hearing will come to order as i told our witnesses a little bit earlier the scarcity of members here is not a lack of interest in this very very important issue that there is a signing ceremony going on at the white house and the republican conference has got various things going on and so we're you know we're going to different places but the important thing is that you're here that we've had a appeared time for minority majority staff to talk with you we've got your written information we're great here for you today so today's hearing is about the role of nist in supporting innovation in the twenty first century as the only federal technical agency with a constitutional mandate measurement and also the oldest federal technical agency with a statutory charter and this as proven it's worth the taxpayer investment for more than one hundred years and as technologies have evolved so has nist from developing the thread standards for the fire hose to the measurement of electricity and now the digitalisation of fingerprints the list continues to grow however the current lab structure dates from one thousand nine hundred eighty eight and the technologies of today are much more multi disciplinary and integrated  scope and function dr patrick gallagher has announced his intention to restructure ness to reflect the true and for the past twenty years to accommodate the trends of the next twenty near structure needs to better reflect the needs of the private sector communit it serves and we intend to make this a component of the american compete legislation and this also has an important role beyond the measurement from its creation the word standards has always been a key element of both its name and function as technologies have changed since one thousand nine hundred three so have standards issues until the eighty's standards were considered to be a purely domestic issue with the growth of international trade and technological corporations or international corporations tech technology sectors this began to change our understanding of the importance of international impact of standards has accelerated over the past twenty years with the globalization of technological innovation today that nickel standards or a key part of the innovation puzzle the focus of today's hearing is to ask what's in this row should be in coordinating federal government standards policy development i want to make it clear that this committee has no interest in telling private sector standards developers how to do their jobs this committee has always been congress's strongest proponent for the public private sector partnership that defies defines the us standards development system and today's hearing is addressing issues that we hope w streamline federal government participation in the private sector led standard system i would like to thank our witnesses for taking the time from their busy schedules to appear before the committee today and now recognize mr smith for his opening statement thank chairman chairman gordon and thank you for calling this hearing today on the structure and authorities of nest the national institute of standards and technology article one section eight of the constitution enumerates the power of congress to quote fix the standard of weights and measures for over one hundred years since its initial founding as the national bureau of standards has been congressionally authorized to fulfill this mission and is trusted domestically and internationally as an unbiased arbiter of scientific measurement as we are continually reminded scientific innovation is never ending and the infrastructure needed to inch ensure continued advancement evolves like life in light of this from time to time this has seen fit to reorganize itself to better meet the needs of the scientific and commercial communities the seven lucian is entirely appropriate so long as necessary means within its authorization and is better able to meet its mission i'm looking forward to hearing from our witnesses on how th the interest of hearing from our witnesses i simply say thank you to the panel for going out of your way to join us here today and share your expertise and i yield back the balance of my time thank you mr smith and those members that are here today will have  an opportunity to submit questions for the record it's now my pleasure to introduce our witnesses first the honorable patrick gallagher is the director of the national institute of standards and technology dr james is the  is welcome to correct the record as we go forward and as you know you will have five minutes for your spoken testimony or anything within reason written testimony will be included in the record for the hearing and when in today's hearing and for me they both deal with how this can most effectively carry out its mission so first let me discuss the reorganization the reorganization that i have proposed for nest actually has to say compound as to  it the first is the organization reporting directly to the director's office if you will the current structure has seventeen line organ organizations that all report to the director a deputy director of the agency i have proposed that this is  an unwieldy and unstable structure because of significant turnover in those positions and the new structure proposes to organize nist by eliminating the current deputy director position and replacing it with three associate director programs directors each with responsibility over major program elements of the agency so one for the laboratory programs an associate director for our export all programs which includes baldrige m e p and the technology innovation program and one for management resources which covers the administrative and support functions of the agency this proposed reorganization has been approved by the department and by the administration and is currently being evaluated by our appropriations subcommittee the other reorganization that i have announced that i am considering and i have also initiated internal planning for is a realignment of the laboratory structure at nest as you pointed out mr chairman this structure has been in place since the late one nine hundred eighty s and i have been working in a very unorthodox fashion here normally zation is are proposed and approved and not announced until they've gone through this process i believe  that i wanted to see brought in put and so i worked closely with in this leadership team with the visiting committee on advanced technology with key stakeholder organizations with our own department of commerce and with your staff from this committee as well  after reviewing input from all of them my initial assessment is that it is time to really realign the laboratories and what i have proposed is creating a structure that's based on organizations that are organized by mission this would create vertically integrated structure where a single laboratory would be responsible not only for the basic r and d activities that support that but also for the measurement services that help carry out the mission of the agency so this would make organizations much more customer focused and responsive a realignment of the type i'm proposing will not change the focus of this program's this does not set us on a new direction it's designed to make the agency more effective nor does it result in any reductions in force i am working closely with all of our stakeholders to develop a proposal that would go to the department and the administration for approval after which it would be sent of course and shared with congress for consideration on the standards issue the national technology transfer and advancement act and its implementation under all of the start of our one a one night scene defines in this role and tells federal agencies that they are to prefer to use standards developed by the private sector through voluntary consensus process this piece of legislation which this committee played a key role and has has been remarkably successful in having agencies replace government written standards with those developed in the private sector however today the pace of technology is changing ever increase with greater speed the technology itself is becoming more complex and  solutions to major policy issues are dependent on technology itself so there are two major questions that we're facing one is to how do we work more effectively with industry in the private sector on developing standards and how do we work more effectively across agencies to coordinate our work and so am i right in testimony i've identified to discuss some of our experience on smart grid i think smart grid has broken new ground as a public private partnership that can be very effective  it includes committed leadership by all the participants it's an effective partnership model with an active governance their strong cord nation among the participating federal agencies and it brings outstanding technical capability to bear we are also working to improve the inner agency coordination and to that end i working very closely with the executive office of the president expressed the o s t p and b to develop a more strategically focused interagency process where we can address specific standards related issues and policy topics so mr chairman i want to thank you again for this hearing and i look forward to our question answer session where i can address any other issues which serve as recognized thank you chairman gordon ranking member smith for the opportunity to testify today on matters related to the organizational realignment and the future role of nist in coordinating federal agencies in standards my name is james serum and i'm president of psi take ventures a science and technology consulting firm i've been engaged in developing and commercializing measurement technologies for about forty years having spent most of my career with hewlett packard for the last two years have served as its chairman in most cases the comments expressed in this testimony are my own but in some cases especially related to the role and standards i also reflect the opinions of the cat as organization involving fundamental research technology standards development and managing programmes for research funding and quality management these activities have evolved over the years but the underlying organisational structure of the sports them has not seen major change and as you have said for about twenty years much of the organization is disciplined focused for example in physics and chemistry yet many of the current goals and priorities are application or mission focused and effective efficient organization must have clearly defined responsibilities single ownership of goals and accountability for achieving results key priority programs must have visibility in all levels of the organization the head of the organization needs to clearly understand the business priorities desired outcomes and capabilities both in people and other assets and then optimize the organizational structure to best me goals i believe that dr gallagher well understands these criteria and his proposed realignment reflects this understanding dr gallagher has proposed a reorganization that i believe will result in a more effective operation and accountability for all departments the laboratories will report into one associate director and with within the laboratories a mission bay structure will bring all elements of the mission together in clothing technology development standards calibration services and reference data high priority industry focus programs and cross cutting programs would gain top level visibility and coordination through a program office under the associate director for laboratory i'm fully supportive of dr gallagher proposed restructuring i was also asked to address the question of my support for the director of nist to also hold the rank of undersecretary similar to that structure at no in general i think this is a very positive change both for the nist organization and for the director in that it brings parity with his peers in the commerce department and allows the director to participate in all the activities afforded to an undersecretary i would only be concerned if the director received significant additional responsibilities with a new title that diverted his attention from the very important challenges that miss faces in the coming years finally i would like to express a high degree of confidence in the nist director and his ability to structure the organization to meet its goals and objectives dr gallagher has a deep understanding of emerging technologies the organization strengths and weaknesses and a clear plan to meet the challenges that this faces in the coming years the cat also has affirmed their confidence of support of dr gallagher in their annual report in consideration of the role of nist in coordinating federal agency activities it seems natural that they would play a major role the development and maintenance of standards is not only a core competency at nist it's a major element of their mission statement together with their competency in measurement technology nist drives and coordinate standard practices and processes throughout much of the u s industries for example documentary standards are recognized as a critical element in the successful implementation of the energy smart grid health care information technology and the cyber security programs nist is already deeply engaged in coordinate standards activities in these and just segments in the v cat has described these activities and its recommendations in its two thousand and nine annual report that the cat believes that the coordination role taken on by nist in the area of smart grid should be used as a model and applied to other areas of national pri priority where standards development is required this clear from my examples in my written testimony that nist technical expertise its reputation as an on biased and neutral party and its extensive participation in standards and conformity assessment activities strongly positioned snus to address the standards related challenges of the twenty first century and helping the u s maintain a competitive advantage thank you thank you dr cyril and now we'll hear from  implementation of technical standards microsoft appreciates the opportunity to participate in this important hearing effective technical standards can help promote innovation fuel market growth and drive corresponding job development the information and communication technology i c t marketplace changes rapidly new and competing standards that are responsive to the marketplace needs and able to point to new solutions and encourage development of innovative products and services microsoft plays a dual role in standardization activities we actively contribute innovative technology to standardization in many technology areas as an example we recently contributed of mice microsoft technology called user interface automation that helps developers build products like screen readers and voice recognition that provide essential accessibility to computers and the internet to those with significant isn't hearing or other learning needs in addition we sit on the other side of the table as are products from windows to x box and beyond implement thousands of standards that are formulated by a broad diversity of standards bodies this balance sitting on both sides of the standards f frames our perspective a diverse standards ecosystem that supports multiple technologies is good for us and global economic growth it's also worth noting that the computing experience itself is undergoing a powerful transformation as consumers governments and businesses are harnessing computing power in what's called the cloud with new innovative products and services and broad based communications new businesses will form because any small group of developers at this stage can create content or software and have it available instantaneously in the global marketplace with this new opportunity comes corresponding new responsibility including the need to protect privacy of users the security of their data and to enable inner operability between systems all areas where standards can play an important role and this is already provided engineering taxonomies that have been important in helping support cloud standardization efforts we've seen this as a key player in the standards ecosystem its expertise and involvement are highly valued by the private sector with regard to nist the subcommittee posed two related questions for this hearing  first question seeks perspectives on the proposed nist realignment and this will be placing standards professionals within each of its labs so they'll be linked to the relevant technology experts we also understand that this will create a coordination team among these standards professionals and this is also proposing broadly a more effective executive management structure we believe that the proposed reorganization of nest will enhance nests over all effectiveness in meeting its mission objectives including in the standard system the subcommittee second question asks what role in this should play in technical standards within the federal government as background president obama's administration has identified a number of very complex technology policy areas such as smart grid health care i t and cyber security that impact many different stakeholder groups all of those areas all of those are areas where standards can play an important supporting role the current voluntary market driven standard system has the tools it needs to create standards to help accomplish these policy objectives at the same time these key policy areas in these key policy areas there is a role for an active convener of the key stakeholders so together they can assess standards related needs frame solutions to address these challenges we believe that nist based on its standards expertise and its reputation as a neutral science based organization this convener as a convener seeking to develop a standards framework to support us government technology objectives and this should define define the problems using specific use cases and scenarios identify and bring together relevan stakeholders to build consensus on frameworks and outcomes and then report back to those stakeholders in this work in developing its framework and roadmap for smart grid in our operability standards exemplifies this approach and this can also s us in a separate convener role to facilitate the exchange of information and collaboration among federal agencies on domestic and international standards policy issues and on federal agency engagement international technical standards development efforts it would be helpful for the u s government to articulate a unified position or be mindful of differing viewpoints especially when engaging in international standards as a international standards bodies in closing i'd like to thank you for giving us the opportunity testify today microsoft appreciates nist valuable contributions to standardization and certainly we at microsoft look forward to working with you and the broader standards community including my colleagues here at this table to preserve and promote a vibrant collaborative and effective standards ecosystem thank you information and communication technology industry overall and as a result intel has a strong interest in the health of the standard standardization system in the united states and globally intel in our industry are primarily interested in global standards standards that are developed to address global requirements and which are ultimately adopted around the world the national institutes of standards and technology has very important roles in the standard system and nist is an active and expert participant in developing standards through involvement by four hundred or so that some of its employees and the participation of those employees is highly valued and it has a role in public and private coordination on priority areas of standardization for example the current work on smart grid and i would emphasize that these types of efforts to convene the public and private sectors to coordinate require a large amount of effort and should be considered exceptional  they should represent areas where policy priorities are for the government areas where nist has truong expertise and where there's a need for public and private coordination this also has an important role to coordinate among  federal agencies on standardization development on policy topics a role it's been described in the n t today i support dr gallagher dr gallagher is plan for reorganizing nist and i believe these changes will strengthen the important roles that nist plays in standardization the changes should improve management stability and customer oriented and the director's examination of strengthening the interagency coordination role is also well considered i'd like to thank the subcommittee for the opportunity to be here and of course i'll be happy to take questions when we get there thank you and finally mr underg chairman gordon ranking member smith and subcommittee members thank you for the opportunity to testify on this important topic my name is andy grove and i am a partner in the boston law firm of guys we're up to grow i'm also on the board of directors of the american national standards institute but the opinions i will express today are mine alone those opinions are primarily informed by my experience in representing almost one hundred nonprofit membership organizations that develop and or promote standards over the last twenty two years to free my testimony today in the context of three important areas were standards play a crucial role which even policy goals maintaining national competitiveness and ensuring the efficient use of taxpayer dollars let me begin by addressing the standards related dependencies of public policy today over the last hundred years are bottom up private sector led standards development structure has served this nation well this approach is wisely affirmed as we all know and strengthened by congress in  hundred five when it passed a technology transfer and advancement act but today the world is changing in ways that i believe require us to optimize this bottom up partnership to ensure that it continues to be as effective as it has been in the past as we become  dependent on technology in general and the internet in particular thousands of new standards have been required to simply make things work major policy initiatives such as the smart grid and lowering the costs of health care through the adoption of electronic health records   each dependent on the develop ability of scores and often even hundreds of standards many of which did not exist when these initiatives were launched unfortunately while the private sector is capable of developing individual standards quickly for specific purposes within a single sector it lacks the will to tackle complex cross sectoral challenges rapidly or at least as rapidly as we need them to accomplish it today this is in part due to that what you would expect would be difficulties of resolving competing economic interests which will not always be closely aligned on every standard that needs to be created well adequate chorused collateral across sectoral solutions can and usually do evolve over time urgent challenges such as cyber security in the rising cost of health care do not permit us the luxury to allow normal normal market forces to provide solutions as a result when the natural national interest demands the rapid deployment of wide cross section or range of co ordinated standards i believe force is needed and note this well challenges such as the smart grid in electronic health records are but the advance party of a host of similarly cross sectoral complex standards dependent challenges the policy makers will face in the future to whom congress turn it determines that multiple industry sectors must be motivated to provide the standards tools needed to address ambitious policy goals in the examples noted above the answer has been clear to miss minturn to national competitiveness the development of deployment of standards is essential to creating new technologies and new product markets and therefore jobs creation and maintaining a healthy balance of trade as well this lesson has been not lost on governments abroad in particular policy makers in the european woven standards development adoption into their national strategies indeed in two thousand and five us aerospace industry working group concluded without a clear strategy and support from industry and government space agencies the u s is in the process of seeding the development of stand for the commercial space industry to venue's outside side of our influence the chinese government has observed this process and today is sponsoring the creation of more and more homegrown standards for the benefit of its domestic industries this is especially worrisome because standards are essential to every emerging area of potential managing growth job growth on the horizon today but how are we to achieve such sophistication without abandoning our bottom up model the answer i believe is to charge a single agency or department with the role of tracking emergency needs for public private coordination with marshalling facts and data for lawmakers in the administration to support the development and deployment standards where international trade policy and with providing a coordinating function between the public and private sectors again i would submit that nist has the right tool for this job lesley let me highlight the relevance of standards to the efficient use of resources there is no argument that widely adopted standards create competition increased product choices and drive costs down hence supporting the development of standards can have a very material impact in learning government cost directly in procurement especially where any agency can buy products from a single proven vendor less the same support can also lower costs indirectly because government side standards adoption allows information to be entered once and then exchange widely securely and rapidly across departments and agencies because of the immense soft power of government purchasing government can also provide incentives industry to move rapidly in directions that are beneficial to society in general such as towards greater cybersecurity and towards greater accessibility for those w disabilities turning very briefly to the questions posed wires coordination among federal agencies important achieving goals such as protecting homeland security and making government more open can only be achieved through standards i can expand upon that if necessary but suffice it to say that without standards these goals simply cannot be achieved what could the future role of nist be quite clearly this can be capable of running  to policies such as the smart grid and i think if i were to leave you with one message today the role of this is essential in meeting these complex challenges such as the smart grid and i believe that it is important that that be institutionalized in cooperation with private industry in conclusion i'd like to thank the chairman and the subcommittee members for inviting me to speak to today and i look forward to the progress that you will make in these areas thank you  and that it seems to me that that you're all saying that that your dues does maybe some coordination and that that that this is a good place for that and the word convener has been used now what i want to e how do we say that it looks like some other countries are trying to get ahead of us in setting international standards so how should we you know let's convene and take a lead in that so you  conveners role and is actually one of the real challenges with this that is determining where one acts i do think that in in the paid ng how we may go about this how nist may play a role one of the key aspects of playing the convenor across stakeholders may be conducting periodic landscape reviews because i know that one of the things that is that people are focused on here is not just having a backward looking approach to the things the problems that just may be able to help fix but a forward looking role in the areas where convening these stakeholders can proactively help to initiate things i believe that my my slightly tongue in cheek answer yes really actually does need to be the case and that is that with the ongoing capability to run landscape or view comes engagement with stakeholders we're stakeholders may identify key areas may also see nist identifying or congress identifying key areas and aspect that is important for mr wimble testimony is that these do take up significant public and private resources so we need to be thoughtful about the will get out of a hypothetical i want you tell us what you where is this chicken and egg and then maybe the industry folks could react to that great thank you i actually see the answer is an a but i think there are actually two distinct cases i think the question about when government takes a stronger role and convening recording on a standards effort actually touches on what is the purpose of the standard and i think in many cases what we're looking at are standards that are needed for achieving government goals in the case of smart grid i think nist took a proactive lead in initiating the convening role because to address our energy needs we had to stimulate and have a standard structure in place that would be viable for let's say regulation or for conditions under federal grants and assistance and so forth and same with health i t same with health i t same with cybersecurity so i think there are many cases where the government's need for technology is going to be manifested in terms of needing to have a certain structured standards in place and that's a case where we're going to want to be more proactive and maybe the check in this first i think there's also cases where industry is going to drive this and  requesting of us greater participation because maybe of an impasse or because of an international issue and those types of scenarios play out as well as i think we can be both initiated by industry and initiated by  by government need anyone else want to comment on this if i may please i think that one important thing to be realize is that the standard setting infrastructure is about one hundred years old and for most of that time it was created to basically solve problems within silos it's currently face now where the reality where silo solutions don't work anymore  private industry in my opinion has not really figured out ways to do things that cross many different sectors it's getting better it is coming up with a mechanism of setting profiles and you increasingly seeing new consortia set up not to set standards but you create profiles of standards to address use cases and if that sounds like a smart grid it should because it's basically the same type of exercise the problem is is that private industry is good at coming up with those to handle still fairly discreet problems it takes an enormous amount of impetus an enormous amount of organization and an enormous amount of sometimes motivating dollars to pull together something of the magnitude of the smart grid so i think that that's the first main area we're government realizes that without government just not going to happen the second thing is i think that there will be standards that are of special interests to government and may be a good example would be open government i've spoken to times about comparing standards to civil rights legislation that if you're disabled and you can't log onto a web site the more government saves money by transitioning to a web based interface with the citizenry you can effectively be disenfranchised if you can't operate the technology to interoperate with government and that might be a second category where the involvement of government might be appropriate all do and then the second one is do you think that the next rector should be elevated to the second to an undersecretary position and raise your hand once again we have concurrent so i have some more areas of interest but abroad particularly in china often integrate their standards with their national strategies i think that can be dangerous sometimes you know in that if you think that the government knows everything and they take the wrong course and that's a problem but also can get their assets together and make them you know be able to pull together all their assets so let me ask you from europe in china it is more government directed and government driven and i suppose a benefit of that approach is when the government would like to see a standard put in place there's a very direct way to make that happen however if you step back and look at the results i believe that the system we enjoy in the us has has been quite successful and continues to be successful despite this different approach that we've taken in other places as i mentioned our industry  information and communication technology really relies on standards to be globally adopted so it's not enough to have a standard implemented in one country we need to see standards that nearly all countries will adopt and the market driven system in the u s where we have you know industry and government standards research and the market driven oriented system has been very very successful in taking standards we should have become popular in the us and having them adopted globally and i don't believe it's it's under imminent threat from more government directed systems way we may not be as dominant a consumption market but still industries which are based in the u s are often very global companies that are participating in markets around the world and when those companies are participating in standards process it's market driven i see impact globally on aligning around technologies and if a single country wants to pursue its own agenda it's it's difficult for that to be successfully adopt globally but has anyone yes or take a slightly different approach but i agree that i think the private sector system is working extremely well in the standards area so i think that there are  two discrete areas where i think optimization would be required in the first place i think you made a very good point about the size of the american market today the united states has had a very disproportionate impact on the setting of standards in areas such as information communications technology there are in existence today something north of five hundred standards consortia not counting the traditional standards bodies that have been created to set standards in this area  i hope set up about a hundred of them and i would say that out of that hundred to have been primarily lead by foreign companies and every last single one of the rest of them the leadership came from major international corporations headquartered in the united states i think we sometimes forget the enormous benefit that american industry has had from having those standards efforts launched to serve at the outset the strategic interests and goals of american industry people abroad are starting to become aware that other people can play that game china in particular with you know one point three billion people has very much realized that all the patents are owned in the west and they're tired of paying patent royalties to build products to sell to their own people while they make ten cents on a d v d player and ship it off to the west or somebody makes five dollars on the patent royalties plus a markup on the device this is going to change and when you have that many consumers the game is very clear to learn how to play i saw in the usa today reports just last week three new standards consortia reform in china year there might have been three in the entire year so i think one of the things that we might not realize until it's gone is when other people start playing the same game and when american companies you start consortia here are looking at that big a market they won't have any choice but to play the chinese game and with what i see that problem so i my question is what are what are the answers i think here is where we need to have better communication between private industry and government so that private industry can alert and frankly i think recruit government to assist it in trying to stay ahead on the trade policy ways particularly i would say through enforcing our rights under the w here i think i would i would echo mr up to grouse comments about about thinking about both the trade attribute and the standardization app attribute as related but not necessarily the same thing going on in the trade side we do have a double as a vehicle we'd like to make sure that we are alert looking forward looking into those things proactively so that we don't end up too late in the game standardization side i think one of the things that is a theme that should run along with that is the effort to draw some of these nations into the global standard system where there is an opportunity to compete effectively using it using the global competitive environment as opposed to as opposed to a single country environment so that's that's where we see a  opportunity to use the existing private standards system but use it on a global basis as a matter of global competitiveness yes or just quickly back to  question of the ordination of standards very often once a technology comes into play it's the question of how long does it take for companies private sector and public public  bodies to come together to think in one fashion before you dominate the industry and i think the very question of of being nimble by by coordinating standards and again i referenced the smart  d a few years ago it looked like an almost insurmountable problem to get everybody to agree on an architecture and a model of how we would go about it and if we can use that as a model for other high priority opportunities i think that can make a dramatic difference in our competitiveness because we can be we can be standardized in a much faster pace and mr smith opportunity not get caught up with the outcome necessarily and i see each and every one of you as having a vital role in that and i would say i certainly within the private sector represented here today have probably given more up opportunity to people whether it's the young people in the audience or a large companies but i i appreciate the prosperity that some have experienced as a result  of more opportunities along the way and so i think that certainly i would say we have the existence of mest as a way to not only ensure opportunity but to ensure  competition and not only to make sure that competitors in the private sector compete because i think that we have a good bit of that i also think that we want to ensure  that we have a competitive industry and domestically to compete in the world marketplace and and i think that we can have a discussion not only today but in the future of how we can leverage that i do want to add that i'm concerned that some of the pending policies and i won't get into those today but i'm concerned that some pending policies that are out of the control of each  but they they might stifle innovation they might stifle opportunity and that that concerns me a great deal not only for the future of our country but for the future of every individual so with that i might just touch on on a few things and dr gallagher how will the proposed director's office reorganization support improving this interaction with industry and academia to support competitiveness competitiveness and what do you have planned to help  america compete and will this reorganization make a difference to american competitiveness great thank you for the question i believe that the reorganization will actually make a very substantial difference in how nis interacting with industry which is its primary stakeholder and the reason for that is simple it has to do with accountability the real difference in the organizational structure that i'm proposing is not at the technical level and this scientist and engineers will continue doing so in the world class work that they've done but the leadership now will be very directly held responsible for carrying out a portion of our mission and ours since our mission is to work with industry i think the major outcome of this is to make them very acutely focused on how their services whether it's measurement services that they're providing out of one of our technical laboratories or whether it's our technology services and promoting new technologies developing  standards their job description now is really based on how well they carry that out and so what i think it does is it creates much stronger ties between the nist leadership and industry leadership that's been the the relationship that  i clearly wanted to strengthen and i think that as you've heard a little bit just in the standards arena you know i view the job of nist as to allow the conditions for competitiveness an opportunity to take hold so in many cases that you know what we're talking about is an enabling infrastructure in other words creates the business or technology conditions for companies to innovate and generate new products to have global markets available to them to have a supply chain that they can work with it's about putting that trust into those into those relationships and viewed that way this is about creating an environment where we can make and  compete and still be the number one country in the world for developing new products and services i think that translates to jobs and economic prosperity in a very direct way very good thank you not just point of clarification  it sounds like there would be a net increase of senior level positions at your shop actually no it's not even a new layer of management currently the existing organization has seventeen line organizations that report to me through a deputy director so while the i'm replacing a single deputy director with three associate directors there's going to be fewer or lying organizations reporting it so actually it's not an increase in the number of executive positions or f t's not at all there's no change i appreciate that and again i don't want to pretend to manage your shop they're not qualified number  one but certainly that's not what i see my role to be but budgetary i just want to stay on top of things he did mention some interagency coordination process if you wouldn't mind the the the standards coordination effort as i said it really has two major compound it's one is have more robust set of models for how we work with the private sector i mean to oversimplify historically we had either a very hands off will participate at a technical level but it's really not managed at all or we take over as a government and we write down standards ourselves and i think the real attractiveness of the smart grid approach is that represented a new type of model where we had a much more active engagement and it really was a public private partnership is that going to be the right approach for every standards question the answer is definitely not but i think in cases where you need those attributes of being able to define your needs very clearly and have some influence over the architecture for example for security in the smart grid over the timeliness of the development it's a very appropriate model the other areas been how do you get these technology systems are becoming very complex and there's almost always a large number of agencies who have a stake in the outcome and so we've been looking very carefully at how to improve the inner agency coordination and i've reached the conclusion that it has two ingredients one is it has to have an agency a nest which has deep technical capabilities and understands the standards process we in some way become the the corporate corporate memory for how to do standards related activities the other part of  coordination though is actually being able to direct agencies to get together to mediate discussions and reach conclusions and in my view that's very much a white house function and so what i've been doing is trying to work very closely with o s t p and with o m b and the u s trade route to come up with a forum where we tied together the type of inner agency process that we've had under the n t t a so there is a standing interagency coordination committee chaired by nest and couple it with a more strategic policy the leadership level driven interagency process that would come out and be managed by the white well said i think by having nest involved in both of those we tie these processes together it should give us the ability to have the active leadership participation where we need it and not lose any of the very active working level interactions that we currently have with the agencies ok thank you sir and a little bit outside the scope of the specific questions that you're asked to answer in your prepared testimony if you wouldn't mind telling us what each of you excuse me might believe our nests strongest contributions to american competitive competitiveness and any areas where you believe nest could use improvement and especially as we reauthorize america compete what recommendations would you make choices to strengthen nest an expert and makes the sound contributions to the standards process the area for improvement i hear discussed among my colleagues is we want more of that there are some places where we'd like to have missed participating in developing standards and they're not there so i don't know if it's a criticism but but you know if there's an opportunity to give nist a bigger opportunity to participate in the standards process i think that's something industry would appreciate and that would ultimately make u disciplined structure that has has been in place the nist has done just well world class research and three nobel prizes have come out of it as a demonstration of that  however that research in the in the in the current structure is not as closely aligned to its deliverables with industry  as it could be and this is one of the reasons why i strongly support dr gallagher's realignment proposal because because all elements of of it impact on industry the  pioneering measurement technology that gets developed together with the necessary standards that the industry needs to be competitive all are accountable within one organization and the decisions can be made by a small group of people made much more rapidly and made synergistically with the outcome the desired outcome closely associated with the pioneering research so i think that's probably this role in standards i think the way that many of these have developed is that nist has an independence that drives a credibility that allows us to participate across different stakeholders it is what we sometimes call an honest brokers role and we do value that very much across the different industry participants on the other stakeholders so we think that that is that's a key attribute to being able to play this conveners role and to it to be able to pull stakeholders to gather as i look to areas that one might leverage out of nest certainly we've we've thought of rather rather than areas improve of improvement the capacity to leverage that conveners role that is some of what we've spoken about here today if i were if i were looking to align resources that any organization on standards issues one of the things that i would certainly think about is aligning the standards professionals very closely with the specific technology areas that are reference then it turns out that that's one of the things that the nist realignment is is designed to do it will create that matrix of both close engagement with the specific missions on a technology basis and then and then a couple assay to coordinate that across different groups nest thank you anyone else trapped first i think the biggest strength of nest in the context of the discussion we're having today in one way is just that there is an enormous pool of people that get standards that's not very common across other parts of government and all of a sudden standards matter a lot more than they used to and it's not the easiest thing to get up to speed so what is the major resource available to government today to educate government about what it needs to know to support modern policy in the technology area that would be sun matched anywhere else in government they're islands of competence in one particular area but not this broad understanding i would couple that with one concern which is that many engineers are familiar with the traditional infrastructure where is run through national standards bodies  and much of the action today in the i c t sector is outside of that in the consortium that i mentioned earlier and i think that not everyone in nest is as conversant with that reality as they might be and might be worth their while to a bit more nimble in understanding that area the last thing i would say is that it would ask nist an awful lot to be expert on every area of technology  o i guess i would sort of leave a hanging question whether government either needs to really empower nist much more or at least realize there's only so much this can do to support  government in an era where technology is as important as it is today and where something as relatively arcane as standards is important to know how to play the game very well in order to support the national interest i think it's absolutely the place to start i'm not sure i see the end of the solution and how to make sure we can do everything a final thought when you look at europe europe has spent forty years trying to knit together an increasing companies countries one of the first thing they had to do was to break down the trade barriers between each individual country and one of the ways they did that was by breaking down the standards based barriers so you're putting a huge problem that government had to solve by understanding standards if you look at china china very much understands it has a huge problem it needs to solve by understanding standards they're throwing billions of dollars and literally thousands of people at that we've been rather lucky in that we haven't had a big challenge that we needed to solve standards the smart grid is maybe the first example electronic health records i think the government should really use these as as learning experiences to understand what government needs and how this can support it you know understanding these looking ahead planning for them and then solving them as effectively as possible thank you i appreciate your comments and certainly we oftentimes forget about consumers both domestically and elsewhere and i'm glad that that's part of the discussion that we don't get into a whole bunch of trade policy here but i know that competitiveness is  big issue because we want folks to flourish here at home as they might be able to provide a higher standard of living overseas and the stability that comes along with that so with that i thank you know recently successful but i think that both minority majority both have honorable folks a couple of of their own each side that sort of zig whatever else and you just can't always get them on the same page so you're trying to develop these consensus standards and for a parochial list interest or whatever the reason somebody just don't agree so how do you say tough luck in move on dr gallagher different viewpoints different technologies different solutions get to the table in other words making sure that the process doesn't drive exclusivity but in fact the process has shown itself to be very capable of making decisions that in fact don't make everybody happy and i think that's otherwise i think you would result with the lowest common denominator in the standards and that's not to our advantage either finally another thing that we've talked about here a lot is as we invest didn't say that much in your oil stable but in the rich say when you talk more about this interest in the manufacturing sector and trying to coordinate across tell us what you're going to do to keep you know that those dollars that we've invested in  depend on economic action at the other end and so in my view i see that it is common aiding in manufacturing making and developing new products and services and i think in fact there's a relationship between our manufacturing ability and our research capabilities and it's very important in this country that we be very competitive in that arena i don't know that this will solve all of the problems there but i think my approach is basically to throw every nest authority and program i have and focus it on this issue so i think for example in standards we can do everything we can to make sure that the conditions the conditions are ripe for companies to develop new technologies and that those standards are adopted as widely as possible on an international basis of those markets that they build products to are available globally i think we can work to make sure that the measurement infrastructure is in place so that companies can work with their supply chains and  we have trust in the system that that competence and things that are purchased in fact meet specification i think we can work to drop barriers to technology transfer and make sure that ideas are getting out of the labs and into manufacturers and creating opportunities for them so that can be a basis for growth basically making sure that the playing field is as fair as possible as advantageous to possible  think americans have shown when those are the conditions we step up and we do very well and i think that i have no reasonably that won't be the case so i really do view this as a broad spectrum approach nest i would like to look at every program we have from our manufacturing extension program to our measurement services to our technology innovation program and make sure they're working in concert to try to maximize these opportunities for manufacturers that we just include th out on this theme i think there is a strong federal role for basic research that the private sector is not willing to invest or didn't have the type of resources to invest in particular when you have quarterly returns and all these sort of things that then is made available for the applied research where private sector takes it and moves forward any more thoughts on how we can make that better how we  can can get this information to you to the private sector to be more productive didn't that's a tough question but it's an age old question of who is the right people to do fundamental research but i but but in my association with nist for the past twelve years i  see areas where and i understand in coming from industry that many times it's just impossible to get the industry players  together with a common cause that's bigger than themselves and so by by nist playing that that technology role in in works on reauthorizing america competes the one thought i would leave you is that this process of translating the ingenuity coming out of our labs into economic output  for me is characterized by participation in other words at the basic research side we have a pretty good idea of who does that work and who funds it and at the commercial side where it's actually being manufactured we know that that's done in industry i don't think there's one answer in the middle and i think this is been something people have focused on for many many years the whole notion of tech transfer and commercialization and i think we will continue to look for a variety of lucian's it may turn out that there is not one answer but the one thing i do know is that the magic seems to happen when we have mechanisms where there can be a mix of participation so when government and university national labs and industry can work together in a variety of ways that's what's happening in the middle and so as the committee looks at the authorization language one of the important issues that was in competes was the role that the different agencies play and in particular making sure that the vehicles are there where we can form those partnerships as appropriate to work together because that's i think the key ingredient do you miss smith you have any well let me thank our witnesses preparing here today i think this was a very interesting hearing and again your  work before they asked and i'm sure that we'll be getting back with you as we try to put the final touches on the could be will be important other members will have additional two weeks to submit any type of questions and answers from you and with that this is what is or excuse in the hearing is adjourned thank you thank you i had a couple minutes