event are actually rave parties! Who
screens them?!

B. Doyle: Those are good questions, Tip. Our folk has been on the ‑‑ our
focus has been on the business side of things on how to make that
happen. There are certainly some technical program questions and the
oversight and review that\'s implied in this, in this question and I
think Henri is more appropriate person to answer those things, but I
want to make it clear that on this particular demonstration project,
there\'s still a number of mechanical things to work out. We think the
concept is sound. We still have to clear through things like this, and
it will be a pilot. So those kinds of questions are the things we want
to look at as we try to deliver services in a more efficient way to the
public. But in terms of the technical program aspects of this, I think
you\'re right, I think Henri probably can weigh in on that.

H. Bisson: Let me jump in for a second. First of all, I can\'t imagine
that we would be issuing permits for rave parties over the net. Even
though that\'s predominantly where they\'re advertised and that\'s how
our law enforcement people find about them is because they\'re
advertised on the net, you know, there are certain types of activities,
recreation permits, that are appropriate to issue permits over the net
for, such as camping permits, some sort of special use permits where
you\'ve got a lot of people asking for those kinds of opportunities.
We\'re always going to have to do necessary environmental assessment
work and compliance for ‑‑ particularly for large groups and for events
such as a rave, which I don\'t believe we authorize very many of. So I
just think it\'s the permits, we need to decide which ones we will be
able to do on the net, but we\'ll still ‑‑ there may be a way to work
out an application process that would have to be submitted and then
taken through the normal work process and then perhaps some sort of
electronic response could be worked out to issue the permit and allow
them to pay, but I think mostly what we\'re talking about are things
like campground permits, maybe some OHV permits.

Dir. Hatfield: Although, Henri, as you know and tip, I know you know,
with AFMS we are trying to do an application interaction with the
permitees and obviously they would be providing information to us and as
Henri says, we would have to do to the environmental analysis with that
with the GLO we have government land office records in our care that we
now have given millions of people the opportunity to access and so the
real advantage to us is just that it makes it easier to process whatever
the business is, and so we can do that both from taking care of the
business side and the transaction of the money and also taking care of
the environmental side but the key is trying to get into that
interaction directly with our customers and making a much more efficient
process.

H. Bisson: A good analogy would be something like Travelocity and other
businesses where you go online and fill out a application or go through
a menu of things you want and what they do is they send you an
acknowledgment that they got your request or that they\'ll follow it up
with an e‑mail confirming that your activity is approved. So some
variation of that I am sure we could work out, not just for recreation
but for other business practices as well.

B. Doyle: The other advantage in terms of the automated system is that
you now have management information. If you begin to see that you get a
large number of requests for a particular activity, then you begin to
ask yourself some questions, what\'s going on, and if it is a rave party
or whatever, it gives you the opportunity to further examine, whereas if
people came in individually you might not recognize what building here
and what\'s going on.

H. Bisson: You know, setting something up electronically, I would assume
that whatever permits we issue, as an example in recreation, it would
already have the appropriate NEPA work completed and you would say we
are, say, going to issue 100 permits to do this particular activity, and
when you got over 100 permits, the system would tell you that you\'ve
exceeded your threshold, or at least you would be able to monitor where
you are relative to that threshold and either cut it off or modify your
analysis to address the greater use that\'s occurring. And in contrast
where you\'ve got sort of individual events, you would take the
application and go through the NEPA process and then make the decision
to proceed or not.

H. Tipton: I think what this teaches us is as we move into ‑‑ further
into the electronic age that there are more and more details and
technical issues that just have to be confronted and worked out as we
go, but I see ‑‑ Henri, maybe you have some thoughts on this ‑‑ that the
real driving force is that the public really wants to do business
electronically. They want to interact with the technology that they have
available to them. And they want their government to have technology
equally as good as what they have at home.

H. Bisson: On the personal level, I agree with you completely. I would
much rather make airline reservations and purchase a ticket for personal
travel by going to a website than to go down and deal with a travel
agent and you could even buy a car over the web now without having to go
deal with car salesmen. Who wants to deal with car salesmen? We
basically cut them out of the process, which is terrific.

H. Tipton: Let me know when that next rave party is coming up, Henri.
Let\'s move on to another question. We have a question from Dennis
Leonard, and Henri, this question is directed to you, and I\'ll try to
interpret this. It says: With the constantly upgrading software in GIS
and the expectation that resource specialists will use it, how do you
see the resource specialists at the Field Office level being able to do
their job as a forester? For example, and also do the GIS? And keep up?

H. Bisson: That\'s a terrific question. I mean, right now when you talk
with the GIS people themselves, every time a new piece of software or a
new iteration of the software comes out people get excited because these
are tools they have not had at their hands before that makes their jobs
a lot easier and I think it\'s going to take a real concerted effort for
‑‑ for our technical specialists to keep people updated and informed and
the Bureau is going to have to make decisions from a Bureauwide
standpoint about which of these processes we\'re going to buy into. I
mean, we can\'t buy everything that\'s coming out, particularly when
it\'s six months later it\'s superseded by something new. I think we\'re
going to have to make some conscious decisions about which tools to make
available to our folks and attempt to manage how much money we are
spending in that process.

Dir. Hatfield: That\'s one of the nice things about having the
information technology board, because there on the board you have
representatives from the Washington Office and AD\'s as well as State
Directors and Field Managers, so we a good cross section of people
across the Bureau having impact on that decision.

H. Bisson: I think what the ITIB has focussed on, at least so far, have
been the investments in terms of new systems, and I think that when we
start looking at available technology and system upgrades, we\'re going
to have to ‑‑ I think that\'s an area where we need work, Nina. I think
it\'s an area we have not focused as much attention on, and it\'s a huge
area of potential investment.

H. Tipton: Michelle, I believe you had a thought?

M. Chavez: Well, when I hear a question like that one, I think about way
back when I first started with the Federal government and we were still
using stencil‑type material to make our copies, and we had to use
carbons to make duplicates of our word processing documents and then we
went to Wangs and a few of us started to pick up more keyboarding skills
and look at us today, those same resource specialists who 15 years ago
maybe wouldn\'t have considered doing their own word processing do it as
a natural part of their job, and I think we need to recognize that, yes,
we are going to be asking for staffs to build up new skills ‑‑ our
staffs to build up new skills, but just looking from the past, I think
we\'re up to it and I think it\'s going to become much more of a natural
part of our doing our jobs.

H. Tipton: I agree. I think there\'s probably a training issue that goes
along with this. I believe we have a question from the floor on the
Washington Room?

M. Allen: We do have a question. This is Georgia from the Oregon State
Office. Georgia, your question?

Well, I know that we use a lot of GIS data from USGS in doing our GIS in
Oregon, and I would like to talk with the ‑‑ care un and possibly Piet
about what they see as opportunities for us to work together with other
sister agencies, USGS in particular, to further our goals and to advance
our technology.

H. Tipton: Karen?

K. Siderelis: Well, as I said earlier, I have just a great deal of
enthusiasm about the two Bureaus working together toward enterprise GIS
and I think we each bring some things to the table, and obviously the
USGS data is one thing that would be the benefit of BLM, I believe. But
I think there are bigger benefits if we think about how we sort of
approach this as an enterprise, as opposed to just trying to put USGS
out in the hands of numerous entities in the field, and I think we can
do more focused enterprise Bureauwide planning, we can do more focused
evaluation of products and so forth. So, as I look at trying to look
across the USGS and the disciplines in the regions there, it only sort
of begs the question, why not look across two bureaus with similar
interests, similar users and similar capabilities to work on these
things together. I recognize there are some obstacles there. Some of
those related to pricing policies and so forth, but I think we\'ve got a
lot of momentum in both agencies ‑‑ or in both bureaus and that we
perhaps could walk away from this session pledging to work together on
working on an enterprise approach to GIS for both of us. Piet, you may
want to add to that.

P. deWitt: As I mentioned, the Secretary has said we need do to more
with less and in many cases partnerships allow us to use our dollars in
joint concert with other agencies and we both get something out of it
and any time that happens, we\'re for it.

H. Tipton: That\'s for sure. That\'s for sure. I understand that Chris
North has another question on the floor.

C. North: We do. Thanks, tip. Jan from the New Mexico state office. Your
question?

This question is for Tip and Bob. With the changing administration I
think it would be beneficial for this group to hear how you see we can
posture ourself to continue to enhance our I.T. budget in the coming
years.

H. Tipton: I will defer to Bob for the first shot on that since he seems
to control most of that budget.

B. Doyle: Jan, we\'re trying to do a number of things on the budget
front, but first let me start by saying we have already met with a
number of officials in the department. We\'ve talked to some of the
designees, and they\'ve been favorably impressed with some of the things
we have been doing here in the Bureau to try to manage by performance,
and I think one of the first things that we can do to demonstrate to
them is that we can succeed in things that we plan on doing. We need to
do that on the program side, but also we need to demonstrate that we\'re
good stewards of the financial resources that they have entrusted to us.
So, we need to continue to educate them on that, but we also need to do
some things on the budget front and I wanted to talk about some things
that we\'re looking at to try to get a better handle on funding for I.T.
and try to make a better case in the budget process to get some more
resources. Number one, hen tree talked earlier about the amount of money
we were spending on I.T. and he hesitated because the reality is we
really don\'t know how much we have been spending on I.T. We have
estimates from \$85 to \$155 million. So one of the things we tried to
do this year was to set up a team to begin to look at that and try to
collect some information on what are our expenditures on I.T., what are
we investing in I.T.? So we have a team looking at that and hopefully
within the next month they will be coming back to us with the results of
their efforts. In addition, we\'ve been discussing with the budget
strategy team and with the ITIB investment board the possibility of
establishing a cap on I.T. investments. Once we have a better idea of
the scope and magnitude of our investments, what we want to do is be
able to manage those resources within the contexts of the Bureau\'s
overall budget and we want to be able to focus our investment and we
want to be able to prioritize where we\'re spending our money. We want
to be able to demonstrate to the department that we do have a management
control over the IRM resources and how we go about allocating our
resources and where we plan to invest our money so that we can get the
best return on the dollars. The third thing we\'re trying to do and we
will do this year, is that is synchronize the investment activity in
I.T. with the budget process. In the past years, it seems that we\'ve
been out of sync in terms of our planning and justifications for I.T.
activities and the budget cycle. So what we\'re doing this year is
synchronizing and coordinating the plans and activities of the
investment board to make sure that once we make a decision on what
investment is best for the Bureau that we then incorporate that into the
budget process so that for 2003, in this particular case, we can get the
necessary resources to do what we think needs to be done here in the
Bureau. Now, all of that requires us to do a better job of advance
planning, better job of understanding what our data requirements are and
what our system requirements and to pull that all together so that we
can make a coherent, comprehensive presentation for our investment
needs.

H. Tipton: Thanks very much, Bob. I guess I would add to that a couple
of major objectives that I\'ve had to try to enhance our budget position
sort of lead back to establishing credibility, increased credibility,
with our field programs, with the State Directors, with ‑‑ and the
Assistant Directors on just how we deliver or how we work with their
business people and their resource people in terms of integrating I.T.
with those actual programs. I think once we get their support, then
Henri won\'t be so tight with his money when it comes time to try to
work some integration with the recreation or the range programs. And the
other thing is to just demonstrate sound management of information
technology in our IRM resources. As all of you have known, we\'ve been
scrutinized very closely by the general accounting office over, I guess,
probable eat last five to ten years and I have typified it as being in
GAO jail and we have had some major success in the recent month in
getting acknowledged from GAO that we have made enough progress that
they\'ve let us out of GAO jail, but at the same time warning us they
are still looking over our shoulder. But that was a major landmark for
us, and as we achieve higher certification of our management ability of
I.T., I can\'t help but believe that that will put us in a much better
position when we move back into the budget cycle and ask for sponsorship
and endorsement and dollars for our projects. I understand we have a
question from Marietta up in the Washington Room.

C. North: Tip, this is Henri. I just wanted to break in for a second if
I could. One of the things that I\'m concerned about as an A D‑Back here
in the programs that I am responsible for is when you start talking
upwards of \$155 million of money that\'s being spent in the I.T. arena,
you know, much of that money is coming out of the programs. It\'s not
pure IRM money, and when we go to the hill and justify program
increases, we say we\'re going to do additional work, and I don\'t know
what the right number is. There\'s no question that a large percentage
of the work that we do has to include investment in information
technology, but we have an obligation to ensure that that money is being
spent to accomplish the work, and so whatever percentage of the program
money gets spent in support of these initiatives has got to produce
something for us, and we need to make sure that money is being spent
well.

H. Tipton: One way of measuring that, Henri, and I\'m glad you brought
that point up, is our test for successful information technology
investment is the rate of return that we gauge and monitor and measure
on that. So we hope to convince Henri and Piet and the program folks
that if they spend a dollar on I.T. to improve the planning process that
they will get ‑‑ at least \$2 in return value on that, and that may mean
that they have additional hours to do planning, but it would actually
translate more back down to getting that work done. So we have to
characterize I.T. as a positive and every investment has to meet that
test. So we understand where you\'re coming from, Henri, and we will
continue to work with you on that.

M. Chavez: I think one last comment on that is the bottom line is
customer service. Customer service internally and customer service with
our external customers. If we can demonstrate that that investment is
providing better customer service, then we\'re well on our way to
justifying it.

H. Tipton: Excellent. Marietta, now I believe we will go to you with a
question on the floor.

M. Allen: This is a question for anyone on our panel. We have Dave from
the Oklahoma state office, Moore, Oklahoma. Dave, your question?

It\'s the Oklahoma Field Office.

M. Allen: Sorry.

That\'s all right. One of the first speakers we heard here talked about
data quality and what I would like to know is how can we convince middle
and lower level managers who don\'t feel that it\'s worth wasting their
time on of the importance of data quality in ensuring that what we put
into these systems is worth the money we\'re spendING to put it ‑‑ money
we are spending to put it in.

H. Tipton: Good question. And with our data doubling every eight months,
we need to know what to do with it. So, Henri, you are sort of our lead
on the data. What can you tell us about that?

H. Bisson: Well, obviously you put garbage in, you get garbage out. I
think we have to be absolutely concerned about the quality of our data
and it doesn\'t matter whether it\'s things like mailing addresses,
which cost us, if we mail items out to people to the wrong address, they
get returned to us or they don\'t get notices on time from a business
standpoint that costs us just as much as using poor quality data to make
faulty decisions. If we rely on data and the data is of such a standard
that we can\'t make good decisions, then it really has no value to us.
So I think it\'s important that managers understand the quality of the
information that they\'re basing their decisions on and that we seek to
improve that quality, either by finding other sources of better data or
by prudently deciding which data we absolutely have to have to make good
decisions and then going after it.

Dir. Hatfield: And moreover, hen re, the way we are managing data now is
what\'s costing us so much money. When we have so many systems have that
the same piece of data but they\'re entered differently, just like the
name and address, something as simple as that, when we have six or seven
different ways of doing that, that\'s what\'s costing us money in terms
of operating and maintaining our systems. So having Data Standards and
adhering those ‑‑ add hearing to those data ‑‑ adhering to those
standards is important not only in the kinds of decisions we may but
it\'s also one of the ways we can move money back into the program work
by making the operation and maintenance costs so much less. It\'s a key
issue for us on a number of fronts.

H. Tipton: Thanks. That\'s a very good question. Come in, Chris. I
believe we have a question from Chris North\'s side.

C. North: We\'re here. Somebody that I really look up to, Rick Dickman.

H. Tipton: I like that shirt, Rick.

C. North: Rick is from the Montana state office. He has a question for
you.

This question is for Tip. I really enjoyed your analogy yesterday about
existing applications, the bus rolling down the road at about 45 miles
an hour with the flat tire, and I represent users of the land and
mineral customers through the change management board for the LR2000. I
want to tell you they are very excited about new technologies, could be
expanded report capability, ad hoc reporting through Bureau, through the
‑‑ and it could also be expanded reporting capability later on, spatial
reporting possibly through NILS as a project. Their concern, though, is
that we can leverage these new technologies in a way that doesn\'t leave
our customer base behind, you know, that they are going to receive the
training, that they\'re going to be able to use these new technologies
without being a computer scientist or without being, let\'s say, a GIS
specialist, as an example. Thank you.

H. Tipton: That\'s a very long comment and question, Rick. You\'ve hit
on what I see as the most difficult issue that we have in developing an
architecture and then implementing that architecture. Moving from the as
is to the target or the future of where we want to be is difficult
because we are not allowed to stop operations or to stop business while
we perfect the architecture. This is a very debated subject because
those folks who are particularly passionate about developing a very pure
architecture, and the GAO has this view to an extent as well, are
concerned when we continue to develop systems such as NILS or other
ongoing projects that we had already started and are not making that
close connection with the architecture. But my view of that is, the way
that we change the tire is not only to continue working in fulling ‑‑
fulfilling the architecture and the Zackman diagrams and all the other
thing we have, but to take the architecture we have put in place, the
initial, and then work from those business applications that are
advanced to the point that we\'re comfortable that they are fitting with
our architecture, they\'re working through the various systems and the
screens and the board and they\'re basically sanctioned to work in
concert and in a sense develop a significant portion of that
architectural while they\'re going. Both the systems and the
architecture are dynamic operations. We don\'t just build these things
and put them on the shelf and re expect them to be static. They
constantly need feed and care to keep them current, especially in the
technology end of the world. So I believe it is possible to do that
transition. It may be painful in many cases, but that\'s the course
we\'ve chosen to take on this. So we\'re not abandoning the architecture
for sure, but we\'re trying to build it for both ways and make sure when
we drill down from the top and burrow up from the bottom that the two
meet. LR2000 is a good example of a system that has been modernized, it
was Y2KKed and a lot of folks participated and I think knew are getting
the benefits from good reporting, better interaction. That\'s a good
example of advancement and how technology has helped us and saved us
some money, by the way. So thanks for the question. I hope my long
answer got to the point, Rick.

I think it did. Thanks, Tip.

H. Tipton: I want to go now to a telefax question, and this is from
Allen of Tulsa, and let\'s see. This could be either Nina or Bob. It
involves not only telecommuting but tele computing. So you folks may
want to answer half and we will fill in the gaps. The question is: With
the telecommuting requirement coming from Congress, will we be able to
have broadband access, lots of programs do not work timely at the 56K
modems. Nina, would you like to start?

Dir. Hatfield: I\'m going to ask Bob to respond to the bulk of it, but,
Tip, we have a question for you back here on the east coast. We\'re
wondering when our lunch is going to get here. But obviously this
administration has a lot of interest in us trying to economize in terms
of office space and people\'s time and actually we have a Federal law
that we have to implement in terms of emphasizing telecommuting where it
makes sense for our business and so we are looking at how that we can
make that work in the most efficient fashion. So Bob actually has been
working on a pilot. We have a couple pilots that have been going on in
the Bureau over the last couple years and Bob has one that\'s been going
on here in headquarters, and through that pilot we\'re trying to look at
questions like what kind of equipment we need to handle and the issue of
the broadband, the kinds of Pathways that we would need to make sure
that the information can go back and forth from wherever the
telecommuter is to the business place. So there are issues that we\'re
still looking at, but we are looking toward trying to make sure that we
can meet the mandate of this new statute. Bob, you want to respond about
the pilot specifically?

B. Doyle: This was an issue that came up in our pilot and my view is
that the job and the needs of the job drive how it is that we equip the
person to do the job. If the person deals with the ‑‑ if the individual
deals with a lot of data and has to download a lot of data and obviously
a dial‑up is impractical for doing that, I think we need to support them
like we would anywhere else. In fact, in our pilot we do have an
individual who\'s participating that does have a need to work with a
great deal of data and we have made arrangements for them to have a DSL
line at the government\'s expense so that they can continue to do the
work that they need to do. So I think it\'s situational. I think what
kind of equipment and what kind of services individuals have, I think
the manager is going to have to make that call, at least certainly
that\'s been our experience in the pilot. We need to continue to monitor
the pilot and look at ‑‑ talk with other agencies and see what their
experience is. But I think if we allow the work to drive what it is that
we need to do and how we need to support somebody in their effort, I
think that will lead us to a logical conclusion.

H. Tipton: Michelle, do you have any experiences with telecommuting in
New Mexico?

M. Chavez: We\'ve had a couple requests from employees on telecommuting
and we\'ve had some temporary situations where for a temporary reason,
health reason or something, child care or something like that, where
we\'ve had to accommodate folks. We haven\'t had to go to the degree of
fully equipping employees in the home, but certainly I think that folks
are watching that closely to see when that next phase may come in. It\'s
interesting, because I just read last night, I think it was a
\"Washington Post\" article, some more nuances of telecommuting that we
need to keep in mind and that has to do with health and safety of the
work environment and the expectation that even though when employees are
working at home, we still are responsible for them being in a safe
working environment, and how we address those kinds of issues are also
going to play into just how we move towards telecommuting. I think the
key is, as Bob said, we have to stay focussed on whether this is good
for the business.

H. Tipton: Allen, I sure hope that your DSL broadband connections work
bet inner Tulsa than they do in Washington D.C. Mine seems to be down
more often than it\'s up. This is a real hot issue right now, and
that\'s ‑‑ it\'s a very good thing for debate and discussion, I am sure
we will see more on this soon. Marietta, I understand you have another
question from the floor?

M. Allen: Yes, thanks question for Bob Doyle. This is Steve from the
Arizona State Office.

Yes, Bob, Arizona has had as a fee demo project for the recreation
permit in Parilla Canyon where we use e‑commerce and we go on line and
the public receives their permit and the transaction is taken care of.
We have another wilderness area which is coming on, and we\'re trying to
work with CBS to make sure that it is funded through them. Is CBS
prepared to take e‑commerce? And the next question is, where is the
e‑commerce effort in the Bureau going?

B. Doyle: In terms of the specific project that you talked about, the
short answer is yes, we are prepared to take it on. In fact, I think
what we\'re talking about right now is one of the challenges that Tip
has had as the CIO in trying to get our arms around all the different
initiatives that are going on. I think these are well intended things,
you know, makes a lot of sense with what you\'re trying to do there in
Arizona and what Oregon is doing, but what we need to do as a Bureau is
to make sure that we all share this information and we can all take
advantage of what\'s already been done. As a side note, the reason why
we got involved from the business standpoint is that the way some of the
offices have gone about trying to be responsive to citizens\' requests
and to take care of technology has caused us to do transactions outside
of the financial system and we need to be very careful that as we do
transactions and we take in revenue from the public that it all gets
recorded properly, and that\'s why we\'re trying to run it through CBS,
and I think we\'ve found ways to do that, and I\'m pretty sure that
Terry had indicated to me that he was aware, who is the project manager
for CBS, is aware of some activities going on in Arizona and hopefully
he\'ll be able to work with you on making sure that the process that you
all are following down there comports to what it is we need to be doing
from an architecture standpoint as well as from a financial standpoint.
In terms of E government, as I was trying to say, I think more and more
the government is going to be getting into the transaction side of how
we do business, how do we deliver products and services to the citizens
and it\'s going to go beyond the information that we are sharing right
now, and actually get into the transactional side of things. So I think
this administration made it very clear, some of you may have heard some
of the management reforms that OMB has talked about. They\'ve asked that
the agencies to focus on five specific areas of management reform, and
one of them has to do with E‑government and the ‑‑ they\'re challenging
the agencies to use technologies to bring government closer to the
citizens and to allow them to open up the decision making process and
allow them to participate in it. So I see us more and more developing
initiatives and developing projects that demonstrate the use of
technology and the invitation to better serve the public.

H. Tipton: That\'s great. I believe we have a question coming in from
Chris North.

C. North: We do. I have REG from the Nevada state office. He had a pad
of questions. I had him pick his favorite one out.

H. Tipton: Good morning. How are you doing?

I actually have quite a few questions, but I\'ll focus on one of them
right now. The USGS has been posturing itself as kind of the warehouse
for remote sensing data within the department, and particular satellite
imagery. I think it would be useful in landscape monitoring to use this
imagery on a weekly, daily basis even, but it\'s very expensive. So I\'m
wondering what kind of collaborative efforts are going on to look at
this kind of information exchange between Field Offices and maybe Sioux
Falls facility where the data center is.

H. Tipton: That\'s very timely question. Care un and I in fact have been
talking about that over our last couple of meetings and Karen, would you
like to address that?

K. Siderelis: Yes, certainly. I guess just to echo what Tip said in
general, we have had numerous discussions about how USGS and BLM might
cooperate more closely in data sharing and hopefully to overcome some of
the pricing obstacles that we have, and I think there is a commitment on
both our parts to pursue this and to try to get into a more mutually
beneficial relationship and that\'s one of the goals I have as the
incoming GIO. With respect to the land remote sensing data in
particular, that is a mission of USGS to manage the national land remote
sensing data archive in Sioux Falls and to provide that information to
the public, and apparently the legislation does require that that\'s
done on a reimbursable basis. We have an advisory committee that
includes representatives from government and the private sector and
state and local government as well to help advise the archive and this
whole area of competing with the private sector is ‑‑ raises its head
from time to time as well as some of the legislative requirements. That
being said, I still think we find the same thing true within USGS that
you\'re saying happens in BLM, this incredible information asset for the
nation is not untapped but certainly not tapped to the extent that\'s
possible and I think our own scientists find the same situation. So
we\'re working to alleviate those problems in an aggressive and as rapid
a way as possible. The only other thing I might say along those lines is
that the archive program at Sioux Falls is undertaking ‑‑ is putting
together a data grant program where they will be providing data through
competitive process to organizations that might want to look back in
time, so go back to the beginning of ‑‑ use multi‑temporal data from the
archive to get at some of the landscape issues that were mentioned. So
while we don\'t have the answer today, I think we\'re on the path of
trying to solve this dilemma for a number of potential users of the
satellite data. Thank you.

H. Tipton: Remote sensing satellite data, the photography, all are
technologies that we\'re exploring in various places to see how
applicable they can be to integrate with many of our traditional land
inspection and monitoring processes. We hear so much this data is now
free from defense and all that, but sometimes it\'s just ‑‑ it\'s free
but there\'s still a cost to it somehow or another. So that\'s the type
of thing that care un and I are going to be talking and working on so
that we can trade out data that we may obtain from companies that they
may not otherwise have information on, and yet figure out how to lower
our costs and accessibility of the data for our folks in the field.

K. Siderelis: I might just add one other thing there, Tip. With the new
administration coming in, it\'s quite clear that they\'re expecting USGS
to provide renewed focus on supporting department of interior, and
that\'s in science and information areas, and so I think that we\'ve got
incentive there to begin to work together and sort of ‑‑ in sort of new
and different ways.

H. Tipton: Well, it\'s about time, you know! Marietta, I understand you
have another question?

M. Allen: Yes, we do. This question is for Pete Piet and it\'s from
Steve from the Alaska state office.

Yes, good morning. I would like to first just thank the management and
people for putting on the conference. It\'s been a great conference and
thanks for that. My question is concerning a program that hadn\'t really
been talked about this morning, called the radio program and the
department has a policy now called Output 25. They are requiring us to
buy digital radios and we are supposed to do this by 2005. It has the
negatives we talked about, not all users want it, negative return on
investment, and the bottom line is now, we\'ve hit the department
several times from the field trying to change the policy, maybe we can
do with it with the energy, the systems we are requiring to buy are not
5, 10, 20they are up about 10 times the energy and I was wondering if
there would be relief of this department policy.

H. Tipton: Pete, I am not sure how much you are up on this particular
issue. Just to sort of frame where the policy came from for you before
you answer, the department at‑CIO Daryl White a few years ago did put
out a ‑‑ I guess it was sort of an ultimatum that we convert to digital
by 2005, and we\'ve been struggling internally with each of our states
in the purchase of what amounts to about \$45 million worth of digital
radios, and there currently is a waiver process in store for this
through DARYL\'s office now, but it\'s pretty tough to get those, and
I\'m not sure just how conversant you are on the issue, but ‑‑

P. deWitt: All I can really say is if it gives us another Avenue to
approach the question, not only the energy consumption, but also the
usability, I think we ought to make that attempt. It just gives us
another chance to bring the subject up in a forum that we know is of
great interest to the Secretary, and we might get relief but I can\'t
guarantee it.

H. Tipton: I hadn\'t heard the arguments on the energy consumption
question. In ‑‑ Alaska as always is a separate and special place for us
and I\'m sure exactly what the status is up there, Steve, on the radios.
But we would be glad to talk to you about those concerns.

M. Allen: He has a follow‑on.

I would just like to mention, thanks for the answer. The waiver process
is only a temporary process. Long term you are still supposed to switch
another standard and it\'s not only an energy consumption problem in
Alaska, but any site that uses repeaters down in the lower 48 would have
that same problem and so it is a big problem, and there\'s only one
vendor out there producing the radio. That is another problem. It\'s
quite energy inefficient. So it is a problem. Thanks.

H. Tipton: Thanks for making the point. I believe we have a telephone
call in? We\'re not ready for the telephone call in. Ok. I am supposed
to go to Chris.

C. North: We\'re ready here on the floor. I have Linda Colville from the
great state of Utah.

Thank you, Chris. He doesn\'t have to look up to me. I want to respond
to the gentleman from Oklahoma who had a question about how you get
middle managers involved in data quality, and to me that\'s a whole
realm of things and I would like to tell you what would happen me with
the various department and headquarters national efforts that we have
going on. You know, data quality involves Data Standards and metadata
and data capture and quality assurance and access. So it\'s a
multi‑varied questions. In Utah we\'re doing a lot of things, as I\'m
sure all states are, to deal with pieces of those questions,
establishing data stewards and educating them, establishing a process to
select Data Standards for spatial data when our folks go and select
that. And setting priorities for completing spatial data themes. Other
states have a lot of other initiatives ongoing as well. What would help
me and I believe would help my peers and everyone on the Utah leadership
team with this whole large issue area is to have processes and tools,
automated tools, to institutionalize those data quality assurance steps
so that we assure quality as a natural part of doing our everyday
business, so it\'s not added work to the extent that that\'s possible.
That would help us a lot. Also, to the extent that we do have to
undertake new work in order to do the tasks that are needed to assure
data quality, to understand the total cost of that new work so that we
can plan for it and figure out how to get that done. Those two things
would help us, so I would just ask Piet as you look at DOI policies and
Tip in DSDs and Nina has you look at the architecture, Data Standards
project, the land use planning, I.T. support project and other projects
we have national in scope, if you could look to help us provide pieces
of those things, processes and tools to institutional data quality and
understanding of the costs of the new work that we do have to take on,
that\'s how you can help us meet our users\' needs in Oklahoma and
Bureauwide and in our public\'s.

H. Tipton: That sort of sounded like send money, Piet.

P. deWitt: Well, it\'s certainly a challenge.

M. Chavez: Listening to Linda talk, I hear us talking about the tools
that we need to do this and I think we also need to focus in on
publicizing our successes as we ‑‑ focus in on publicizing our successes
as we step into use ‑‑ using our Data Standards and how standardized
data helps us do our job better. Whether we are trying to share data
with USGS or the Forest Service or internally, as we have successes
because the data has been standardized, we need to make sure folks can
see the benefits through those successes.

H. Tipton: That\'s an excellent point. Most everyone looks at this issue
as well, what\'s in it for me? And there is something in it for
everyone. It\'s our job to communicate and till what that was. Well, I
understand our phone call was from the fraternal order of police looking
for donations, so we\'re not going to take that one and we\'re going to
move on now back to Chris on the floor. I\'m sorry, mayor yet. ‑‑
Marietta.

M. Allen: This question is from Michelle and it\'s from Paula with the
Milwaukee Field Office.

Hi. The question I have actually kind of spring boards off of the last
question or comments that were made and it has to do with Data
Standards. I think most folks are familiar with the Data Standards that
have been wished our various automation efforts and how they have not
necessarily come to the level of fruition that we have ‑‑ would have
liked to have seen. Part of that has to do with the fact that not ‑‑ the
standards did not fully address all of the information needs and the
peculiar tease that occur within the Bureau. What will the boo Bureau do
to make sure the future Data Standards will meet the needs of the people
in the field?

M. Chavez: Thank you for that question. I am going to speak to that from
my perspective as a State Director and I think that either Bob or Tip
might want also to chime in terms of nationally what we are going to be
doing there. There is no question that as we deal with trying to
standardize how we do business and collect our data, there\'s always
going to be nuances. There\'s always going to be those exceptions to the
rules, and we do have to recognize that. I think what we need to do is
stay focussed on maintaining open communication so that as we start to
move into more standardization, we don\'t lose sight of the need to
continually assess, is this the most appropriate and most effective
method of collecting our data, and are there some serious gaps or some
serious areas where we need to perhaps adjust those standards so that,
in fact, we\'re doing an adequate job of collecting the information so
that you all can do the jobs on the ground and that we can share that
data effectively. The important thing is for us to keep in mind that
this doesn\'t end with a declaration of completion, that we continually
are assessing the quality of our systems and our data and looking to
where we have to make some adjustments and keep those communication
lines open. Tip, do you have any other thoughts on that?

H. Tipton: Well, I certainly do. I have lots of thoughts on data because
this is not the first time that there have been attempts to standardize
and be more ‑‑ standardize our application of data. I understand the
Bureau spent several million dollars in previous efforts to try to do
this. The problem has always been getting the policies and the
definitions and the standards implemented. So I think we have to look
now at a stronger commitment from management to really enforce the
standards and where there are needs for maybe variations or state
versions of particular pieces of data that that be well documented. But
in terms of developing what we look at as the corporate databases, there
have to be few exceptions from that. And we also can note that we do
have better editing tools to the extent that our data is going to be
housed and distributed in a different way, we have more controls on the
data that does go into these systems.

H. Bisson: Tip, this is Henri. I would like to jump in for a second as
well. We have to start somewhere in terms of setting Data Standards, and
you\'re right, there have been other efforts by the Bureau to ‑‑ from
the resource programs to try to set standards to be used by everybody.
They were just never fully accepted and they\'ve certainly never been
implemented. What we\'ve done, though, this year with the start of the
serious investment we\'re going to make in our land use planning is
we\'ve at least begun to set standards for the planning data that\'s
going to be used and with the project that Gary Stuckey is leading, what
we hope to do is wrestle this whole issue of Data Standards to the
ground and to try to do what Linda is asking for, which is provide some
guidance, some quality assurance up front as we proceed through all
these jobs. Karen mentioned, it\'s an opportunity now for BLM and USGS
to work together on various initiatives, including data, but there\'s a
large neighbor that we have not had much interaction with. I think to
this point they\'ve chosen to work internally to develop their Data
Standards and that\'s the Forest Service. And the Forest Service, my
understanding, has invested more than \$120 million in the last
year‑and‑a‑half developing Data Standards, and, you know, what we\'re
doing is ensuring that Gary and other folks, our national data stewards,
are communicating with the Forest Service so that we don\'t reinvent the
wheel and to the extent the two largest land managing agencies can be
consistent, I think it will be more effective in spending the money that
we have. So we\'re very concerned about working closely with the Forest
Service and not trying to invent Data Standards ourselves, and we\'ll be
spending a lot of time working with them over the next six months.

Working across the Bureau and the departmental lines is very challenging
and very difficult, but hen very right. We have to stay with it. There
is\' no choice.

H. Bisson: I think the best example of good payout is the effort that
was initiated by our cultural staff and they really set out to achieve
what I think ought to happen in most programs, which is a national
effort to set standards and a national agreement on the data that\'s
going to be used to make decisions in the cultural program that included
the users. That\'s the state SHPOs. I think it\'s a terrific example and
it\'s one I certainly am asking my group managers and our data stewards
and our directorate to focus on.

H. Tipton: That\'s for sure. Well, data has been a very invigorating
topic for the day, as it has been on our conference. So a lot of thought
is going into that. On ‑‑ timewise I think we have time for one more
question from the floor, and, Chris, I believe you\'re waiting for us?

C. North: I\'m here with Pam from the Montana state office. Pam, your
question?

I would like to direct the question initially to Tip and probably
eventually to some of the other panel members. The government paper work
elimination act and other laws are going to greatly affect the way we do
business. I haven\'t heard much about BLM\'s plan to implement those
initiatives. Do we have a plan which lists those processes and those
records that are going to be automated before 2003 as required by GPEA?

H. Tipton: That\'s something that\'s had a lot of us scratching our
head, Pam. And also the department is involved in this, in that a number
of agencies as usual have been looking at how to address E‑records and
to gain compliance with that law. Independently. And ever since I have
been in my job, the department has had us frozen with regard to
procuring or developing any kind of a system to move in that direction.
We do have some pilot efforts that we got waivers from the department on
to do some trials with. So I can\'t say that waive a plan that I\'m
satisfied with that\'s going to make us compliant, but it\'s just
something that we have to continue to work with the department on to the
best that I can tell to see what the overall strategy is for bringing
not only just us but all of the agencies into compliance with it. Does
anyone else have a thought or a comment on that? From the panelists? I
guess that\'s about all you\'re going to get, Pam. Anyway, thanks for
raising the issue.

Thank you.

H. Tipton: I understand we can take one more question from the floor,
and Marietta, do you have someone?

M. Allen: We do have a final question for you, Tip. This is from Georgia
and she\'s from the Alaska state office. Georgia?

Hi, Tip. With the deployment of Tivoli, employees have become a bit
nervous big brother is watching over them and I was wondering what
assurances or reassurances you could give them like Martha Stewart would
say, \"it\'s a good thing\"?

H. Tipton: That\'s kind of a loaded question now, Georgia. Tivoli can
have that big brother appearance to it. But we have to acknowledge that
we\'ve spent at least a year in working with all the folks down in the
states that are going to benefit from the use of Tivoli and we have
worked out arrangements and working agreements through our SLA and I
know I\'m not supposed to use acronyms, but it\'s a service level
agreement, I just now remembered what it was, that sort of defines the
roles and responsibilities of how Tivoli will be implemented. First of
all, there will be no mystery about the use of Tivoli. We want to have
clear instructions and documentations out as to where the gains and how
every one can benefit from the use of the tool. We hope to be fully
deployed with Tivoli by the 15th of June in all of our states and
centers, and some are already using it to some extent today. But we
expect to have many gained efficiencies from Tivoli. We will at long
last know what our I.T. assets are, and we can inventory and we hope
this is going to make life easier throughout the field. So I guess the
thing that I get constantly reminded from computer technicians at my
level is, these are government computers, you know and we tend to look
at these as our personal PCs at work when they really aren\'t and we
just don\'t need to lose sight of that perspective and any concerns
about private information on there or confidential information really
shouldn\'t be stored on the computers in the first place. So we have to
be real clear on the policies of just how we manage that type of
information. So Tivoli is going to be a very positive asset for the
Bureau. It\'s going to save us some time, it\'s going to save us some
money and it will make life a lot easier.

M. Chavez: Tip, when I had the capability of Tivoli described to me,
realizing there is that potential, it just seems to me that there is so
much efficiencies associated with that. If I have something go wrong
with my computer and I have to call the help desk and they can\'t quite
figure out what\'s wrong, then they have to come up two flights of
stairs and hover over my desk, I am probably sure I get a little more
attention than perhaps other people in the state office, but, still, to
have this capability where they can sit down and they can watch what\'s
happening on my monitor, help me fix that, download software remotely,
all of those things to me are just so exciting in terms of efficiencies
that hopefully we can downplay the concerns and the worries about
potential impacts to privacy and focus in on the efficiencies that
we\'ll gain from this.

H. Tipton: That\'s true. Well, as we near the end of our broadcast, I
would like to ask if any our panel members would like to have any last
thing they would like to raise before I call on Piet and Nina.

M. Chavez: I guess I would just like to say that this has been fun. I
have had some opportunities to see some folks I haven\'t seen in a
while. Piet, it\'s great to see you here. And certainly every time I
come to the Training Center with a gathering of specialists like this, I
pick up more information than I walk away with and I think that\'s one
of the key things to the seminar, if S I hope everyone leaves the
seminar with a sense of having gained some additional information and
maybe some contacts and I really congratulate you, Tip, on an excellent
seminar.

H. Tipton: Thank you very much. I take this opportunity, as well, to
personally thank all the folks who have contributed their time and the
State Directors who have allowed them to contribute their time to work
over this ‑‑ on this seminar for the last ‑‑ probably last six months.
These are very comprehensive things and not easy to put together. We\'ve
had some great comments and great questions today and raised a lot of
level of excitement, and ‑‑ but before we go, I would like to give Piet
deWitt our acting Assistant Secretary an opportunity for any closing
thoughts he might want to add today.

P. deWitt: I hope these are appropriate in that has been a wonderful
discussion. For somebody who is I.T.‑challenged as I am, I am impressed
with the huge array of challenges that lie before the Bureau. But I\'m
also struck with the sense of great energy and enthusiasm as your people
work to ‑‑ work on the future of information technology in the Bureau. I
think that the fact that you have this energy and enthusiasm is a
guarantee that you will move down the road smartly and get to where you
want to go. I was particularly impressed with Michelle\'s comments about
the evolution and training of people and their growth with time. I think
it\'s important that we remember while we are discussing programs and
machines and devices this is really all about people. My real concern
remains that we don\'t forget the people closest to the ground. They\'re
the people that deliver to our customers. And we need to keep them
always in the process. But this has been a wonderful discussion and I
thank you for the opportunity to be here.

H. Tipton: Thank you very much, Piet. That\'s encouraging to hear from
the Assistant Secretary\'s office. Now we want to give the final word to
Nina, our Acting Director. Any closing thoughts for our viewers.

Dir. Hatfield: Thank you very much, tip. Was we go forward and try to
deal making the appropriate managements reforms, it seems to me
information technology really a key for us. Piet, I look at doing more
with less probably a little differently because as I have said in the
past, we in the Bureau are stretched so thinly in so many different
areas, we\'re like a rubber band that\'s been pulled as far as we can
go. But there\'s a lot that we can do in terms of trying to do our work
more intelligently, and that\'s where I think the information technology
offers us so many benefits. We are trying to operate about 60 national
systems, about 600 state systems, and it\'s really the operation and
maintenance of all those systems that\'s costing us so much money and so
if we can move forward with our Enterprise Architecture, with being more
effective in terms of GIS, creating Data Standards, using those Data
Standards, doing all those things, we are going to significantly
decrease our operations and maintenance costs. And what that means is
that every dollar we save in terms of how we\'re trying to operate our
I.T. systems goes directly into our program areas. So that\'s really key
for us. It\'s really important for us to continue down the road we
we\'re on in terms of trying to use our technology so much more
efficiently. I\'ve been carrying around for several years now a little
quote from a book that was written by Edward O. Wilson in which he said
we are drowning information while starving for wisdom. The world
henceforth will be run by people able to put together the right
information at the right time, think critically about it and make
important choices Wisely. It seems to me that\'s exactly what we are
trying to do here today, that it\'s significant that we just don\'t have
a panel of people from the I.T. world, but we have a panel here that
consists of people trying to marry up the technology and information
systems with what we\'re trying to do in terms of the program sides of
the house. And certainly for those of us in BLM, we\'re absolutely
committed to making sure that we put together the right information and
have that information at every employees\' fingertips at the right time
when they need to it make the best decisions. So thank you very much,
tip, for having us here and we\'ve enjoyed it.

H. Tipton: Well, thanks to all of the panel members. This has really
been excellent. And this concludes our show for today. So thanking those
in Phoenix and again thanking you folks in Washington D.C. I want to
also thank Chris and Marietta up on the seminar floor and all those who
participated from Phoenix. Now we also need to remind all satellite
downlink coordinators to let us know how many people from your office
watched our program and how did we do. You can use NTC\'s automatic
viewer reporting and evaluation system on the NTC homepage at
www.ntc.blm.gov/satnet. Or you can complete the standard broadcast
viewer roster and fax it to the NTC immediately following our show.
Thanks for watching. And so long.

Announcer: To help your office participate in future telecasts, see the
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more information on upcoming distance learning events, as well as
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