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31–073 2006

HEARING ON IT ASSESSMENT: A TENYEAR VISION FOR TECHNOLOGY IN 

THE HOUSE 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON HOUSE 

ADMINISTRATION 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, SEPTEMBER 27, 2006 

Printed for the use of the Committee on House Administration 

( 

(II) 

COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION 

VERNON EHLERS, Michigan, Chairman 

ROBERT W. NEY, Ohio 

JOHN L. MICA, Florida 

CANDICE MILLER, Michigan 

JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California 

THOMAS M. REYNOLDS, New York 

JUANITA MILLENDER-MCDONALD, 

California 

Ranking Minority Member 

ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

WILL PLASTER, Staff Director 

GEORGE SHEVLIN, Minority Staff Director 

(1) 

HEARING ON IT ASSESSMENT: A TEN-YEAR 

VISION FOR TECHNOLOGY IN THE HOUSE 

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2006 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION, 

Washington, DC. 

The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:10 a.m., in room 

1310, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Vernon J. Ehlers 

(chairman of the committee) Presiding. 

Present: Representatives Ehlers, Mica, Doolittle, Brady and 

Lofgren. 

Staff Present: Peter Sloan, Professional Staff Member; John 

Clocker, Senior Manager for IT Strategy and Planning; Fred Hay, 

General Counsel; George F. Shevlin, Minority Staff Director; 

Charles Howell, Minority Chief Counsel; Sterling Spriggs, Minority 

Technical Director; Stacey Leavandowsky; and Jared Roscoe. 

The CHAIRMAN. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The Committee on House Administration will come to order, and I welcome 

you all here. 

I would like to advise all of you to turn off your cell phones, 

pagers, and other electronic equipment, as I have already done, so 

that we will not have our business interrupted this morning. 

Thank you. 

Today’s hearing is on the IT Assessment Initiative. IT, of course, 

as everyone in this room knows, is information technology, but our 

vast sea of listeners throughout the building may not realize that, 

so I wanted to make that clear. 

The Assessment Initiative outlines a 10-year vision for the future 

years of technology in the House of Representatives. This hearing 

will focus on several key business decisions called To-Be Visions, 

which the House needs to agree upon before implementing a strategic technology plan. We will talk about specific technologies to 

implement these To-Be Visions at a future hearing. 

The issue of using technology to improve House operations is not 

a new one. In 1995, as Chairman of the House Computer and Information Services Working Group, I championed the Cyber Congress 

Plan, commonly resulting in what is commonly referred to as the 

Booster Report. As part of that effort, we created a new standardized e-mail platform that would replace the 11 separate e-mail systems used across the House. As challenging a task as it was, today 

we reap the benefits of being on a common e-mail platform as well 

as having other uniform software choices that allow for enhanced 

collaboration and improved technical support. 

2 

And just talking about that, information technology churned 

through my mind because I recall the incredible task we had at 

that time. Now it is impossible for us to realize today, but back 

then, as you know, the House operated as a fiefdom, 435 individual 

operations, each selecting its own computer, each selecting its own 

software, none of which talked to each other. And I was astounded 

when I got here and found it was easier to send an e-mail to Timbuktu than to send it 20 feet down the hall to a colleague. And that 

is why I was given the thankless job of trying to reform it. I am 

pleased that it all worked out, even though you would not believe 

the recriminations and criticisms I had to deal with at that time. 

I think it will be smoother this time. 

It is my hope that the findings we will examine today and over 

the next few weeks may reveal a similar opportunity to invest in 

the future of the House through the use of technology. 

On our first panel today, we are pleased to have Kathy 

Goldschmidt of the Congressional Management Foundation, and 

Larry Bradley from Gartner Consulting, who will discuss the results of the study. They were heavily involved in the study from 

beginning to end. 

These findings are the product of extensive research with key 

stakeholders, including detailed interviews of 128 Members, managers and staff throughout the House and the legislative branch. 

The interviews that the CMF and Gartner team conducted were 

designed to capture the challenges that House staff face each day, 

the impact of technology on their work, and what improvements we 

can make in our systems and processes to help House employees 

do their job better. 

As any researcher will tell you, any theory, no matter how well 

formed, must be tempered with the challenges and complications of 

real life situations in order to paint an accurate picture of their 

true effect. To provide this additional practical context, our second 

panel will consist of several experts on the administration and operations of the House. 

Jim Cornell, House Inspector General, will discuss the potential 

impact on the failure to embrace technology on the future operations of the House. Bill Livingood, the House Sergeant at Arms, 

will discuss the convergence of IT security and physical security 

and the implications for IT planning and decision making. 

Karen Haas, Clerk of the House, will describe previous efforts to 

implement new technology into existing processes within the legislative process and the Office of the Clerk. 

Pope Barrow, House Legislative Counsel, will provide insight 

into the challenges of drafting legislative language and how technology could improve that process. 

And finally, Jay Eagen, Chief Administrative Officer of the 

House, will provide a historical perspective on technology in the 

House, our current state, and where we go from here. 

And just reviewing this list of names reminds me of all the interviews and meetings I had with your predecessors 11, 12 years ago, 

and some of the difficulties we encountered at that time. We have 

a good team together this time, and I don’t think we will have 

those difficulties again. 

3 

I would also like to announce that at the conclusion of this hearing the committee will make available all of the IT assessment research and recommendations on an internal House Web site, 

http://it.house.gov. Furthermore, we are soliciting general comments from any members of the committee or House staff members 

on the contents of this study. All may submit your comments at the 

above-mentioned Web site. The comment period will run through 

January 2007 in order to provide the 110th Congress freshmen an 

opportunity to participate. 

I thank all of our witnesses for their presence here today, and 

I look forward to receiving their testimony. 

At this time, I would like to recognize Ms. Lofgren for any opening remarks she may have. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask 

unanimous consent to submit Ms. Juanita Millender-McDonald’s 

statement in the record. She could not be present here today. 

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, so ordered. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I don’t have a formal opening statement. I did 

have an opportunity to be briefed on this process as a relatively 

new member of the committee. And I recall, as you do, first arriving here and being a little bit stunned by the technological situation. Certainly we have made great strides and there is more to do. 

I look forward to hearing the testimony. 

I would note that for reasons I cannot fully understand, since we 

are adjourning on Saturday, the Judiciary Committee is in markup, 

and I may have to zip out for a vote or two, but I would certainly 

not want to disturb the testimony. So proceed if I have to do that 

for a minute or so. I will be back. 

This is important stuff, no matter—we have issues, but then we 

have the Congress itself, and to have the tools that we need so that 

we are transparent and efficient is important. And technology I 

think is the key to that. So I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for recognizing me. 

The CHAIRMAN. And I thank you for those comments. 

It has been 10 years since the plan was implemented. Ideally we 

should be doing this every 5 years, not every 10 years, and I hope 

that will be the pattern in the future. 

I would like to welcome our first panel of the day. We have with 

us Kathy Goldschmidt of the Congressional Management Foundation, and Mr. Larry Bradley of Gartner Consulting. Welcome to you 

both, and I am pleased to have you here. 

And I hate to reminisce all the time, but you would be amazed 

at some of the roadblocks I encountered. When we did the first report, there were some objections raised on our competence to do it. 

And someone who had no knowledge of computers was asked to review it and came out with some negative comments, at which 

point—I am very level minded, I don’t get excited too easily—I said 

I don’t mind having my work criticized, but it has to be by someone 

who is competent. And so we agreed on Gartner Corporation to do 

the review of our plan. And for an extra $10,000 we found that we 

were right. And I have always had a warm spot for Gartner Corporation since that time. We always like people who agree with us. 

I am very pleased to welcome both of you, and please begin with 

your testimony. 

4 

STATEMENTS OF KATHY GOLDSCHMIDT, CONGRESSIONAL 

MANAGEMENT FOUNDATION; AND LARRY BRADLEY, 

GARTNER CONSULTING 

STATEMENT OF KATHY GOLDSCHMIDT 

Ms. GOLDSCHMIDT. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, 

thank you very much for having me here today to discuss the 

House IT Assessment Project. 

As you said, I am Kathy Goldschmidt. I am Deputy Director of 

the Congressional Management Foundation. We are a nonpartisan 

nonprofit that has been providing management services to Congressional offices for almost 30 years. 

The House IT Assessment Project was initiated by this committee and the Chief Administrative Officer to develop a 10–year 

vision and plan for technology in the House. To support the project, 

the House engaged Gartner and the Congressional Management 

Foundation. 

Larry Bradley and I have brought our own expertise and the considerable expertise of our organizations to this project. We have 

also channeled the knowledge within the House to create a roadmap for technology over the next decade. 

Although technology is at the heart of this project, we didn’t 

spend the bulk of our time talking to technology experts; instead, 

we spent most of our time talking to the people who conduct the 

work of the House. We let the challenges and opportunities they 

identified and the processes they use guide us in identifying technology to help them, their offices, and the institution become as effective and as efficient as they want it to be. 

We are conducting this project in five stages. First, we did research to understand the current state of technology in the House. 

Second, we facilitated roundtables with members, officers and 

senior managers to provisionally agree on a vision for the House 

in the future. 

Third, we conducted a gap analysis to identify the difference between where the House currently is and where it wants to be. 

Fourth has been a working group with House officers to discuss 

how major technology decisions are made now and how they could 

be made in the future. 

And finally, we are developing a high level strategy, a roadmap 

to help guide the House in obtaining its vision. 

I am going to spend the remainder of my time discussing what 

we learned about the current state of technology in the House, and 

Larry will address the vision and the next steps. 

As Mr. Ehlers mentioned, to identify the current state we interviewed 128 people, including Members, officers, senior managers, 

professional and administrative staff, and technology specialists. 

We also reviewed literature on technology and operations in the 

House over the last 10 years. Through this research, we identified 

some findings that have resonated throughout this project, and we 

have categorized these as forces for change and institutional challenges. 

The forces for change are six factors that are exerting pressure 

on the House to more quickly and thoroughly integrate technology. 

The first force for change is the budget crunch, which is placing 

5 

pressure on the House to minimize costs. Changing how technology 

is procured and used in the House is one way to save money. 

Second is the need for the House to be prepared for future security crises in which technology will play a significant role. 

Third is the increasing comfort of new Members with technology, 

since the businesses and State legislatures they are coming from 

use technology significantly different from the House. 

Fourth are increasing demands by constituents and the press for 

information, which technology can help meet. 

Fifth is the continuing integration of technology into society, 

which is placing pressure on all institutions to use technology more 

effectively. 

And finally, sixth, are the demands of the legislative cycle which 

technology can help members and staff meet as effectively as they 

would like to. 

Despite these pressures for change, however, the House faces 

challenges in its efforts to integrate technology. The challenges are 

not the result of anything the House has been doing wrong; rather, 

they stem from practices that have been in place for decades, coming into conflict with modern capabilities and demands. At this 

time in history traditional operations throughout our society are 

being tested by modern technologies, and all institutions are being 

forced to adapt. 

The four factors that seem to be the greatest hurdles to technology in the House now are: First, the lack of standard legislative 

document formats and policies makes it difficult to implement technology to increase sufficiency, enhance access, or reduce the cost of 

producing legislative documents. 

Second, the lack of House wide technology coordination sometimes leads to conflicts, redundancies and higher costs because offices often implement technology in a vacuum. 

Third is the fact that the House operates disparate systems 

throughout the institution, which prevents it from taking advantage of economies of scale, shared support services and enhanced 

capabilities provided by enterprise systems. 

And fourth is the general lack of resources in House offices. Although technology has placed all kinds of new demands on Members and staff, their resources aren’t keeping pace with the demands. 

The forces for change are exerting pressure on the House to expand its use of technology and the challenges are exerting resistance. For the House to adapt most effectively to the demands of the 

Information Age, these challenges will need to be directly addressed and overcome. 

Through our current state research we laid a solid foundation for 

the House IT Assessment Project. I am going to leave it to Larry 

to discuss the vision of the future that the House built on this foundation. I hope that together we will provide you with not only a 

good idea of what we have done, but also with an understanding 

of the positive impact this project could have on Members, staff, 

and the institution in the years to come. 

Thank you, again, for having me here today. 

[The statement of Ms. Goldschmidt follows:] 

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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Bradley. 

STATEMENT OF LARRY BRADLEY 

Mr. BRADLEY. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank 

you for giving us the opportunity to come here today and to discuss 

the IT assessment with you. 

My name is Larry Bradley, and I am an Associate Director with 

Gartner Consulting. And Gartner is the leading IT research and 

market analysis firm in the world. Along with Kathy, I have been 

one of the primary analysts and authors of the IT assessment. 

I will spend my time today focusing on the visions for technology 

in the House over the next decade and the next steps for obtaining 

these visions. 

Once we identified the current state of technology in the House, 

we needed to define where the House wanted to go, where it wanted to be in the future. To develop these visions, we conducted a series of workshops with members, senior managers from leadership, 

committees, Member offices, as well as House officers, legislative 

branch officials and high level IT executives and administrators. 

Through these workshops, we developed a series of vision statements on which workshop participants provisionally agreed. We 

grouped these statements into five categories. 

The first, for the legislative process, the participants outlined a 

vision for greater electronic access to legislative information and 

greater automation of legislative document production. Their vision 

includes the ability for Members to electronically access relevant 

documents in Chambers during committee and floor debates. It also 

includes the ability for Members to see in real time the changes 

that amendments are making to bills and bills are making to public law. 

Another component of their vision is more timely updates to the 

U.S. Code, so that there is always an official version of public law 

in order to draft new legislation. 

They also identified the need to include electronic documents in 

the official legislative record. 

And finally, they envisioned timely searchable access by Members and staff to all legislation before it is considered on the House 

floor. 

Second, for Member office operations, the participants envision a 

future where Member offices spend less time and money managing 

technology, but also realize significant benefits. Under this vision 

the House will provide commodity technologies, services and support to realize cost savings and improve the level of service. 

The vision also provides for staff in both Washington and the district to have improved access to information, services and technical 

support. 

And finally, the participants envision the House providing more 

services to help Member offices deal with constituent demands. 

The third area, for Members themselves, the participants defined 

a vision where technology would provide Members with more effective information access and improved communications from wherever they are. 

Then fourth, in order to achieve these visions, underlying process 

and capabilities must exist to support the institution. In this area 

14 

of institutional operational support, the participants identified a vision where there would be greater coordination of major technology 

projects. 

The House would also provide enhanced services, capabilities and 

cost savings through greater centralization. Under this vision, the 

House would assign jurisdiction for technology planning to a single 

organization. This would help provide a more explicit process for 

strategic technology decision making, stakeholder involvement, and 

requirements gathering from Members and staff. 

The participants also envisioned involvement of Members in 

technology decisions that have a significant impact on the House. 

And fifth, the participants discussed the role of leadership in 

technology and decision making, and determined that leadership 

should have a role in working with the House to determine the direction of institutional technology adoption. 

Throughout the process of developing these statements, the participants acknowledged the challenges in attaining the visions and 

the trade-offs that would have to be made. 

The key point that emerged is that technology changes are easier 

than the cultural and organizational changes. The House would realize significant benefits by attaining the visions, but because they 

touch on some well-established business practices and cultural assumptions, the changes will require a great deal more than just 

choosing and implementing new technologies. 

Our final task is to develop a strategic technology road map, 

which we are currently in the process of doing. We will lay out the 

critical components and milestones for achieving the visions. The 

steps in this task include: First, providing a more focused description of the House IT visions; second, identifying critical technologies and supporting management processes necessary to implement the vision; and third, developing the final report and conducting briefings with House stakeholders. This road map will provide the House with an IT strategy that includes high level recommendations and direction for achieving the visions over the next 

decade. 

Once this project is complete, however, the House will still have 

significant work to do over the next 10 years to achieve the visions. 

The House will need to first vet and approve the House IT strategy. This will require a business case where benefits, risks and 

costs are thoroughly analyzed, then socializing and communicating 

the strategy and its benefits with key stakeholders and the House 

at large to win support. 

Second, once the strategy has been approved and vetted, the 

House will then need to develop individual implementation plans 

for specific pieces of the House IT strategy, and then the House 

will be able to begin executing and implementing the strategy. 

Again, we thank you for the opportunity to brief you on the 

House IT Assessment, and we now look forward to answering any 

questions you may have for us. 

[The statement of Mr. Bradley follows:] 

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29 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. 

Let me begin with some questions. First one. In your testimony— 

and I don’t recall which of you said that or if it is in the report— 

you discussed that no office or entity has the authority or mandate 

to plan and coordinate technology projects. Maybe I am partial to 

the committee, but I thought the committee had that authority. Are 

you saying we don’t have that authority? And are you saying it because it is dispersed or shared with three officers of the House, or 

is there some other reason? 

Mr. BRADLEY. Yes. When we were doing our research, one of the 

things we identified is that although the Committee on House Administration does have responsibility for a large portion of the 

House, there are pieces of it that it doesn’t have responsibility for. 

And so there are other organizations, the Rules Committee, for example, the Committee on Appropriations that all have pieces or 

they all have responsibility for some areas of strategic technology 

decision making, and that there is no one office, no one organization that has the ability to look across all the different pieces of decision making. So where Appropriations has the view and most of 

the finances, House Administration only has a limited view for the 

areas that it has direct responsibility over. 

The CHAIRMAN. All right. Is this clarified in your report as to 

who has which authority? 

Mr. BRADLEY. I don’t know if we list all the different components 

of which areas have authority over what pieces. One of the parallel 

processes that we are working on is IT decision making workshops, 

where we did go into more depth on who actually has the ability 

to make decisions in which areas, and that report will be released 

as well. In the current report there is some information on that. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. 

Ms. Goldschmidt, you have mentioned in your testimony disparate systems. Could you explain what you mean by that? 

Ms. GOLDSCHMIDT. Right now, as you mentioned in your opening 

statement, IT was the case in 1995 when you did the work, the previous work, there still are basically 448 or more—actually, more 

with the committees and leadership offices and institutional offices—different small businesses that make their own decisions or 

largely make their own decisions about technology. And so although there are House standards and there are some policies to 

have similar systems, offices for the most part get to make their 

own decisions about what technology, hardware, software they buy, 

what equipment they use, and to some degree how they use it, and 

so they are not always compatible with one another. And it makes 

the support of these systems more difficult and more expensive. 

The CHAIRMAN. Well, that leads to another question. The previous chairman of this committee had a key role in technology in 

the Ohio legislature where they had adopted a system whereby the 

computer stays with the office, when you move from one office to 

another you move from one computer to another. We are currently 

discussing something similar here. It would save a huge amount of 

money in our moves every 2 years if we could treat computers as 

we treat telephones; in other words, they belong to the office. And 

frankly telephones are now small computers, so the analogy is 

quite apt. 

30 

In your interviews and discussions with Members and staff, was 

this broached at all? And furthermore, do you have any recommendations on that proposal that we simply move the files from 

one office to another, but not the computers, not the telephones, 

not the file drawers, et cetera? Any comments? 

Mr. BRADLEY. Sir, we did talk about sort of the ownership of data 

and the ownership of computers and applications, and it was something that there was concern about where people, you know, store 

sensitive information on their work stations on their desktops, and 

so one of the things that would need to be done is to make sure 

that that information can be removed from the desktop, and then 

the hard drive being wiped clean so that the person is secure in 

knowing that their information is not going to be exposed to somebody else. And so that is something that, you know, would provide 

a great deal of benefit to the institution if those work stations 

would stay so you didn’t have to move them. And there are ways 

of limiting how much work it will take to move that information 

from one computer to another, and to quickly wipe those machines 

clean and prepare them for the next user. 

The CHAIRMAN. Did you make any estimates of how much money 

we would save? 

Mr. BRADLEY. No, we did not. But one of the things we did look 

at is that currently the House spends about 33 percent more on 

supporting Member offices than similar organizations that have 

similar, what we call complexity and size profile. And so, you know, 

we do see that there is significant area for improving the cost savings in the area of supporting Member offices and their computers. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. My time is expired. 

I recognize Ms. Lofgren for 5 minutes. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I am wondering if you have a concept on how we 

can get more Member buy-in on this. In looking through the reports, I notice that the Members who participated in the interview 

were all Members of this committee, and there has been an effort 

to outreach, but an unsuccessful effort. 

As my colleagues know, the 435 of us, plus commissioners, are 

an independent group and will pay attention when they feel that 

their traditional prerogatives are being abrogated. So I think this 

is not really a technology issue so much as a sociological issue, how 

do we do the up front successful integration with them. And I wonder if you have any suggestions on that score. 

Mr. BRADLEY. Sure. One of the things that we have developed is 

the idea of what we call a Mobile Member Working Group. And essentially what we would like to do is recruit technology savvy 

Members who are interested in developing what the Member of the 

future would look like. 

One of the things that was discussed is that really if you want 

to get Members’ attention, you have to have other Members, so it 

is sort of a network effect. If we can get a core group of Members 

who are really interested in technology, in developing this vision of 

what the Member of the future is going to look like, they can begin 

working with the technology implementers to develop this vision, 

to develop how they want to be operating as Members. And then 

from there, they can act as champions, they can act as the carriers 

31 

of the message to the other people, the other Members, and then 

slowly begin building that. 

The other thing is also that if you begin developing sort of a 

more formalized IT decision making structure, then what you will 

be able to do is you will be able to target Members and provide 

them only the information that they need and the decisions that 

they need to make so you can limit how much time they need to 

spend either preparing or engaging and answering—— 

Ms. LOFGREN. Well, our Members are all over the board. There 

are some colleagues that are white-out-on-the-screen people, and 

other people who could, you know, build a computer from the parts 

you buy at Fry’s and everything in between. So I think we need 

a matrix that we don’t share with anyone, because none of us—and 

none of our colleagues wants to admit that they are white-out-onthe-screen people, but whether it is the chief of staff or the Member 

themselves doing the decision making. 

I am wondering—and I am not making this proposal, but I had 

a chance to go through some of this with the staff, which was very 

helpful yesterday, and in the course of our discussion we mentioned 

that this is a very large organization, the House of Representatives, 

without a CIO. Do you think that that would be something we 

should look at or not? And have you had a chance to consider the 

pros and cons of that? 

Mr. BRADLEY. Yes, we did take a look at that. And one of the 

things, as we were going through and exploring how decision making is made in the House, it seemed more appropriate to have more 

of a steering committee or, you know, a council that made decisions, because with the traditional organization of the House, there 

are different organizations as we talked earlier, like Appropriations, like Rules, who have specific responsibility for areas in the 

House and the way the House operates. So it actually seemed to 

be more appropriate to have, you know, limited steering groups 

and limited councils of people to make decisions collectively. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I will yield back, Mr. Chairman, I know that time 

is short. 

The CHAIRMAN. I yield to Mr. Mica for 5 minutes. 

Mr. MICA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Interesting. A couple of 

things I don’t know if you considered. One of the things when you 

get to IT and use of technology is the sort of the loss of documents, 

too. In the past—and I was talking with a librarian of Congress 

some time ago, but in the past there has been a great history compiled of Congress and the executive branch through hard documents. I don’t know if any thought has been given to technology 

and how we retain some sort of the legislative history and development. Drafts are wiped out with a click of, you know, a button or 

a key, that we don’t have the history that we had before. Is this 

something you all looked at—or a record of development of legislation and other documents? 

Ms. GOLDSCHMIDT. It is not something that we looked at in 

depth, but it is an issue that we raised in our discussion of the legislative process. The Library of Congress currently has a project 

that is looking intensively at this as well. And so, you know, what 

we suggested is that the House consider looking at and working 

with the Library of Congress—— 

32 

Mr. MICA. One of your concerns is that there weren’t standards. 

Probably great histories have already been lost as we have become 

more reliant on computers and technology because we don’t have 

those hard drafts that we used to have, unless somebody has printed a copy along the way. But it is just a part of sort of a gap that 

is going—that started and will continue. And maybe there should 

be some standards for retention of some of this material. 

And I noticed that again you have so many different systems, 

and you cited that, everything sort of being developed on itself. I 

was trying to buy just a—well, the acquisition of technology is one 

that just blew my mind. Trying to buy a laptop through the House 

of Representatives is a 30-day ordeal that never ended. I couldn’t 

find a standard—I couldn’t find a model, and then when you got 

it, the operational capabilities—and I think that is repeated 435 

times. That is just an acquisition. Then there are other issues of 

interoperability that haven’t—I don’t think have even been addressed with some of the stand-alone equipment or equipment that 

is taken for granted in the private sector. Is that also something 

you found? 

Mr. BRADLEY. You know, one of the things that we did look at 

is that, you know, the House has made a couple attempts of putting in some of these more centralized processes, these more centralized capabilities. And generally what it has been is it has sort 

of grown up from the bottom. So HIR or CAO, they come up with 

a good idea, and they are trying to put this process in place, capability in place, but because they are having to do it in isolation, and 

you know, it has—there are a lot of challenges in trying to get it 

to work correctly. And so as you take sort of these half steps, it 

makes it difficult to really develop a very efficient process and an 

efficient way of doing it. 

And so, you know, looking at what our findings say is that there 

needs to be more of a sort of top down buy-in, more of this institutional decision to put in these processes or put in these capabilities, 

and that increases the chance of them being more effective. 

And so we did look at—when we talked to people in our interviews, there was sort of this tension between, you know, the attempts of the House to centralize things or to provide shared services, but that it was never really something the institution as a 

whole decided to do. It is generally one office trying to do good, and 

without that coordination, without working together, you know, the 

obstacles are just too high for most of them. 

Mr. MICA. Sometimes it just seems like we are spending a lot of 

our time inventing and reinventing the wheel. 

Maybe this hearing will help us find a better way. Thank you. 

The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. Doolittle, do you have any questions? 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. No, Mr. Chairman. 

The CHAIRMAN. Just a few follow-ups. What comments did you 

find about the availability of technical service, whether TSRs or 

other means? I sense a lot of frustration in my colleagues about the 

time it takes, so most of them hire a staff that has at least one IT 

knowledgeable person of varying degrees of competence to deal 

with the day by day, and some even hire someone who is basically 

33 

full time IT, and they fill their other time with office duties. This 

strikes me as being an inefficient way. 

What did you hear and what is your opinion on that issue? 

Ms. GOLDSCHMIDT. We heard comments to that effect, that there 

is a lot of frustration. The way the House is structured, their technical support right now, the offices do have or are expected to have 

somebody in the office to do day-to-day things. There is also the 

House TSRs, and then there are the systems integrators, which are 

really to provide the bulk of the technical support for an office. 

And the frustration, the tension that we heard most was that 

these are not always coordinated, not always on the same page, 

and there is finger pointing among them. And this is one of the 

issues that led to the conclusion or to the vision of a more centralized technical provision. So it would include, you know, commodity 

hardware and software as well as support being provided by the 

House. And that would reduce the likelihood of, you know, the dissatisfaction with different people saying different things, doing different things, and not knowing who is responsible for what. There 

would be one entity with well-trained staff to provide technical support. 

The CHAIRMAN. And that leads to my next question, which is 

having, for example, a centralized server system. And that is rife 

with political angst on the part of Members, which would have to 

be dealt with. But I would be surprised if there is any other organization of our size that has this many distributed servers around, 

basically a server in every office, which adds tremendously to the 

cost of the total system. 

In your discussions with Members and others, did you find receptivity to centralizing servers, taking them out of the offices and ensuring their security to the satisfaction of the Members, which is 

key. And I know when I computerized the Michigan Senate, the 

only way I could sell this plan was to have a bank of Republican 

servers and a bank of Democratic servers, even though as you 

know they can exchange information as easily as if they are in the 

next room or as if they are next to each other. What did you encounter in this and what is your recommendation? 

Mr. BRADLEY. When we discussed it with Members and their 

staff, there was a lot of concern about letting go of that physical 

control. They feel like the server sitting on their desk run by somebody that, you know, they can point to and say, you know, you are 

responsible for this, it gives them a feeling of comfort, and that 

there would be a fair amount of resistance to letting go of that. But 

I don’t think it is something that is insurmountable. There are 

ways of ensuring that security and ensuring the independence of 

the organization. One of the concerns was if the—if HIR is appointed by the majority, then the minority may have concerns 

about that. But using the Inspector General, using a lot of modern 

management processes and technologies, all of those concerns can 

be alleviated. 

A major part of this, though, would be the communication effort 

and educating people on the fact that really having that server in 

your office, it drives up cost a great deal, and actually reduces the 

security of the system rather than improving it; that having that 

34 

more centralized function can give you the security and much better performance at a much lower cost. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. And the last quick question. Did you 

interview or talk to individuals in district offices about their likes 

or dislikes with the system? 

Ms. GOLDSCHMIDT. We did. And their primary concerns were the 

speed and availability of their systems, and the availability of information. They feel kind of—especially those in districts that have 

significant time zones, Alaska, Hawaii, the West Coast, where it is 

harder for them to just pick up the phone and call the D.C. staff 

and get the information that they need. And so they had significant 

concerns about expanding information available to them so that 

they could find information on their own, and improving the speed 

of their systems. 

The CHAIRMAN. All right. I can vouch for myself. When I use the 

computer in my district office, I find it extremely frustrating. And 

frankly, I use the computer in my home office most of the time simply because it is faster working over the Internet than working 

over a T–2 connection. 

Thank you very much for your responses. This will conclude the 

first panel, and I appreciate your participation and your suggestions. 

I next would like to ask the second panel to come forward. 

We have with us Mr. Jim Cornell, House Inspector General; the 

Honorable Wilson Livingood, Sergeant at Arms of the House; the 

Honorable Karen Lehman Haas, Clerk of the House; Mr. Pope Barrow, House Legislative Council; and the Honorable James Eagen, 

Chief Administrative Officer of the House. 

I would first recognize Mr. Cornell. 

STATEMENTS OF JIM CORNELL, HOUSE INSPECTOR GENERAL; 

THE HON. WILSON S. LIVINGOOD, SERGEANT AT ARMS OF 

THE HOUSE; THE HON. KAREN LEHMAN HAAS, CLERK OF 

THE HOUSE; M. POPE BARROW, HOUSE LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL; AND THE HON. JAMES M. EAGEN, CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER OF THE HOUSE 

STATEMENT OF JIM CORNELL 

Mr. CORNELL. Mr. Chairman, and Members of the committee, I 

am pleased and honored to appear before you today in my capacity 

as Inspector General of the House. 

First I would like to commend the committee for the work that 

has been initiated to increase the awareness of the House’s need 

for a comprehensive strategic IT planning process. We endorse the 

Gartner IT assessment methodology and concur with their reported 

findings. 

We believe that the House would be well served in considering 

the visions set forth in the Gartner report and adopting the related 

recommendations. If fully implemented, they would also address 

prior OIG audit recommendations. Our past audit work demonstrates that strategic IT planning has been a longstanding need 

here at the House. 

Since 1995, my office has conducted five audits related to this 

topic. In our June 2002 report, we stated that the House did not 

35 

have a plan to project its technology needs or to develop an effective IT strategy. Our report concluded that without a mandate, the 

House would never have an entity-wide strategic IT plan that 

would serve the interests of the entire House. 

We provided three options for consideration; one, appoint a 

House level nonpartisan Chief Information Officer; two, create a 

House level IT Steering Committee; or three, delegate centralized 

IT planning and management authority to an existing House officer. The Gartner report, which points to a steering committee approach built around key stakeholders and decision makers, meets 

the intent of this recommendation. 

It is important to note that industry best practices call for effective strategic IT planning. The IT Governance Institute, internationally recognized for setting standards and performing research in information systems security and assurance, developed 

the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology, 

commonly known as COBIT, as a framework for assessing, managing and optimizing IT investments. This framework consists of 

linking business goals to IT goals, providing metrics and maturity 

models to measure their achievement, and identifying the associated responsibilities of business and IT process owners. The linking 

or strategic alignment of IT resources with the organizational business strategy is one of the five cornerstones of IT governance. 

The Gartner report appropriately focuses on the need for creating 

a vehicle for setting the strategic vision and carrying out the technology planning process. Once this decision-making vehicle is in 

place, we recommend that the House consider the remaining areas 

identified in COBIT so as to achieve the full intended benefit of IT 

governance—they are value delivery, resource management, risk 

management and performance measurement. 

Looking forward, as the House implements its IT vision, my organization stands ready to assist. Through our independent reviews, we will provide assurance that the strategic IT planning 

process is designed, implemented and sustained with the appropriate controls to ensure confidentiality and security for all House 

stakeholders. As we did with the House-wide deployment of Active 

Directory, where we played a critical role in evaluating and testing 

the Active Directory forest design and the related alert system, the 

OIG will provide review assistance dealing with deployment of the 

plan to mitigate the overall risk to the House, and to ensure integrity and equity in the process. 

In closing, I would like to stress that the cost of not implementing a coordinated House-wide strategic IT plan is quite high. 

Without one, the House will continue to incur increased unnecessary cost for its information technology resources because it will be 

required to support multiple platforms, maintain overlapping technologies, and will not benefit from the economies of scale experienced by other organizations similar in size. 

Nonstreamlined operations and disjointed, incomplete information could also cause a lack of responsiveness to customers and unduly complicate the ability to secure our House technology infrastructure. Case studies have shown these types of failings often result in adverse publicity and decreased stakeholder confidence in 

the organization. 

36 

In contrast to this scenario, a fully implemented, coordinated 

House-wide strategic IT plan would provide Members with an improved support structure and timelier access to information, which 

in turn would better enable them to produce quality legislation and 

make informed decisions. 

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the committee, thank you again 

for providing me this opportunity to share my thoughts with you 

today, and for your interest and leadership in developing a strategic IT plan for the House. 

[The statement of Mr. Cornell follows:] 

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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. 

Mr. Livingood. 

STATEMENT OF THE HON. WILSON S. LIVINGOOD 

Mr. LIVINGOOD. Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, 

I am honored to appear before you today to discuss the Information 

Technology Assessment and ten-year vision for IT in the House of 

Representatives. 

I am here to provide you with my thoughts on the impact of this 

10-year vision as it relates to the functions of the Office of the Sergeant at Arms. 

My staff and I were active participants throughout the study, 

providing input for the current state report through interviews 

with personnel from Gartner and CMF. In addition, my staff participated in the focus groups as part of the To-Be Vision, and IT 

decision-making workshops. We found the study to be thorough and 

complete. Gartner and CMF included all pertinent offices within 

the House that support service operations, and also acquired feedback from the many stakeholders that participate in transmitting 

data through the House. 

The use of information technology within the Office of the Sergeant at Arms is mainly focused on supporting the security functions of the House. The production of identification badges, distribution and inventory control of parking permits, wireless communications inside and around the House Chamber, and during 

special and emergency events are all areas that rely on IT infrastructure for consistent and reliable operations. 

There are a number of instances where centralizing and standardizing the information technology functions and equipment in the 

House could be useful to my office. As a member of the U.S. Capitol 

Police Board, I have seen the impact of information technology on 

the physical security systems of the Capitol campus. The ability of 

autonomous systems to share information is dependent on compatible hardware and software, in addition to the proper information, 

security controls to ensure the data is not compromised. 

One example of this is communications during emergency events, 

both among the office staff and with outside offices and agencies, 

which relies on various forms of wireless communications—from 

BlackBerry devices to two-way radios to cellular devices. The ability to utilize these forms of communication to notify Members of an 

emergency situation and to provide accountability of Members during these events could be more effectively implemented in a centralized IT environment using systems that are interoperable. 

Another area that could be beneficial to House operations is the 

idea of a Federal identification badge. Currently, the agencies of 

the executive branch of the government, pursuant to the Homeland 

Security Presidential Directive 12 are implementing an identification badge that will be valid across all agencies of the executive 

branch using digital authentication. 

Although current business processes in the House do not provide 

an effective means of implementing all the requirements of this directive, my office, in conjunction with the U.S. Capitol Police, has 

been reviewing these standards to determine if certain points or 

44 

portions of the directive could be more easily achieved should the 

IT process change. 

Another area of interest I have been exploring is the use of socalled SmartCards to blend the ideas of physical security and access security. SmartCards are ID badges with computer chips built 

in to store large amounts of data. These cards could be used to provide access to secure areas of the Capitol complex, and also as a 

means of authentication for House staff to access their computer 

accounts and e-mail. To implement this vision, however, the physical security access control systems managed by the Capitol Police, 

the Active Directory authentication system managed by HIR, and 

possibly the ID badging system managed by my ID section would 

have to share information across various platforms. Centralization 

and standardization of information systems would be necessary to 

implement a system such as this. 

Mr. Chairman, I thank you for the opportunity to give you my 

thoughts on this vision, and hope that we have been able to share 

some insight into the effect and the need for standardization and 

centralization of IT services in the House of Representatives. 

[The statement of Mr. Livingood follows:] 

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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. 

Ms. Haas. 

STATEMENT OF THE HON. KAREN LEHMAN HAAS 

Ms. HAAS. Thank you. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am pleased to appear before you today regarding the 10- 

year technology vision for the House of Representatives. 

I was introduced to this project shortly after becoming Clerk late 

last year, but the Office of the Clerk has been engaged in this 

project since its inception in 2004. Hopefully my testimony will further our efforts to ensure the House of Representatives proceeds 

along a path of greater efficiency. 

Due to time constraints, Mr. Chairman, my brief comments will 

focus on three examples of technology advancements and the importance of a long-range plan to resolve outstanding policy questions. 

The Office of the Clerk has been a longtime active partner in advancing technology in the House. Since the late 1990s we have 

worked with the House Legislative Counsel in cooperation with the 

Secretary of the Senate, the Library of Congress, and GPO to implement a vision of this committee to bring standardization to the 

creation and transfer of legislative documents. 

An agreement was reached to use extensible markup language 

otherwise known as XML, for the exchange of legislative documents. To date, customized XML based applications allow House 

Counsel to draft 98 percent of bills, resolutions and amendments 

in XML. This represents the cross-organizational standardization of 

text that needs to occur in order to more fully exploit the electronic 

dissemination of legislative text. 

Ms. HAAS. There is more work to be done before we reap the full 

benefits of a fully electronic process for creation, distribution and 

presentation of legislative documents. The scope of the initial effort 

must be expanded to allow every entity in the legislative process 

access to these tools. 

Future plans should include the creation and exchange of additional legislative documents in XML, committee reports, hearings, 

House Calendars and journals. This is not a simple endeavor and 

can only happen if the effort is part of a fully coordinated plan that 

ensures that all parties are committed to its success. 

The second technology advancement is electronic authentication 

of digital signatures. In between the issue of standardization and 

access to data is the matter of the official version. Currently, paper 

is regarded as the official version for legislative documents. For example, although an electronic version accompanies nearly 99 percent of introduced bills, an original signed hard copy must be submitted on the Floor of the House while in session in order for it 

to qualify. 

While respecting the primacy of the printed version as the official 

version, we must consider the importance of having a means to associate the electronic version of legislation to the printed official 

version that derives from it. This is critical if Members and staff 

are going to be allowed access to reliable electronic documents. 

The solution to this problem lies in the area of electronic authentication. We have deployed the first and only official use of elecVerDate Aug 31 2005 04:27 Jan 23, 2007 Jkt 031073 PO 00000 Frm 00050 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HR\OC\D073A.XXX D073A
49 

tronic authentication in the form of an outsourced digital signature 

certificate for the filing of lobbying disclosure forms. We would envision an agreement on an electronic authentication standard, a 

mechanism suitable for legislative and other documents, would be 

one of the critical areas of concern for the House in the near future. 

With regard to on-time availability of legislative information in 

committee and the House Chamber settings, I share the views of 

those who recognize that it is not just a matter of deploying equipment and software, but rather it is a fundamental policy issue of 

determining how our rules and procedures would have to be 

changed to accommodate the immediate access being discussed. 

The third technology advancement is electronic filing for lobbying 

disclosure. Since electronic filing became mandatory in 2006, we 

have realized over an 80 percent on-time compliance rate, with the 

filings becoming instantly accessible for public viewing on our terminals at the Legislative Resource Center. 

Under current law, the information that must be provided to the 

Senate and House by a registered lobbyist is mandated, but the 

process for filing is not. As you are aware, in the House we require 

registrants to file electronically, while the Senate does not. This 

has resulted in two entirely different computer systems and databases that provide challenges to the filer, challenges to the Office 

of the Secretary of the Senate and the House Clerk, as well as additional expense. 

These are only a few examples where coordinated policy guidance 

and established procedures could help the efficiency of our process, 

reduce costs, and benefit Members, staff and the public as we 

strive to make accurate information available as quickly as possible. 

Mr. Chairman, in conclusion, I would liked to again thank the 

Committee for the invitation to appear here today. The Committee 

should be commended for the leadership you have shown in moving 

the House forward technologically, while recognizing many of the 

important challenges we must deal with as an institution. I look 

forward to continuing the partnership that has developed through 

this process and to further advancements in the use of technology 

in the legislative process. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. 

[The statement of Ms. Haas follows:] 

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The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Barrow. 

STATEMENT OF M. POPE BARROW 

Mr. BARROW. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank 

you for the opportunity to testify at this important hearing. 

First let me briefly explain the functions and duties of our office. 

The Office of the Legislative Counsel is the legislative drafting 

service for the House. We provide assistance in connection with virtually every bill, amendment, and conference report produced by 

the House. 

The office is nonpartisan and neutral as to issues of legislative 

policy. We maintain strict confidentiality with each client. We also 

provide some services ancillary to drafting. One of these is the 

preparation of reported bills for the committee in the format needed by the Clerk of the House and the GPO. We also prepare a portion of each committee report showing the changes made in existing law. This is known as the Ramseyer. 

We participated in the preparation of the Gartner Report, and we 

concur by and large with the findings of the report. Our operations 

are highly dependent upon information technology and upon interaction with other House offices, especially the Clerk of the House 

and the various House committees. Unfortunately, when it comes 

to information technology, coordination has fallen short. 

Members and their staff often ask us questions relating to our 

software systems. For example: Why does it take so much longer 

now for your office to prepare drafts than in the recent past? How 

can we edit your drafts with our software and send them back to 

you for your review and further revision? Why are you having so 

many problems producing Ramseyers for the committees? Why did 

you stop giving committees up-to-date versions of the laws in our 

jurisdiction? 

These questions can only be answered if you understand the limitations of the information technology that we and other House offices rely on and how it is currently put in place. Each House office 

involved in the legislative process, including ours, to quote the 

Gartner Report, ‘‘is independently responsible for identifying, acquiring and supporting technology to conduct its work with little 

coordination or standardization of processes, formats and technologies.’’ 

Let me first briefly describe the recent history of our document 

composition software. We were using a very old, essentially an obsolete, text-editing system. A few years ago it began to break down 

completely. We needed to bring a new IT solution on line. With no 

IT expertise of our own, when the Clerk of the House offered to develop a new bill-editing software for us as well as for the Clerk’s 

own use, we accepted. 

The new software using XML, extensible markup language, allows for instant publishing on the Web and offers other opportunities for the Clerk’s Office to function much more efficiently. We 

now use the XML program for the composition and editing of all 

legislative documents. 

The cooperation between our office and the Clerk’s Office is an 

unusual example of two House institutions working together to 

bring an IT solution on line. That is the good news. 

55 

The flip side is that the software is designed best to fit the 

Clerk’s operation and is not ideal for our office. It is also not well 

adapted for use by other House offices with which we need to collaborate. 

The developers were aware of this, but did not have the authority or the budget to expand beyond the scope of the Clerk’s functions and our basic functions. An example may help. Our clients 

often wish to revise draft legislative language provided by our office 

and have that highlighted in text. This is known as red-lining. But 

no Member staffs are working with the XML editor, nor are many 

committee staffs. And even if they did, they couldn’t collaborate in 

this way because the program does not provide this feature. 

Another example: Members who have served in State legislatures 

often ask why bills amending existing law do not show the changes 

made in existing law. There are several reasons. As I mentioned 

above, we do prepare a document, the Ramseyer, showing these 

changes in connection with reported bills. This is required by the 

House rules. We prepare this manually. It is now more difficult 

than ever before because we need to get our old software and the 

new XML software to work together, and it is a tricky process. 

The result is that our ability to provide these Ramseyers to the 

committees on time has deteriorated. This failure has a House-wide 

impact because a committee report without a Ramseyer does not 

comply with the House rules. To consider the bill, the rules have 

to be waived, and the waiver can sometimes be controversial. 

It would be possible with XML to automatically and almost instantaneously show the effect of proposed bills on existing law. 

State legislatures and other foreign legislatures already do this. 

Within our office we are attempting to build a solution on our own 

so that we can better meet the committee’s need for Ramseyers. 

However, even if we built it, we couldn’t deploy it throughout the 

entire House for use by Members and committee staffs. 

There is another reason why it is so difficult to depict changes 

made in existing law, and it has nothing to do with information 

technology. The reason is that we do not have an accurate, current, 

and official version of existing Federal law, as amended, on paper 

or in electronic form. Nor does anyone else. To be positive Federal 

law, the kind you need for legislative amendments, a U.S. Code 

title must be enacted as such by Congress. Only 24 of the 50 titles, 

less than one-third of the volume of Federal laws, is officially codified. 

The effort to codify all Federal law in the United States Code 

foundered many, many years ago, so most Federal law is not part 

of codified positive law titles. The nonpositive law titles are completely different in form and numbering and cannot be used for legislative amendments. Members who have served in State legislatures are used to having all State laws in a single official State 

code easily available in printed or electronic form on a current 

basis. That is not the case in the House. So we are left with most 

Federal law in uncodified form. There is no entity responsible anywhere for providing an official amended version of these laws. 

Our office, various universities, private businesses, various other 

people, all cut and paste each new Public Law, often many new 

Public Laws, into the original to provide a best guess as to what 

56 

the official amended law would look like. None of these documents 

are official, and the degree of accuracy is unknown. So that means 

that any document provided by anyone showing changes made in 

the existing law would rely on an unofficial, and possibly an inaccurate, base. 

To draft amendments to these nonpositive laws, we need to 

manually maintain the best current electronic database of them 

that we can, albeit unofficial and possibly inaccurate. We used to 

use this database to provide committees, upon their request, compilations of the various laws in their jurisdiction. These would be 

unofficial, but the committees often found them very useful and 

printed them for their members and staff. Some posted them on 

their Web sites. 

We can no longer provide the committees with these documents. 

Our database of Federal laws have become so difficult to maintain, 

with part of it in XML and part being done in the old software, 

that we are unable to continue providing this service. I have been 

hearing some complaints from a number of committees about this. 

The solution to these problems really requires an overall entity 

of some kind with responsibility for providing IT solutions that 

work for all components of the House, including our office, the 

Clerk’s Office, the Members and the committees. 

We endorse the conclusions of the Gartner Report specifically regarding the fragmented feudal structure of IT planning and implementation in the House with individual compartmentalized silos of 

IT development leading to inefficient business decisions. The ultimate solution, we feel, will require the imprimatur of the Majority 

and Minority House leadership. 

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you again 

for the opportunity to present my perspective on the information 

technology issues addressed by the Gartner Report, and I am 

happy to try to answer any questions you may have. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much for your accurate, but depressing report. I came from a State legislature and had the same 

questions. I finally came to the conclusion that the present system 

was maintained to deliberately confuse new Members, and no one 

has yet disproved that. Thank you for your comments. 

[The statement of Mr. Barrow follows:] 

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Mr. Eagen, for the final word. 

STATEMENT OF THE HON. JAMES M. EAGEN, CHIEF 

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER OF THE HOUSE 

Mr. EAGEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ms. Lofgren, Mr. Doolittle. Thank you for your time, and I am very excited to be here 

to participate in this hearing. 

The CAO was very pleased to participate in the development of 

the House IT assessment, and we are supportive of many of the 

recommendations and observations in the report. 

I would like to thank the committee for sponsoring the initiative 

and for establishing the comment period that the Chairman referenced in his opening statement. This approach is consistent with 

the recommendations of the study to make House IT decision-making more transparent. 

I would also like to recognize Kathy Goldschmidt and Larry 

Bradley for their work. They had an arduous job of listening to 128 

different people give their take on the challenges of IT decisionmaking and the state of our systems, and to compile them in the 

manner they have has been very helpful and very effective. 

The Chairman has noted that he intends to have another hearing 

on the more detailed aspects of the recommendations in the study, 

so I would like to focus on what I consider to be some high-level, 

important aspects of the study for the committee’s consideration. 

First, the title of the study may give the wrong impression that 

what we are doing is picking nifty technology bells and whistles. 

It is not. The primary focus needs to be on business processes. How 

does the House see its primary business processes evolving in the 

next decade? And then and only then how can technology be employed as an enabler of those evolving business processes. 

Many of the House’s business processes today flow from traditions and precedents established over the past two centuries. As we 

look to the recommendation of the assessment, it is important that 

we first consider our processes and institution and how Members, 

staff, and the broader House community, including the public, believe those processes may need to evolve to better support the legislative process and operations of the House. 

The many innovations recommended in the 10-year road map 

will require a coordinated and collective vision that includes processes and procedures to improve decision-making with regard to 

House information technology. 

Second, when contemplating a new vision of House business 

processes, it must be done with an eye to the future; not just the 

next 10 years, but well beyond. When I consider the future of the 

House of Representatives, I think of my son and the rapid pace of 

change he will see in his lifetime. He is 8 years old, and I think 

there is a very good chance that he will live to see the year 2100. 

In the next century, technology will be even more integrated into 

our daily living than it is today. This will result in profound 

changes to the institution of Congress, for its Members and for our 

American citizens. 

We can expect an increased demand from constituents to have 

access to their Representatives and their government on a realtime basis. This will mean that notions mentioned in the House IT 

66 

assessment, such as mobile Members and expanded electronic access to legislation and the legislative process, are inevitable. 

Through technology, I fully expect that Members and staff will be 

legislating anywhere, any time. 

My point here is simple. If we ask ourselves, do we expect technology to have a significant impact on the House by the year 2100 

within our young children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes, and the 

answer is yes, let’s bring that same mind-set to this study and 

begin that process now. 

Third, and finally, when we consider the technology and its impact upon our institution as fairly recent, we must look to the future and consider how decision-making must mature to keep pace 

with these changes, which leads me to what I believe is the fundamental recommendation of the House IT assessment: Improving IT 

decision-making. 

We must recognize that while Congress has existed for over two 

centuries, the use of technology as we define it today is still in its 

infancy. I first arrived on Capitol Hill in the early 1980s, about a 

quarter century ago, when we were still using typewriters. There 

was no e-mail. There was no Internet. House Information Services 

had only come into existence a few years before. We then evolved 

to large word processors the size of refrigerators, then to desktops 

and laptops, and most recently to today’s ubiquitous PDAs or 

BlackBerries. 

Within the CAO we have already begun operating under an inclusive and coordinated model with the development of our Balanced Scorecard Strategic Plan, the CAO Technology Strategic 

Plan, our Capital Investment Planning and Control Strategy, and 

the establishment of our Portfolio Management Office. This oversight in strategic planning allows us to look to the future and align 

our resource planning accordingly. 

We are also establishing these plans and oversight procedures to 

ensure that once we have committed the resources to delivering solutions, they are delivered as cost effectively and efficiently as possible. Even with these efforts, we won’t achieve our grandest goals 

on behalf of the House because we cannot reach them in isolation. 

We support establishing a structure to coordinate institutional 

technology decisions in a way that effectively involves stakeholders, 

leadership, Members, committees, staff and technology experts 

throughout the process. 

Mr. Chairman, Members, the various volumes of the House IT 

assessment contain a set of well-thought-out, high-level goals for 

the institution, a myriad of specific technology solutions and even 

a draft road map on how they may be carried out over the next decade. Speaking for the employees of the CAO, we look forward to 

working with the committee to deliver them. And I will be happy 

to respond to any questions you may have. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. 

[The statement of Hon. Eagen follows:] 

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The CHAIRMAN. And I thank all of you for your excellent testimony. It is clear to me that there is much work to be done, and 

a great deal of it rests with coordination among all of you. 

That raises another question, which, Ms. Haas, you referred to 

in a sense in your work with the Senate. I recall that over the 

years that has often been a stumbling block. At the same time we 

have so much to gain from working more closely with each other. 

I just wanted to ask all of you, do you see any hope of developing 

a much closer working relationship, perhaps using combined resources, with the Senate, with regards to information technology? 

Or do you think this is a bridge that is too hard to cross or even 

build? 

Ms. HAAS. If I could speak to that first, Mr. Chairman, I am optimistic. We are working with them currently within our XML Working Group. They are participating, as you are aware. But we are 

also working with them on another front, and we are reaching out 

to the Secretary of the Senate when it comes to electronic lobbying 

filing, and we have—they may be considered baby steps at this 

point—but we are working very closely with them, sharing information and supporting them, because we both have a very important stake in this process. 

And so at this point, I am very optimistic. We are still very early 

on, but we have a lot of work to do. 

The CHAIRMAN. Does anyone else wish to comment on that? 

Mr. EAGEN. I do, Mr. Chairman. I have three very tangible practical examples of hope in this area. And I concur with Karen’s perspective that the chances are good that those opportunities can be 

accomplished. 

The first is as a practical example that traditionally the telephone exchange, the telephone operators that have been doing 

services for the House and the Senate have been organized as a 

joint facility between the House and the Senate. It was located on 

the Senate side, run by Senate managers, but the House supplied 

half of the personnel. Over time we came to recognize that this was 

an inefficient management structure, that half the people were 

paid by one organization and so forth, and through negotiations 

with the Senate, came up with an arrangement where now they 

are all Senate employees, and the House has a contract with the 

United States Senate to provide telephone exchange services to 

both institutions. And as far as I know, there has not been a single 

complaint. No one even noticed. 

The second example is that after the anthrax and 9/11 circumstances, we obviously had to do quite a bit of reinvention of our 

mail systems here in the House, and part of that was to add security features and make sure that the mail was delivered safely. 

And the Senate is now contracting with the House for some of its 

mail processing, packages specifically. And so we are doing those 

House and Senate packages together at one facility. 

Finally, and probably the biggest example of success comes with 

the institutions’ alternative computer facility. After 9/11 and anthrax, the institutions made a decision that we were quite vulnerable with our redundancy systems, and we needed to establish 

those kinds of capabilities at a remote location. We could have done 

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76 

stead, the House and Senate agreed to work together to establish 

a central facility, and in the end the Library of Congress, the Government Printing Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Capitol Police have all joined us together to save costs and work together across those normal invisible barriers that exist in the Capitol. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. I think each of you has a different 

set of problems. We could have a meeting like this every week to 

try to work through those. And in some respects I think we need 

an IT czar for the House or perhaps eventually for the Hill to try 

to work out all of these issues and coordinate everything. 

This has been a constant problem. In the previous reorganization 

and planning, we had to work it all out. It took endless amounts 

of time to meet the needs of every user, and now we are facing precisely the same problem. 

So let’s tuck that in the back of our minds as perhaps eventually 

an objective to develop a combined system. But the immediacy of 

the problems that we face means that we have to take action on 

a lot of things right now, too. 

Mr. Livingood, you mentioned the IT and emergency services, 

and, frankly, I have been very disappointed in the progress in that 

area. For example, when we evacuated the building, I personally 

received an all-clear on my BlackBerry after I was back in the 

building. Now why didn’t I wait for the official all-clear? Because 

it came over television that there was an all-clear in effect, so we 

all went back in the building. We shouldn’t have to depend on local 

TV stations. 

Similarly, the event this past week with the deranged person 

racing through the halls of the Capitol armed with a pistol, I was 

shocked. I was in Michigan at the time. I got the message that 

said, ‘‘Please stay in your offices and lock the door,’’ and I discovered that message was sent out some time after the perpetrator 

had been captured. 

We have to have immediate notification of emergencies like that. 

Do you see that possibility developing? 

Mr. LIVINGOOD. Very definitely. We have the technology. In those 

two instances—and we have been working on this, not only the 

technology, but the human error. Those two instances that you 

mentioned were basically human failure. And—— 

The CHAIRMAN. It seems to happen over and over and over again. 

Mr. LIVINGOOD. Well, it has happened at least in the last 6, 7 

months several times, twice that I know of. And we have taken 

steps as late as yesterday evening to try to remedy that with the 

command center of the Capitol Police. And we are taking action to 

increase—we have been told they would have a communicator in 

there to run these systems. That was not quite the case. That has 

not been the case. 

So we have asked that they again rededicate someone on all 

shifts that will be right at the equipment to immediately transmit 

on the annunciators or whatever method we need to transmit it on 

instructions to the staff, Members and visitors in the buildings. 

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. My time has expired. 

Ms. Lofgren you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

77 

Ms. LOFGREN. Well, I think this is a very helpful hearing. And, 

Mr. Eagen, as you were talking about when you first came here, 

I was remembering when I first came here as a staffer right out 

of college in 1970. And we had—it was precomputer. We had what 

was then called a robotype machine, which was a paper with little 

holes. It would break about every fifth letter, and we would have 

to tape it together. And we would—rather than get our copies of 

bills on line, because we did not have a fully formed Internet, we 

would go over to the bill room over to the first floor of the Capitol, 

and it was very quaint, and you would have to physically get the 

bills. So we certainly have made progress since then, but there is 

much more to do. 

And as I listened, I mean, there are technical issues, but I think 

really the more serious—the technical issues can be solved. It is 

the policy issues that are going to be tougher to do, because really 

what we are talking about is making this whole thing more transparent to the public. You know, the lobbying registration should be 

on line and searchable to the public. You shouldn’t have to come 

over to the Capitol to see that. 

As the legislative process proceeds, the public as well as Members ought to see what is being discussed in draft form, and that 

is not really the way we legislate today. 

So I think that there are going to be some difficult policy issues 

that are going to take some leadership within the House through 

the House leadership and the committee structure. And it is really 

a change of the way we do business in the House that we are talking about. And I think that may be a hard adjustment for some, 

but it will be welcomed by the public, and it is really the way we 

ought to do the public’s business. 

I was going to ask about the Senate as well, but I think we are 

not really completely all on the same page on our side of the Hill 

yet either. We have a lot of work to do. 

The one thing I did want to mention, you mentioned your 8-yearold son. I have two children a little bit older than that, and thinking back to 1906, 100 years ago, and hopefully our children will be 

here to greet the next century, we have lost so much. And I worry, 

and I know the Librarian is focused on this, too, about the electronic records. They won’t turn to dust, they will—we will have no 

history. And there is a group that is formed out in Silicon Valley 

to look at open standards for documents so that we can make sure 

that we actually have accessible to historians or our successors 

what it is we are doing today and in 100 years or 200 years, because our Republic will go on. 

Have you had any interface with that broad group yet? And if 

not, any of you, how might we help pull their energetic efforts together with the government with the goal of preservation? 

Ms. HAAS. I haven’t had any dealings at this point with this organization. I would love to get more information from you. As was 

mentioned previously, there is an ongoing working-group-type 

structure with the Library of Congress in conjunction with the National Archives. So this is something that is very active and ongoing, so if I could get that information from you. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Maybe we ought to work it through the Library if 

they are taking the lead. 

78 

Ms. HAAS. Absolutely. I think that is an excellent idea. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much. 

And I guess the only other question I had was for Mr. Barrow. 

You know, we stopped codifying a long time ago, and I can’t actually imagine that—I guess the Judiciary Committee has the major 

role, but not the exclusive role—that the committee which I have 

served on now for 12 years is actually going to drop everything else 

and go into codification. That is just not going to happen. 

Do you think that the lack of codification is substantively a deficit on a policy basis for our country? And if so, legally could we 

form a commission to do the detail work? Obviously, the Congress 

would have to adopt it, but a commission to really move us forward 

on codification? Do you think that would be worth doing? 

Mr. BARROW. I am not sure what the solution is. The Law Revision Counsel which currently is the institution in the House that 

has the responsibility for the codification of Federal laws. They do 

have the technical capability to do that and have been doing so at 

a very slow pace, because there is no constituency pushing for this. 

Like you, I can’t see the Judiciary Committee taking time off to do 

this from all the things they are being pressed to do. 

Additionally, when they codify a series of laws that are currently 

uncodified, other committees have jurisdiction over all those laws, 

and there is going to be some friction over the actual language that 

is involved, because it is impossible to recodify an uncodified title 

without changing something. The numbering, the wording, and 

other things are going to be changed and that makes people very 

nervous. 

So it is a difficult process. They do every 3 or 4 years manage 

to get another title codified, but it has been a very slow process. 

Ms. LOFGREN. And we are getting farther behind. 

Mr. BARROW. Yes, they are getting farther behind. I talked to the 

Law Revision Counsel yesterday, and he feels that the bulk of the 

uncodified laws is growing faster than they are able to codify. This 

is relevant to the IT situation because we can’t provide electronic 

official documents if there is no official document anywhere, electronic or paper. It becomes an institutional impediment. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you. 

The CHAIRMAN. The gentlewoman’s time has expired. 

The Chair recognizes Mr. Doolittle for 5 minutes. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you. 

Just so I understand, Mr. Barrow, is one of the reasons we don’t 

have more codification that frequently laws are put under appropriations bills? Does that have something to do with it, and therefore they are, by definition, uncodified? 

Mr. BARROW. No, I don’t think that is the reason. The bulk of our 

laws are amendments to these Public Laws, and there are official 

copies of each Public Law. But when that Public Law, no matter 

what committee it came from, is amended at this point, there is no 

official version of the law, as amended, that anyone has responsibility for maintaining unless it is amendment of a codified U.S. 

Code title. In those cases, with 24 titles, we do have that. 

We don’t, however, have that on a current basis even now because the Law Revision Counsel does not have the resources or the 

manpower to be able to provide those documents at the time we 

79 

need to make amendments. It takes 18 months to 2 years to get 

those documents from them. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, it sounds like we have been applying the 

same approach in the past to our border security that we apply to 

this. It is just not important enough to do? With money, couldn’t 

we solve the problem? It sounds like it. 

Mr. BARROW. It would take more resources, but I think it would 

also take some impetus from the leadership essentially that this is 

an important thing to do. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. This is the first time I have ever heard that stuff 

is going on. It is interesting to hear it. I would certainly—I mean, 

the State legislatures, it works just fine. It is amazing that we 

can’t do it here. Can we subcontract with commercial services or 

something to have them do it? 

Mr. BARROW. You could do that. The Law Revision Counsel has 

the ability to do this. With additional resources, they, I am sure, 

could do it. What happens, however, is they get a title ready to be 

codified, and it may take 4 years or so or longer even before anything happens politically. Sometimes it just does not happen. And 

now they are down to the more difficult titles where there is much 

more political controversy, so it is even less likely to happen. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I am interested in this, but I have two or three 

other areas that I want to ask about. So I will learn more about 

it. 

Mr. Eagen, for 5 years I have been trying to get—it turns out 

they are called ‘‘nodes,’’ put around the campus so that we have 

BlackBerry reception wherever we go, and we don’t lose it in HC– 

5 and other places, and that Verizon isn’t having better service 

than Cingular or any of the others. And every time I ask over these 

5 years, I am told, yeah, we are going to do that. It is 6 months 

away. 

So it is 5 years later, and I am wondering, and I am told that 

4 months ago my staff was assured that in 6 months from then we 

would have these nodes in place. So we have 2 months left. Are we 

going to have these things installed by Christmas? 

Mr. EAGEN. Actually all the House buildings are done and have 

been done for about a year. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Awesome. They are done, but they are not 

turned on? 

Mr. EAGEN. No. They are turned on, and all the carriers are 

using the repeaters. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Are you intentionally blocking HC–5? 

Mr. EAGEN. I meant the House buildings. The Capitol is the 

last—I was going to say something, and I held back fortunately— 

the Capitol is the last location that needs to be done, and, of 

course, the CVC will need to be done as well. We have a contract 

in place to do that. There are some issues with that contract at the 

moment, but our plan is to finish that work, yes, and have it all 

be accessible. 

The Capitol was held off as the last location for two reasons. One 

is the sensitivity of the architecture, and that putting those—they 

are repeaters, I think is the name that is used in the industry, and 

the wiring that goes to those repeaters is always more challenging 

in the Capitol. And secondly then security sensitivity, and we had 

80 

those same challenges in the House office buildings that in locations where there has been security-sensitive briefings or hearings 

and those kinds of things, you have to handle those locations in a 

different manner and plan them out more carefully so that there 

could be positive disconnects and so forth established so that penetrations through that technology don’t have an adverse effect on 

the content of the discussions. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. When would you anticipate that the Capitol will 

be up to speed in this area? 

Mr. EAGEN. I will have to get back to you Mr. Doolittle. I don’t 

have them at my fingertips, the planned completion date. I do 

know that we have had recently a contractual issue that we are 

working through right now that impacts that completion date. So 

I will have to get back to you. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Would it be reasonable to believe that this 

should be completed at the time the visitor center comes on line? 

Mr. EAGEN. I know that we had established a contract and agreement with the Senate as to how the visitor center would be handled. I think, without having the completion dates at my fingertips 

to give you with a valid assurance, I think, yes, that is generally 

the plan. But I would want to get back to you and confirm that before you hold me to it. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, please do. I am interested in having that 

situation taken care of. Thank you. 

The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman’s time has expired. I appreciated 

your questions, as I had some of those same questions. 

Just one final wrap-up. 

Mr. Eagen, you discuss seat management, which is the term that 

is used for what I talked earlier about, treating computers like telephones. From your standpoint, and you would bear the burden of 

setting this in place through your office and HIR, do you see anything that would give us cause in trying to pursue this, other than 

the political and perception problems? 

Mr. EAGEN. I think it is definitely worth pursuing in the House. 

We need to go into it with our eyes wide open. And actually I 

thought Mr. Doolittle might ask about the subject, because it is 

something that he has been equally interested in in the past. And 

as a result of some of his inquiries, we actually are doing a pilot 

with seat management and using CAO as the pilot audience. 

And so we have made a shift over where we have gone to a contractor and have installed so far about two-thirds of our organization on a seat management methodology. And to explain seat management, there is a lot of different flavors of it, but essentially it 

is taking the desktop that all of us use, or a laptop for that matter, 

and treating it as kind of a commodity, and that the hardware and 

potentially portions of the software are centrally managed and centrally acquired and standardized. 

In CAO, that is somewhat relatively easy to do. We do have some 

places where we have some high end users where a standard desktop configuration, either from the power of the machine or the software, may need to be adapted. 

In Member offices, though, or even committees for that matter, 

it becomes a bit more of a challenge because historically the operating principle here has been to give offices full discretion and full 

81 

choice. And therein lies the trade-off. With standardization you 

have the potential for economies of scale on the acquisition of the 

hardware. You have opportunities for standardization of support 

because you are going with certain desktop features. But it is certainly a challenge to choice and discretion. And where does the 

House want to be positioned? 

I think there are prospects to do that, but it goes back to business decision-making. Are we going to stay with as much decentralization and as much choice as we have traditionally offered 

Member offices, or are we willing to move somewhere to the middle? I could see a seat management that offers perhaps tiers of support. 

You were mentioning the different kinds of Members that we 

have around here with the White Out versus those that are hightech. Perhaps there are tiered levels of seat management support 

depending on the office’s business practices and preferences. The 

more choice you have, the less standardization, the more cost, but 

less customization as well. So those are the trade-offs as I see it. 

The CHAIRMAN. Yes, it is a difficult problem, and a decade ago 

I went through this. Actually it is very difficult, as I found out, to 

network 11,000 computers and do it properly. And that is a very 

challenging technical problem. But I found the political problems 

were much, much greater than the technical. 

Mr. EAGEN. Mr. Chairman, if I may, there is another aspect to 

this that would certainly directly confront this committee, and it 

would be the budgetary aspect. Right now through the Members’ 

representational allowance, most of the control over the in-office 

technology decisions is vested with the Members. And so if the 

House wanted to contemplate some kind of method like this, that 

would be one of the hurdles to confront. One option would be, well, 

you add more moneys perhaps into my budget, and we do this centrally; but, of course, that adds more money to the House budget, 

and we are in relatively challenging budgetary times. 

The other option would be to have a pooled share of resources, 

and would the Members be willing to make contributions from 

their accounts to something like that? 

The CHAIRMAN. Well, there are technical problems, there are 

budgetary problems, but the political problems outweigh it. At least 

in my experience, having 435 system analysts in 435 offices, plus 

the committees, telling their boss that I am an idiot because I was 

trying to do something that might cost them their job; and their 

Member of Congress then would go to Newt Gingrich and tell him 

I am an idiot. I fought a lot of political battles to get what we got, 

and I gave up on the centralized service system. That was an impossibility at that time. I think it is a possibility now, but it will 

not be easy. 

Mr. EAGEN. Actually, you shouldn’t give up hope. We are moving 

in that direction. 

The CHAIRMAN. Well, we already have it in one facility, and so 

there is no reason not to have it in two. We need to remember the 

budgetary issue, as it does save money for the institution. So that 

is something we have to investigate. 

Let’s see, I was going respond to one comment you made, but I 

have forgotten it. Do you have any further questions? 

82 

Ms. LOFGREN. No, I just—obviously we are about to adjourn, but 

I think this is a topic that we will revisit, and I am glad that this 

will be posted not only for current Members, but freshman Members to review. For the freshmen, this is something I am sure that 

they have no idea what they are walking into. But I think that if 

we could make some decisions in the early next year time frame, 

that we will be making progress. And I really appreciate the participation of all the witnesses. Very helpful. Thank you. 

The CHAIRMAN. I second that. And what is heartening about this, 

every year we get new freshmen who are far more computer literate than the people they are replacing in general. 

I also just wanted to comment, Ms. Lofgren, on your issue about 

preserving records. I was involved in the state of Michigan in allowing all the county clerks to maintain their records in electronic 

form, but no one had thought about long-term preservation. I managed to get an amendment, which to my knowledge is still working 

well, that they had to maintain the algorithms and the software, 

and whenever there is a major change, they had to change everything over to the new algorithms and new software in order to 

maintain a permanent record. That is troublesome, but it is important. Otherwise we will lose the records in 5 years. 

Ms. LOFGREN. On that point, Mr. Ehlers, it is not just the legislative branch, but we are really failing governmentwide on that 

whole issue. We might be a leader in changing that. 

The CHAIRMAN. Actually we are failing nationwide, not just 

govermentwide. 

Mr. Doolittle has another question and is recognized. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, I would just like to—I don’t know if you 

were hinting at this or not, Mr. Eagen, but now that Apple has 

moved to the Intel chip, is that making all of this desired harmony 

a little easier? Or is that just a tiny part of what you are even talking about? 

Mr. EAGEN. It is really just a tiny part of it. 

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, okay. Thank you for your work, and encourage you to make these things happen as quickly as possible. 

The CHAIRMAN. Now that you have two Macintosh aficionados 

here, we assume that will be part of the next step in improving information technology in the House of Representatives. 

With that, I thank all the witnesses for their participation. 

Speaking for myself, it has been extremely beneficial to get a better 

handle on not only the issues, but also the problems that each of 

you face. And it helps me to recognize all the different things that 

have to be done. And it has been very, very helpful to me, and we 

will continue to have dialogues on this topic in the future, more frequently and in a less formal setting than this. 

Thank you all for your ideas and your participation. With that, 

the meeting stands adjourned. 

We have just a few wrap-up things. I ask unanimous consent 

that Members and witnesses have 7 calendar days to submit material for the record, including additional questions of the witnesses, 

and for those statements and materials to be entered in the appropriate place in the record. 

Without objection, the material will be so entered. [The information follows:] 

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The CHAIRMAN. I ask unanimous consent that staff be authorized 

to make technical and conforming changes on all matters considered by the committee at today’s hearing. Without objection, so ordered. 

Having completed our business for today and for this hearing, 

the committee is hereby adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:51 a.m., the committee was adjourned.] 

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