Aileen MacMillan

<p><b>David B. Dlouhy is the Administrator for the Dept. of State Pension Fund with the U.S. Department of State.  David is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with 35 years with the U.S. government.  He served as Deputy /Acting U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Luxembourg and Bolivia.  He is currently the administrator of the $15 billion Foreign Service retirement and Disability Fund and director of the office of retirement, which services 42,000 active employees and new entrants.  David reorganized business process around a new web-based retirement process and he moved 42,000 employees and retirees into the new operating system.  He has also converted the entire process from paper to electronic and created a methodology for incorporating retirees as a workforce asset, creating additional institutional response capability and he was the originator of the Employee Profile Plus (EP ) system, which we are going to talk about today.  He was also a winner of the Department of State 2005 Innovation in the Use of Technology award for this system. </b></p>

<p><b>John D. Long is the Manager of the EP System with the U.S. Department of State.  John is a retired member of the Foreign Service with 25 years with the U.S. government and he is currently serving as Foreign Affairs Advisor, as well as EP program administrator in the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Human Resources.  John has served overseas in China, Japan, and Switzerland, as well as the U.S. Mission for The UN in New York.</b></p>

<p><b>Access the archive of this webcast <a href="/SITEFORUM;jsessionid=102A694EC25FD392FCF30A1DEBA430CB?t=/contentManager/onStory&i=1116423256281&l=0&e=UTF-8&active=no&ParentID=0&sort=Price&StoryID=1143816990913">here</a> .</b></p>

<p><b>View upcoming Reality HR webcasts <a href="/SITEFORUM;jsessionid=102A694EC25FD392FCF30A1DEBA430CB?t=/contentManager/onStory&i=1116423256281&l=0&e=UTF-8&active=no&ParentID=0&sort=Price&StoryID=1120498588279">here</a>.</b></p>

<hr>
<p><b>AM: Could you perhaps begin with a bit of information about the Department of State?</b></p>

<p><b>DD: </b> Certainly, I want to welcome you and people who have joined us to Washington D.C., the headquarters of the Department of State. This is home base for about 57,000 employees scattered throughout the United States and around the world.  The Department of State manages our diplomatic relations with 189 countries.  We have about 267 diplomatic missions around the world.  I mention those figures because one of the things I want to talk a little about today is how to manage a global workforce and a workforce that is involved in multiple activities.  We have both Foreign Service and Civil Service in the Department of State and overseas we have what we call Foreign Service Nationals or Locally Employed Staff.  We also have Eligible Family Members, the trailing spouses and dependents whom are occasionally employed by the Department of State, so we have a very large and varied workforce. That is one of the things that the EP system has targeted: how do you manage this kind of a workforce?</p>

<p><b>AM:  Can you tell us a little bit about what EP entails?</b></p>

<p><b>DD: </b> Let us back up with a little war story, an anecdote.  Like a lot of businesses, workforce knowledge is contained in informal systems and when Iraq started we got a lot of questions to a group of us who had been previously involved in the Balkans, working on Bosnia. The question was, where is that expertise? How did you find that expertise? Where are the people who know how to do elections? Where are the people who speak a particular form of Arabic? How did you organize the office? And after a while it became clear that the corporate knowledge systems that we had were not providing the kind of answers that management at the Department of State needed to respond effectively. </p>

<p>About three years ago the American Productivity Quality Center did a Best Practices seminar in Houston, where they brought together about a dozen large U.S. corporations to compare notes on Expertise Locator Systems.  That was one of the key experiences we looked at in trying to answer this question about how we find the knowledge and the expertise that we needed at the Department of State.  We literally went to the rocket scientists at NASA.  NASA has developed a very interesting application. They were very generous and spent time with us to help clarify our thinking about what it was we were trying to accomplish.  What was the specific objective?  The best practices study of about a dozen U.S. corporations that are running Expertise Locator Systems showed that there is a wide variety of systems that are out there and NASA had a variant of its own.  We came at this with a little bit of a different objective in mind and the NASA folks were very helpful in getting us to the point where we could translate what we were trying to accomplish into an actual application.  Our own in-house IT people took it from there and helped us translate our objectives into the application that became known as EP .  The plus is what we are going to talk about today.  Employee Profile is the corporate database for employees at the Department of State.  It is the standard HR information that you would get in any large HR shop on an employee, their training history, their employment history, salary, grades, that sort of thing.  We had that at the time Iraq started and you could look at that database, but it did not really tell you anything in particular about what it was we were trying to accomplish.</p>

<p><b>JL: </b> David has talked about what we had under corporate data. We developed something that sits on top of and complements the corporate data.  There are basically six different areas where employees can input voluntarily data into the system.  Two of the areas complement what is already in corporate data that may be insufficient.  These are all State Department specific and as David mentioned the system is based on our own needs, but for instance, other federal agencies, which may adopt it would adapt it for their own purposes.  The two areas where we already have records, but they may not be complete, are in: professional knowledge of overseas foreign countries and the second is foreign language in which you have an expertise. </p>

<p>There are four other areas where there are no records, nothing in the State Department system.  These areas concern professional experience with various kinds of organizations, which could be anywhere from international organizations like the United Nations to intergovernmental organizations like NATO, to what we call non-government organizations which would include organizations like the Red Cross. The professional background many people have in various areas.  We have two people in the State Department who are qualified as Nuclear Power Client operators, which no one would ever know if they were not able to put this information in the system. There are plumbers, attorneys, and doctors.  The heart of it, which we will talk about a little later, is a competency dictionary, which actually derives from what NASA had done.  Currently there are almost 300 different entries that people can indicate that they have specific knowledge in, which they are expert in.  A very recent addition is certifications.  One that most people would be familiar with, I think in this area is certifications that a lot of IT people get, but there are also people who are certified as financial planners or even doctors. There are places for employees to indicate this type of information as well.  There are six broad areas at the moment where employees can indicate different kinds of background expertise and skills.</p>

<p><b>AM:  Did you develop the Competency Dictionary from scratch yourself or where did that dictionary come from?</b></p>

<p><b>DD:</b>  That´s the heart of the beast, and that´s the real key to making this very simple application function effectively.  We sat down and basically, wrote this ourselves.  A small group of people got together and set ourselves a rather daunting task to describe everything that the Department of State does, and to try to limit it to mission objectives. </p>

<p>The dictionary process turned out to be not quite the gargantuan task that it sounds like, because we did very much focus on mission tasks, and what it was that we were trying to accomplish.  We did not include in the dictionary things that we didn´t think we would have an interest in. On the other hand in this day and age you never know, so there had been a certain degree of latitude.  We took a small group of people and basically locked ourselves in a room for a couple of weeks, and went through this.  It was only when we were satisfied with the product that we had, that we started releasing it to various parts of the Department of State, and asking them to review what we had done.  We made this command decision at the beginning that we were going to have to keep control of the process; otherwise it would turn into an unwieldy bureaucratic exercise and wouldn´t have the kind of focus that we were looking for. So, as John said, we were able to produce this product, and then hand it out for people to look at and then after a couple of iterations and fine-tuning, it was finalized. </p>

<p>We do in fact go back every three to four months to update the dictionary.  Employees are welcome to make contributions.  We may want to talk a little bit about how the dictionary functions, because it´s fairly detailed in some respects, in terms of the definitions of the activities that are encompassed in the dictionary. To make these Expertise Locator Symptoms function, the key is the dictionary, and how you get to that dictionary I think is one of the things you might want to spend a little bit more time talking about today.<b> </b></p>

<p><b>AM:  Could you go into more depth around how EP works?  One of the things that I found interesting is that it is a voluntary program, and you had a very high compliance rate. Could you tell us a bit more about how the program functions? </b></p>

<p><b>DD: </b> Yes, let me share the technical specifications, and describe a little bit about what this is.  As I said earlier, the Plus is really what we are talking about today.  Employee Profile is one of many applications located within what we call Human Resources Online, which is a single sign-on portal for the Department of State that has many applications.  To get into EP an employee logs into their HR Online account using their Department e-mail address and their password. The system recognizes the employee´s credentials, loads the information and forwards the employee the dashboard for the application.   That dashboard will have various announcements about the availability of EP , updates on EP , and then gives them the link directly to access the application. </p>

<p>Since the main portal HR Online handles security for the application, EP does not have any additional security in place. The EP on the technical side is an Oracle 8i back-end with a Cold Fusion MX front end and we use Business Objects for reporting.  It´s got a modified Fuse Box methodology, and a Cold Fusion screen associated with the query display and action files for each of the pages. This system was built in-house by our own IT staff in conjunction with the task force that came together to create EP . The IT side of the house was really successful in translating what the non-technical people were trying to accomplish. They understood the logic, and I give them the credit for making this thing very simple. It´s user friendly and I think that, combined with the way the application was rolled out, is what accounts for the 80% participation rate that we are enjoying.</p>

<p><b>JL: </b> Could I talk about participation rate?  One reason, as David has alluded to, that we have such a high participation rate is that the Director General for the Foreign Services, who is basically among other things the Head of Personnel, went to the heads of the various bureaus in the State Department, and went to what we call Assistant Secretaries who are heads of these bureaus and said, "This is what we have initially in your bureau, this is rather low, and I would like your help in getting it higher."  This same message was communicated by his boss who is the Under Secretary for Management, so we had very senior level management engagement.  It remains voluntary, and while it remained voluntary, employees were encouraged to participate.  There is no penalty for not participating, but it got basically not only the management side of house, but also the policy side of the house involved. Another part of the reason that this I think has happened is that employees are themselves able to send within the Department copies of what they have entered into the system. </p>

<p>Basically, it´s a combination of what we call Employee Profile, which is the basic corporate info that already exists on them, plus the new info they have entered in this system sent to people who are responsible for hiring for new jobs in the State Department.  This in fact gives people a much better idea than they would have otherwise of the actual skills and talents of the potential employee.  So employees have a self-interest in completing the process, as well as management´s own interest. </p>

<p>Management's interest, which is something we haven´t really talked about very much yet, but that David has alluded to, is that we can search the data.  It is a relational database, and covers all the things that we talked about, all our different search parameters.  Management can pull up for its own use any combination by using these different elements, the people that they want to look for with different skills and different kinds of knowledge sets as David referred to originally.  It was developed to find people to use in a crisis, and in fact we will discuss that later, but it has other applications as well, potential applications.</p>

<p><b>AM:  Were the benefits to the individual and the organization as a whole then part of the communication plan?  </b></p>

<p><b>DD: </b> That´s correct. It didn´t take too long for employees to perceive the benefit to themselves in terms of career direction and career management.  We basically rolled this thing out in a way that employees looked at this and said, "Well here is a tool that I am being given to direct my career, and to say what I would like to say about myself, and to emphasize certain skill areas and certain skills sets in a way that would help me over the long term with my career development." I think that kind of openness was really the big selling item for the application. </p>

<p>Certainly as John said, on the management side of the house, employees are sharing voluntarily with us what they would like to say about themselves, and employees then get the Plus side of the report, the EP , and they are able to use that and send that around. For example, if you want to get a job in a particular part of our business you can take your EP and send it around for your next assignment.  In the Foreign Service, we basically shift jobs every 24 to 36 months and it´s a way for employees to self-direct their careers. </p>

<p>The other part that I think has proven to be really critically important is that it has bridged the divide between workday life and your afterwork life. Many people have skills that they had in previous jobs, in academic environments or just hobbies.  From our offices here at The Department of State In Washington we watched the smoke rising over the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 attacks, and one of the questions that came up for us was, how many firemen are there here at the State Department?  If we need help and there is a disaster here in Washington and we have to rely on ourselves, how many people have first responder skills? The corporate knowledge databases did not answer those questions, but in EP , we let people say what they want to say about themselves.  You would be surprised how many people are volunteer firemen after work.  You will be surprised at how many people have languages that they had never tested for, and how many people had expertise from other work lives that they had before the Department of State.  EP gave all of these people a platform to say what they want to say about themselves.  Our Office of Emergency Preparedness now has a huge roster of volunteer firemen, CPR experts, and first responders.  All information that was not previously known to us.  I just use that as a concrete example of one of the results of the application and one of the ways in which we have basically tried to make people whole in terms of what I call 9 to 5 and 5 to 9 lives that we all lead.</p>

<p><b>AM:  You have provided a scenario that illustrates how the program works; can you walk us through that?</b></p>

<p align="left"><b>JD: </b> With the chaos and damage that occurred in Hurricane Katrina, management at the Department decided that it wished to be as helpful as possible to what FEMA was doing. The Agency for National Development is normally the arm of the government that actually deals with developmental questions and assistance in overseas countries, but they have a disaster arm as well that was cooperating with FEMA.  So management at the State Department asked that a search be run in the program based on certain parameters to try finding employees who had potentially the knowledge, background and skills to be helpful in this domestic crisis.  The initial run produced 1,600 people who potentially had such skills.  That list was partially reviewed by management and it was whittled down further to around 1,000 and then management sent an e-mail to our employees and asked if they would be willing to serve if we were going to send people.  They found out of that list 100 people were able to go immediately.  Whether or not we would send more than that was a separate issue, but we had   immediately identified 100 people.  The names of the 100 people were provided, both to USAID and to FEMA. </p>

<p align="left">One of the success stories out of that was that there are ethnic fisherman settled in the Gulf area, that come from Vietnam and Cambodia.  There are people there who were resettled, they were refugees, but they don´t speak English very well, so they needed someone to serve as a liaison.  Well, the State Department has many language trained officers who serve overseas, so, we actually sent a small number of people to the Gulf to act as intermediaries with these ethnic fishermen between FEMA and the local government and the fisherman and were very instrumental in helping to work things out.  As a result, the ethnic fishermen are able to get the relief to which they were entitled.  </p>

<p align="left">This is actually an unforeseen example, as the system was developed largely to deal with overseas emergencies, foreign policy emergencies that the State Department would face.  This refers to one question that we can discuss later, which is the flexibility that the system offers.  Once the information is there it can be used for different purposes, of which this is one, another potential one is workforce planning including training and hiring in other such dimensions.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b> The first experience we had in terms of responding to a crisis came with the South Asian Tsunami.  Our Bureau of Consular Affairs, this is the part of the business that takes care of America Citizen Services Overseas, came to us and asked for quick help.  They were looking for employees who had first responder skills, who had consular skill, who had some kind of geographic country experience in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand, and they gave us their search parameters.  That was the first time that we had actually run this system for that kind of a crisis, and it really brought home to us the validity of the concept of the Plus part of the Employee Profile. </p>

<p>When you come to work at The State Department, you may or may not want to test in languages that you bring with you.  There is no way in the corporate database for us to know that in a previous incarnation you were a Peace Corp volunteer.  When we ran the query in the EP database, it was really quite remarkable, the combination of skills that we came up with; individuals who had served in the Peace Corp, who had the language skill, who had first responder skills, who had consular skills.  Using the basic corporate database we never would have found that, it was only because we opened that database on the Plus side of the house to permit employees to say what they want to say about themselves that we were able to marry that data up. </p>

<p>I want to emphasize here a point that we haven´t really clarified enough, that there is EP and there is the Plus side of the house.  EP is the corporate database.  Plus is what the employees are bringing to the table.  Those two databases are married up in our knowledge center, and the database query is run against both of those, against EP and the Plus side of the house to come up with what we call a combined view.  The combined view would tell us for example, if I have been trained at our Foreign Services Institute, our training center here, in a couple of languages.  I also have a couple of languages that I just brought with me to the State Department that I was never tested in.  The corporate database would tell us what I have been trained in by the State Department and Plus side of the house tells what languages I have said I have some expertise in, and the combined view will give you both of those.  So, when we do the query search, we are able to come up with the total picture if you will, the whole package, what the individual employee has said about themselves in terms of their skill sets.  This leads then into the question of what degree of expertise and how do we know it? And that may be something we may want to spend a little bit of time talking about.</p>

<p>When we looked at the full array of experience that US companies have had with Expertise Locator Systems you see there is a wide variance in use of validation techniques.  NASA had also gotten into a validation process.  Let me just say up front that at the end of day, we decided not to go down that route.  Our sense was that some of the large corporations had mixed luck with those kinds of approaches, because employees hesitated a bit because of the appearance of, if you will, a pseudo evaluation system, whether it was the corporation itself running a validation mechanism or some business using a peer-to-peer evaluation system.  What do I mean by the latter? Basically, permitting employees to say what they want to say about themselves and then deflating it by peer group review.  So and so says they know something and colleagues would say yes, but that person doesn´t really know that.  Another approach is to require some sort of testing.  Our sense of the systems that have gotten into that is that they had not been as successful as they might have been because of the reluctance on the part of the employees to participate in what was seen as a sort of secondary performance evaluation system. </p>

<p><b>AM:  Can employees update and change profiles as their skills and situations change?</b></p>

<p><b>JL:</b> Yes, the system is always available and we encourage employees to go in and update as their situations change.  David already mentioned that we ourselves change the system occasionally to make it more useful, both actually to employees and to management.  In January of this year, we did a major overhaul of the competency dictionary, and we revised substantially the organization listing and the certification area that I talked about which allows people with, for instance, IT certification.  That was brand new.  So, when we made those changes, we sent a message out to all employees in the department, domestic and overseas, and we asked people to review their profiles and to ensure that they were accurate.  This first of all gives them a chance to take advantage of the new features.  Second of all, from management´s perspective that ensures the correct information is input into the system so that when searches are run it captures the people we want to capture.</p>

<p><b>AM:  Now could we take a step back and talk about the Competency Dictionary again in terms of the number of levels of performance that you included, etc.?</b></p>

<p><b>JL: </b>Basically, the Competency Dictionary starts off with very general categories like economics or humanitarian.  Then there are subdivisions within that for major fields and then below that there are specific competencies.  People will always have an option; they can either pick a specific competency, which is of course the most helpful, or if they have been around a long time and they can do almost anything in the area, they can pick either the subcategory or even the field as a whole. If they are senior, quite senior and they can do almost anything, they pick the field as a whole.  When we run searches, we would search for anybody who indicated this.  If it´s a specific competency in a specific area then anybody who checked the category would automatically be included. There are 293 specific competency definitions that we have in the dictionary across a very wide range.  As David said, what we try to do in the dictionary is not include everything, but we included areas where we anticipated management would actually be looking for people.  For instance, in humanitarian, there are various people with specific refugee experience, and people who have experience in resettlements and rehabilitations.  So, there are wide categories.  There are other areas we omitted in which, like in the professions for instance, we don´t anticipate ever searching for.  But the system is basically flexible enough that it could do whatever you want, which is a great virtue, frankly.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b> From our corporate perspective, one of the decisions that would need to be made upfront if you were to ask us to come in and basically set up this kind of system for a business is; do you want an in-house solution or do you want a COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf)solution? There are many commercial providers out there now in the HR world where you can go and actually purchase the makings of a Competency Dictionary.  As I said, we have about 57,000 employees, and we are basically covering everything from soup to nuts around the world.  I mean every single kind of activity can be found at the Department Of State.  So, our basic view was that we were going to do this in-house to get the dictionary to look like what we wanted it to be and to function for us.  But I would say that HR folks listening to us today, they would want to look at some of the commercial providers of dictionaries, and to see if anything is available that would give them a jump start in this process.  I can´t emphasize enough how important it is to keep it simple, and keep it tightly controlled so that it doesn´t turn into a bureaucratic exercise.  As John mentioned, and if we think about this for just a minute, we reduced the activities of The Department Of State to about 300 entries, and as I said at the beginning of the program we have 267 diplomatic establishments around the world.  We are a global operation engaged in every manner of activity and we have a dictionary with only 300 entries. I think that´s one of the things that I will emphasize today; the importance of keeping it very simple and keeping it mission focused.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b> I don´t want to go into names this afternoon, but we did our due diligence before we launched this and visited with a couple other executive branch agencies.  We found examples that we did not want to follow because it´s very easy to get into the minutiae of each individual position.  Some of the approaches that were being taken were basically to have each individual employee describe down to the nth degree their specific activities, and the dictionary tried to capture the totality of every single individual.  You can easily write a dictionary with hundreds of thousands of entries and it becomes applicable only to a single individual.  That wasn´t what we were trying accomplish. We took the approach that the purpose of this application was to enable us to know the workforce and to manage the workforce, and to get the knowledge that we needed to achieve our mission objectives.  The corporate database turned out to be a goldmine that wasn´t being properly run or managed.  By putting the Plus on top of that corporate data we got what we were looking for and we created a tool for ourselves that has now proven to be very adept.  In the two examples that we spoke about earlier that John mentioned, HurricaneKatrina and the South Asian Tsunami, I should tell you that in the Tsunami it took about 30 minutes to respond to the request for information, and to identify the 1,600 people that we identified as potential volunteers for emergency relief in the Gulf States took about 45 minutes.  When we were first contacted about Iraq it took weeks to try to find and assemble names and match names up with expertise.  We literally are in a position at this point to provide the President and the Secretary with information within a matter of minutes on any number of topics.  If they are looking to deploy resources or suddenly need to shift resources to address a need, we can provide that information within 30 minutes to 45 minutes.</p>

<p><b>AM:  Yes, it´s a fabulous success story and I congratulate you on it.  It´s so valuable.  I am curious now to understand how you see this initiative evolving.</b></p>

<p><b>DD: </b> John why don´t you talk a little bit about the workforce and how we are trying to expand the EP to the other segments of the workforce?</p>

<p><b>JD:</b> We already have data on this and we have done several things.  The first part involved making it available through an Internet site to employees of the Department who had retired.  That´s actually been David´s baby so I will let him come back to that.  The second was done last autumn.  This spring we made it available in a parallel Internet site to family members of the members of The Foreign Service at The State Department who are serving overseas as well as such family members who are domestic in United States. </p>

<p>The theory behind both of these really was that The Head of Personnel in the Department believed the department should have access to ideally all of the talents and abilities of the larger State Department family.  Now it´s true that retired employees and family members cannot be made to go anywhere they do not want to go, but if they take the time and have the interest to complete this survey, they at least have some potential interest in that they know what it´s for and can be asked if they are interested in going.  Retirees, as David can explain, can be rehired under very specific provisions of law and family members also.  There are various kinds of mechanisms that we can hire people on for short term assignments. </p>

<p>We haven´t had to do this yet for family members, but this conceivably could be.  Right now it´s only extended to family members who are American citizens because direct hire employees in the department must be American citizens.  Of course some family members have foreign born spouses who are not naturalized citizens of the U.S., but you could have a family member who has a very high facility in the language in a country that you need.  Where you might not have employees who have a high enough facility to do the work is in a crisis situation, you might also have a family member who had served for instance in a consular section overseas, and is extremely familiar with processing refugee visas.  That could be a very significant assistance in case of some crisis overseas and we would need that kind of skill on a temporary basis.  One point under consideration, but there has been no final determination made on this - is potentially  opening  up an EP to our local employees, who are mostly overseas at our missions and our embassies.</p>

<p><b>DD:  There are about 38,000 employees overseas thatare local staff.</b></p>

<p><b>JD: </b> Local staff, also especially importantly would be for training purposes if we had to send people, for instance if we were going to open an embassy somewhere.  You may have read in the paper that we just opened full diplomatic relationship with Libya yesterday.  I don´t know that this would happen and I am just making this up, but it´s possible that, for instance there are local employees at our embassy in Cairo who have the skills and ability to train new employees that we would hire at out embassy in Tripoli.  That is a function that could probably be used if we extended it to local employees.  I will let David come back to the part about retirees.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b> I would emphasize that when you look at your workforce--and this is really a workforce management tool--you need to look at the totality of the workforce, and the totality of the skills.  There are two driving forces here in the application.  You have all heard and talked about the baby-boom generation and the imminent increase in retirements.  One of the things that we were looking at here was, how can we maximize the skills and abilities that we have in Department? Where are those skills and abilities, and how can we reach out to all the segments of our workforce to accomplish our mission objectives? It seems like a contradiction to say that you are going to look at retirees as a workforce asset and we thought that we probably ought to ban the word retirement because certainly from my perch here no one is retiring, it´s simply a transition. </p>

<p>This application is turning out to be a real winner for retirees and big boon to us.  It basically permits someone walking out of the door to say "you know of all the things that I have done in the past 30 years, I really liked subject X the best, and I really know how to do subject Y the best," so, that´s what I am going to tell you.  I am going to tell you that I like to speak Arabic and I like to work in Arab countries or I am a transportation expert.  Retirees have a segment as they walk out the door; in their web application we call it EP for retiring employees.  They can say what they want to say as they walk out the door.  That information has been married up to the corporate database. It becomes their permanent record and then retirees have access, as John mentioned, through the website, and they can change and fiddle with whatever they want as often as they want, as many times a day as they want to say what they want to say about themselves and basically direct their retirement.  We suddenly now have this huge pool of expertise to draw on, and in conjunction with the establishment of a new office in the Department called the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, we are able to draw on that retiree database to find experts to assist us in solving specific employment problems. I also want to say something about the trailing spouse issue.  This is a long-term problem for the Department and one that we share with corporations working overseas and in a dual career world that we live in.  This is something I think that all corporations and businesses need to address. </p>

<p>EP has proven to be not the solution to that problem, but certainly a vehicle for helping to address it.  We have opened this application to dependents, what we call Eligible Family Members, and again it has opened the eyes of Department management to the sources of expertise, skills, and competencies that exist in that particular universe.  We now have the ability to go find these people, either working overseas or to ask them if they want to take a job, if they are overseas in a specific location.  There is a psychological healing element to this and I can´t emphasize to you enough how much of a community this application has created, employees, retirees, spouses, dependents, eligible family members, locally employed staff all together for the first time in a single database.  This did not exist before and so there is sort of a psychological factor at work here.  The whole workforce knows they have the ability to state their case through EP , and it´s really boosted morale tremendously at the department.  I think that´s one of the reasons why we are having such success with the application. </p>

<p>There was some sentiment at the beginning when Department management saw this as we had created it to make it mandatory, and to require that everyone fill this out.  Those of us who were involved in the creation of this said, let´s try it on a voluntary basis first and let the people take ownership of it. What we had seen in the past made us hesitate about making it mandatory.  It certainly has taken hold and I think that´s one of the reasons why it has been so successful for us.</p>

<p><b>AM:  For an organization that was considering going this route, what types of resources do you suggest they need to apply to this type of initiative?</b></p>

<p><b>DD:</b>  Not a lot, I think that´s the answer.</p>

<p><b>JL: </b> It´s a lot of work.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b> John is looking at me, it´s a lot of work.</p>

<p><b>JL:</b> That kind of resource is important to us.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b>Yes, you get a few hardcore folks who are really willing to make this happen and have a mandate from management to make this happen.  If you have a hard core you can make this happen.   The development cost was only $136,000 to create the plus side of EP.  To layer this on top of the corporate database was basically the IT side.  That doesn´t include John´s cost or my cost or the handful of us that actually wrote the Competency Dictionary or sat there and tried to describe to the IT staff what it we were trying to accomplish and to come up with the vision.  There are COTS solutions out there and you can go to a contractor and they can come in and do this for you.  There are a couple of U.S. government agencies that have tried that particular approach, but I would say, keep it simple, keep it small, keep it focused, and be very linked to the mission objectives and keep in mind the purpose. </p>

<p>As I said at the beginning of our broadcast here today, there was a Best Practices study done in 2003 on Expertise Locator Systems, several large corporations participated in that, and shared their experience and there is a lot of variance between Expertise Locator Systems.  To be honest with you ours has been one of the more successful and the reason is it is very focused.  We were very pleased and proud to receive the 2005 Presidential Quality Award for this application.   Josh Bolton who is now the Chief of Staff to the President presented the award to us, and held up the application as a model for the executive branch.  He has encouraged other executive branch agencies to follow suit and basically take the model that we have laid out and apply it at the other executive branch agencies.  The model is basically to take this front end link it up to your back end, to your corporate database, figure out what your mission objectives are, and then reach out to your workforce and get them to buy into it.</p>

<p><b>AM:  What lessons learned would you pass along?</b></p>

<p><b>JL: </b> First of all I think it´s very important that it be a collaborative effort, between basically your policy people.  Not policy in the sense of both the policy people who run your firm because  they basically  have to decide what they are looking for, but the HR policy side in terms of developing the competencies and the framework, and the implementing side, which are the technical people who actually have to make it work.  That was very important, we kind of realized that from the beginning, and that´s the only reason we are sitting here today able to say that it actually happened.  The second thing is that it needs to be flexible.  It was designed for a very specific purpose, but also it was built to allow for a way that it could be expanded with knowledge, for knowledge that it might be used for something else in a way that it could be both expanded and applied in different ways that might not be completely unforeseen at the time. </p>

<p>The other thing which is actually something that I think David feels strongly about was that, you know what we really found through this whole process is that there is what David calls a goldmine of basically untapped data out there that is important to management.  It was only because we had a particular need that we eventually stumbled on the fact that there is always useful HR information out there which is not presently incorporated in any profitable way which management could draw on.  I think that´s the main three kinds of messages that we want to leave people with and the three basic thoughts to leave for the future.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b> In terms of controlling business costs, in controlling employee costs, today if someone came to me and said we need to have this sort of expertise and I want to go out and hire this sort of a person, my first response might be "how do you know we don´t have that already, where would we look to see if we had that capability?"  That´s one of the things as John mentioned--we really have taken the blinders off the workforce here.  We know our workforce to the nth degree at this point, at least insofar as what employees want to tell us about themselves.  This is money in the bank, because that´s motivation, this is what drives people; this is what gets them up in the morning and gets them going.  They have told us that, they have shared that information with us and so we need to be able to respond to that willingness that employees have shown, the contribution that they want to make. </p>

<p>I would add to what John said; for me the keyword is simple, do not make a complex system.  Keep it very simple, keep it very user friendly.  Do not overload your dictionary and keep it very mission focused.  Given what we have done, and we have accomplished, any number of objectives and certainly as the hurricane season approaches again, I would say with no hesitation whatsoever that the Department of State is ready.  Our forte and where we are supposed to be focused is on assisting overseas with international crisis, international disasters including natural disasters, but we are ready to help here at home, and we certainly stepped up to the plate during Hurricane Katrina and The Department of State is ready to do so again.  We basically can respond within an hour. We are ready to go, and I think we know where our talent lies and what our capabilities are, and that´s something that before this application was in place I couldn´t say with any degree of surety.</p>

<p><b>JL: </b> I have something that I had meant to say and forgot to mention.  The program as it exists now, because it was developed internally and paid for by the US government is only available to other federal agencies of the US government, so, it´s not available for transfer to the private sector.   The ideas that we have talked about are freely utilizable by the private sector, but the actual application itself is not.</p>

<p><b>DD: </b> The methodology is freely available and we are happy to talk to folks about it and to share our experience and to fully explain how it works.   The Plus side of EP that we developed in-house we are happy to share with any of the executive branch agencies.  Our hope is that we can spread this all the way down to state, county and local governments.   Certainly it would be nice if there is another Hurricane Katrina type event, if we are all able to pull together in a more effective way and if we know where that expertise resides.  So, local governments, county governments, state government can match up with the information coming from the federal level and everyone knows what everyone´s capability is and where that capability resides and if they were to reach out could tap it very quickly.</p>