Venyu Blog

You know I’d been wondering whether this ship would still be upright once its captain set sail for a different island. And now we all know the answer: FedCloud.

Let me back up a bit. With President Obama’s Federal CIO/Cloud Evangelist, Vivek Kundra, trading out the Beltway in late September for the Brahmin and brownstone of Harvard University, the question remained not only who would fill his shoes but whether the cloud “initiatives” he outlined – efforts like data center consolidation, for example – would soldier on in spite of his absence.

This being the federal government, of course, you hire consultants to fill that void, in this case, Deloitte Consulting, LLP which recently released a report on how the cloud computing model could be applied to human capital in order to create a flexible workforce that can “rapidly acclimatize to future work requirements.” The report, entitled FedCloud: The Future of federal work” outlines the suggestion that the attributes of cloud computing – such as shared resources, cost efficiency and virtualization – could be applied to the federal workforce to increase its flexibility and efficiency.

As reported in Federal Computer Weekly, the over-arching theory advancing this framework is that in the cloud-based federal workforce, or Fed Cloud, “knowledge workers” would move from a single agency to working for the federal government at large.

Dan Helfrich, a Deloitte “Federal Human Capital Practice Leader” quoted in the article put it this way: “What that would then mean is that the tasks those people worked on, the programs they were associated with, they could change from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, depending on where their skills were mostly needed,” he explained.

Federal employees with different backgrounds and varying expertise would act as “free agents: self-sufficient workers who display loyalty to teams,” the report states. Over the course of a career, the average federal employee in the Fed Cloud would work with many more people, departments and agencies, and a broader set of problems than today. For those employees, it would become important to embrace flexible work arrangements and know how to be a truly mobile workforce.

According to the report’s executive summary, other prescriptive solutions available in the Fed Cloud include:

• Shared Resources: Cloud applications reside on shared hardware, which is accessible by many users. In Fed Cloud, cloud workers reside in a central talent pool, accessible by many agencies.
• Cost Effective. Cloud computing reduces the amount of overall hardware required, which can reduce maintenance cost and cost of associated personnel. Similarly, Fed Cloud could reduce the burden on each individual agency to maintain and manage a large workforce.
• Dynamically scalable. Co-locating software on shared hardware allows processing power to be quickly shifted from low-need to high-need programs without going through acquisition cycles to purchase additional hardware. By pooling workers in a government wide Fed Cloud, resources could be quickly shifted from low-need to high-need programs and agencies without requiring individual agencies to hire new workers or standup new organizations.

Another section of the report appropriately entitled “Breaking Up Bureaucracies,” speaks plainly to the conundrum that is the federal government’s most challenging feature: its silos, of agencies, personnel and in my opinion, its way of thinking. This section actually starts out with the obvious declaration, “The current federal model tends to constrain workers by isolating them in separate agencies.” 

No argument there.

The report continues: “Cloud workers would vary in background and expertise but would exhibit traits of “free-agent workers” – self-sufficient, self-motivating employees who exhibit a strong loyalty to teams, colleagues and clients.”

Look, are we talking about overpriced free agent baseball players or federal workers?

In adopting the Fed Cloud model, the federal government would have a significant talent recruiting and retention advantage, with ROI that could be measured in the greater number of those who choose to work for and stay with the public sector, Helfrich said.

And who wouldn’t want to remain with the Feds? According to this story in USA Today, entitled, “Some federal workers more likely to die than lose jobs”, the federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta, former research chief at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles federal firing disputes.

The Fed Cloud model would also reduce the demand for permanent structures to erect new offices and to create new full-time, permanent positions, allowing what Helfrich called a more dynamic allocation of labor to the needs of the time. 

“The HR professionals are going to have to manage a more virtual workforce; they’re going to need to manage performance and gather their feedback from a broader set of people than are done today,” Helfrich said. “I see this is a way to further the dialog on performance management overall, so that we get to a more outcome-based and more results-oriented way to evaluate people.”

Well, maybe it’s just me but to paraphrase a well-liked series of children’s books, if you give a federal employee one job, he or she will only ask for another. At our cost. On our dime. And all the while as Vivek Kundra works toward getting his tenure at Harvard.