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Web and IT Efficiency David Hebert: OK, we're going to go ahead
and get started with our third session, Web and IT Efficiencies. For folks that settle
in for this discussion, I expect it to be fairly quiet. I'm sure there are not questions
about any migrations to email systems or anything like that, so we'll move through this quickly.
Up on the stage we have our ELT host for this session, Bill Werkheiser. Then we have Tim
Woods, who's heading up the Web Re- Engineering effort. Rich Frazier, who heads up our IT
functions at the bureau. I apologize for not having your exact title, Rich. Then Paul Exter,
who also heads up the IT functions working with Rich.
Don't think we have anything queued up in the chat yet. Do folks in the room have questions
about any of these issues or related issues? Question 1:Are you going to be providing some
sort of tool kit for the web... [audio cuts]: ...to incorporate the analytics needed for
both DOI and USGS, because I've looked on the web pages. I can't see them anywhere.
The same is through the ForeSee metrics. Tim Woods: Sure. Starting today, we've updated
the memo so that they would pull that up on the blog. There's a link to a SharePoint site,
an internal website, which houses the code that we would like everybody to implement.
I should say that's required for everyone to implement on every single .gov web page
that is public facing. On that website we're asking people to fill out a simple registration
so we can update the information in the web hosting application registry, just to make
sure it's correct. If there's a change in the point of contact, or whatever, we can
get in touch with you come deadline time if you haven't complied.
The code is very simple. It's one line, just added. On the 15th of January, we are going
to start scanning all USGS websites for compliance with this. The White House, or I should say
GSA, is going to begin looking at all agencies, sub agencies and bureaus starting January
23rd compliance with this activity. The goal here is very simple with the theme
that we've been talking about, the ACES and producing space, and so on and so forth. The
White House put out a strategy in May, and ultimately they're looking at the same thing
for the web. They're trying to figure out how is the web being used? Are we meeting
our customer service mandates set forth? They're trying to get a handle on it.
USGS is going to ride the coattails of the White House digital strategy. We're going
to collect the analytics as well so we understand what's being reported up the chain. We can
be prepared for whatever comes down and/or help improve the web and make it better.
David Hebert: I think I mentioned, I just want to tell folks how to get here real quick.
This is a News Item a reposting of a memo from Suzette. You can get to it in the USGS
news section in the lower left corner of @TheCore or by going to that current issues site I
mentioned and clicking the "Web and IT Efficiency Tab." You scroll down three items, and here
it is. As Tim mentioned, it includes a link to the process, and some of the background
information and that sort of thing. Bill: Dave, let me just give a little bit
of context for the effort. Here, this is Bill Werkheiser. The web re engineering team, which
is headed by Tim Woods here, started a year and a half ago I guess now. The reason it
started was that the USGS was an early adopter of the web back in the early 90's, I guess.
But we tend to treat our web presence as an ancillary activity or something that's extra,
or added on. As the web changed and our reliance on the web changed, it's now one of our core
functions, one of our core ways of disseminating information. We're getting reports that while
our content was of high value to our customers, we weren't getting such high marks on things
like navigation and search within the web. The web re engineering team was formed to
really get us back on the forefront of having a good web presence to get our information
out to the people that needed the information in a very easy and useful way.
Well then, after we got started, we were overtaken by events, and some of the things we're talking
about now, like the analytics, are a requirement all agencies in the government have to comply
with. Under the theme of, "No good deed goes unpunished," we gave Tim's team the responsibility
for implementing those requirements. [pause]
Bill: Yes, in the back? Annie: I work with an inter agency working
group that catalogs the USGS websites and content. It's science.gov, and USGS is a member
of science.gov. In some of our searching for putting information on the web to give more
presence and more visitations to USGS web pages, we've discovered that there are a lot
of pages that are orphaned and still up. Not being updated. While we really appreciate
that it's really important to have a uniform web presence and the analytics be up to date
and uniform, what is being done... In many cases, people have retired and they don't
even know that they have those pages on the web. Is there anything that we can do to help
the directors and the different parts of USGS? Because we've got so many different web pages.
Is there something that's being done within the web re engineering to help us retire our
older and not maintained content? Tim Woods: Thanks for that question, Annie.
This is Tim Woods again. We're not specifically addressing the issue of turning off web pages,
per se. Although it is a giant issue here at USGS and we recognize that. We are putting
things in place as we transition into the second year to begin to extensively inventory
the web that we have out there. One of the results of that will be finding these orphaned
web pages. We're developing the requirements of, "Well, what is an orphaned web page?"
Maybe it's a page that hasn't been updated since 1997. Things like that. Which, those
types of web pages do exist? From that, we will make recommendations on how to proceed.
There is bureau policy on archiving the web. You know, part of the mandate for doing the
web here at USGS is to make sure that our information is up to date, timely, accurate,
so on and so forth. It's part of us to help figure out how big the problem is, but it's
also everybody's responsibility who does a website to make sure that those things are
taken care of, they are updated, they are timely. I think everyone here would appreciate
people to be good stewards of the web and deactivate these things, archive them appropriately,
but deactivate them as you see fit. Bil: Tim, can you talk a little bit about
the USGS web presence compared to other DOI agencies?
Tim: We have customer service satisfaction scores that come in on a quarterly basis from
a company called ForeSee. I'm sure you've seen that activity on our site and/or other
popular websites like BestBuy or Amazon.com and things like that. Our scores continually
come in low. We are in the mid 60 percentile. These scores have to do with, as Bill mentioned
earlier, how does our search engine and/or work? How do people find things within the
web? How do people navigate from one page to the next? How good is the content of our
web? How does it function? So on and so forth. In all of those areas, we continually rate
very, very low compared to other activities. We can compare to a lot, like NASA, Department
of Energy or the EPA. We rate below those guys.
What we've been working on this first year in web re engineering is, "How can we improve
those scores?" A lot of the products and recommendations that we're coming up with are just starting
to wrap up, and we'll be announcing those probably in the beginning of the next calendar
year, but with the goal to raise our customer service satisfaction scores in the areas of
navigation, search. We know search is a really under performing
activity here, along with the overall functionality web pages, and the way people navigate and
traverse the vast expanse of information we have.
Barbara Wayman: Tim, getting back to the abandoned or orphaned website, would it be
fair to say that some of the governance we're looking as part of this web re engineering
would provide the authority and the direction to managers to take down those sites? We will
be looking at some tools to tell people to do it. We won't necessarily be doing it all,
but I think there will be some impetus to help people do the right thing in that regard.
Tim: Yes, absolutely. Man 1: That was Barbara Wayman, by the way.
Barbara: Oh, sorry. Tim: You know, part of the things that we're
looking is governance. How do we control the web? How do we advise and tell people to do
things? The question keeps coming up to us in this past year, "How do I archive my website?
What is the appropriate way to do that? We've looked and looked, and we've had a really
hard time finding the correct information. What is the policy to do this? We're working
to correct that with the various people who are in charge of policy to make sure that
gets updated, number one, and number two, gets communicated out. We're also working
on looking at the way the weather's governed, of course, working with the grocery shop and
everybody in there and other groups to come up with the proper ways to communicate, "It's
time to take this down," or, "If you don't take it down, we'll take it down."
We have to make sure we do this in a methodical, tracked process, not just [indecipherable
11:55] who are getting some kind of legal issue.
David Hebert: Let me get one from the chat here real quick. I'm getting an awful lot
of web engineering, but I want to ask Rich and Paul if you could address a couple about
the migration. Could we get the general impression on the migration across SurveyHouse going,
and is there a timeframe for converting group calendars to the new system?
Paul Exter: The migration started December 3rd for the USGS, as well as some of the other
bureaus of interior. As of this morning, Monday, we had roughly 11,000 mailboxes migrated to
Google. We have about 13,000 to 14,000 mailboxes, and mailboxes don't necessarily include people,
so we're above our population number. We're at about 12,000 mailboxes migrated. We have
about 1,000 to 1,500 to go, and we have a few mailboxes that have errors in their migration.
You may be one of them who did not have a Google account or who did not have an Active
Directory account. We have about 1,500, also, mailboxes we have to address.
We're in that timeframe of being done. We have the rest of this week, December 10th
through the end of Friday, to work on those who have not been migrated and the migration
issues. Next week we're going to work on mailboxes
that aren't people. They're called drop boxes and Lotus. Many of our missionaries have drop
boxes. Next week's our drop box migration, and then we have the holiday break. Then the
week after that we're going to start working on archives.
So, by the first of January approximately, we'll start working with all the individual
users across the USGS who have archives and the directions to migrate those archives to
Google Mail. After we get done with achieves, we're going
to address applications that have their links into our Lotus infrastructure, and then after
applications we're going to address mission applications which have a more critical need
for application into our Lotus infrastructure. That's our path forward up until about the
second or third week of January. We're continuing to work with the department on some of the
issues or differences in the Google Apps for government solution, as opposed to what we
had today in Lotus, and we're working...One of our hottest issues is the spam folder and
groups, so we're continuing working with the department on our groups and how we use groups
in USGS. David Hebert: Thank you, Paul. In the back
of the room. Question 2: Hi, I've got a couple of questions
that relate to the January 15th deadline. My first question is, do you really mean all
public facing URLs? Many of our URLs are generated by programs. There's going to be a significant
reprogramming effort that's going to have to be done in order to accomplish that, which
can't be done by the 15th of January because it's too large an effort.
My question is, where do resources come from to do that?
Thirdly, my last question is, this notification came from the deputy director directly to
web managers, not to our center director, not to our managers, who are the people who
can allocate resources and schedule people to do these tasks. Why doesn't such notification
come to them so they can help us get the resources to do this?
Tim: This is Tim once again, so I'll work backwards, your third question, the notification.
The notifications, the emails, the memo that was sent out too, worked off of the web hosting
application registry tool. For those of you who don't know, there's a tool that everybody's
supposed to register their website or web application in, and it collects things like
email address. So, we got a report out of that, and that's really contacted because
we felt those are the people who are in power to make this change.
The second question about the resources, that's upon you guys. You guys are the owners, managers,
operators of these websites, and it is up to you. If you're going to run a website that
you run into the [indecipherable 16:22] dictated by laws and policy and ultimately the White
House. The first question, yes. All websites that
are public facing that have a .gov domain are required. There are 607 sub domains underneath
34 top level domains at USGS, so that's 637 websites are going to have to comply, which
equals millions upon millions of web pages. It's estimated that's how large the USGS web
footprint is. We realize that the 15th, not everybody's
going to have this. At this time, there is no waiver process. The GSA has not said there's
a waiver that anybody can file. However, that's why we're going to start looking at all the
websites and scanning to see who's got a gun. For some people, it should be pretty easy.
For others, obviously it's going to be more complicated.
We will be contacting you and talking to you and coming to understand what is a reasonable
timeline that you think you can comply with this effort.
So, that's not a waiver, but it is a way to circumvent the deadline. There is an email
address that is on all the material listed about this activity. Feel free to reach out
to that email address with your problems, and we will be in contact to help you get
through the situation. Question 3: I have a follow up on the very
last of my questions about the notifications. This is a more general problem than just notification
about this particular unreasonable deadline. There are other notifications that come from
Paul and from other places. There were some very notable ones that came from the CIO down
at the department, directly to employees saying to do things. The question is, how are these
IT related requests for action connected to our line manager?
Bill: I'll take a stab at that, and then I'll turn it over to Rich to follow up. [laughter]
I've talked specially about the notifications that came from the department CIO. We recognize
that that was not a great process to use to notify our staff. We heard it loud and clear.
There are frequent meetings of what's called the deputy's operating group that Suzette
sits on, and there's a group specifically to look at the IT transformation. So it includes
Suzette, myself, and Rich, who are on that group.
All the bureaus made a request to the CIO, to Andrew, Jackson, and Taria Sue that we
no longer have those blanket emails for those policy type memos. I think since that time
there's been a pretty decent effort to follow the chain of command to get that information
out. Now, I've seen some efforts where it's not
followed exactly. But I think in general there's been a change in making sure that at least
the line management is notified of these requests and these actions.
Rich Frazier: First I'll be very careful when I say, because we are hosting a CIO organization
right down the hall here. All that noise here was Andrew, Jackson, and others coming in
talking about some of these issues that we've conveyed to them. As Bill mentioned, we've
been strong advocates on your behalf recognizing that some of these deadlines are unrealistic.
It's very challenging to move the organization in many ways when these challenges come up,
like the web pages, like the ITV 6, like the messaging.
We generally don't have a lot of control over that. Sometimes a department doesn't have
control over that. They are OMB mandates or they are administration mandates. And we try
to work within the confines of those requirements to the best of our ability. We generally ask
for best effort to resolve those problems as much as possible.
We do try to work with you all when these challenges come up if there are some problems
that you have in terms of being able to complete these actions timely. If people reach out
to us then our organization will do everything we can to help you and try to help you resolve
those in the most efficient way we can and/or go back to the department and ask for some
relief there, as much as possible, in terms of waivers and so forth.
We've been very successful in doing that where we can provide a really good justification
for doing that. We are happy to champion that as much as we possibly can going forward,
as well. Barbara: [inaudible 0:21:13]
Man 1: That's right. Suzette: And a little bit more on that.
We have over the past year, year and a half been having regular sessions for the ALP,
special session on both web reengineering and IT transformation. That doesn't mean that
the principles are necessarily always there but the intent is that that's the means for
transmitting these kind of requirements that we know are going to be coming down the road
at some point or another. In this particular case, what we weren't sure of is whether or
not that message had gotten out to all the people that had to implement that on because
oftentimes some of these large umbrella requirements that come out as part of an ALP special session
or a meeting around what we call director staff, when the ALP gets together on Tuesdays
on a regular basis don't always, at least so we've been told, don't always translate
down through the system. Usually on these memos when we send it out
to someone who's not the line management we copy the regional offices. I don't know if
this one did or not. If it didn't, my apologies, and we'll try and be more careful in reviewing
and editing double checking to make sure that it does.
But in this particularly case there should have been a heads up quite some time ago about
these requirements coming in down the road, not necessarily the cost associated with it,
and I'm not sure we know the costs. I think that's going to be the kind of information
that comes up from these gentlemen working directly with the people who actually have
to implement this particular requirement. I appreciate the input, and to keep this honest
is let us know when we haven't got it through the chain of command. Sometimes we send it
out expecting that it permeates the [indecipherable 23:26] for me it's the organization, and it
doesn't. Sometimes it turns out that it goes the other way that we expect that we've sent
it to a few people and it goes viral, but in any case let us know when we're not living
up to those expectations. Thanks. David Hebert: If I could add real quick
we're also working on...we're sort of in the midst of testing some tools and processes
that allow information to be shared more directly with center directors. We realize that we
have a breakdown in communication sometimes between headquarters and centers, and we're
working on some things to make that...to address that breakdown. So, hopefully, this will alleviate
this very issue down the road. OK, we've had a lot of questions on the chat that have not
been addressed yet, and I'm going to try and sort of package them together, both on the
web re engineering front and the IT transformation unified messaging front.
Ted in the next five minutes well, in the next two and a half minutes or so could you
try to give us a break down when we plan to release some of the products that have been
discussed, if there's going to be follow up training, whether we're looking at sort of
a decentralization or centralization of web, or I should say a centralization since we're
already at the other end of that spectrum? And one specific question, regional sites,
we're planning to stand up regional sites now that the realignment is final.
Tim: So very quickly we wanted to have a town hall specifically to deal with web re
engineering and the mobile framework, but with scheduling in this town hall we got merged
into this one and realized there's a lot of information to cover, and we have a lot of
things that we want to talk to you about. So we're looking at the calendar, and our
backs are up against the wall now with the holidays are almost here. We plan on scheduling
some more, maybe not a big town hall like this, but brown bag type web access where
people can come, but we want to go through the products that we're going to be delivering
very soon and also lay out the road map for what web engineering should try to accomplish
in this past first year and then the subsequent years that we're going down.
Guidance on new regional websites I haven't been given any guidance so I hesitate to give
out any guidance on developing those. All I know is that no new domain names so people
have to work within those confines. What other points were there?
David Hebert: When we're rolling things out you talked about a town hall or brown
bags training. Tim: Training...training is going to be
probably rolled out after the brown bags. Every time we release a product like this
analytics thing there is some minimal instruction with that, and we would like to have a brown
bag before the holidays to kind of go over that and address any kind of technical concerns.
We have been testing that code for a couple weeks now, and it really hasn't caused any
problems. We have direct contact with GSA and their developers to work through any issues
should they arise, but people have been having a lot of success with employing this.
One product that we're going to release very soon is a search engine optimization guideline
and checklist. One way to fix search around here is for everybody to fix search inside
of their pages, that meaning the way things are coded, meta tags that included, so on
and so forth. The technology can only do so much. If the
page is illegible to a search engine then the page is illegible. So we're going to announce
that very soon, and then we'll have a whole host of other things to talk about beginning
of the new year. David Hebert: Question in the back of the
room. Question 4: Just a question on what you're
going to do with a web re engineering spat. So part of the people with whom I work were
part of some test team, and they did test packages, and they sent them to whoever they
were supposed to send them to. If I ask for a copy of them, because I think it would help
us give feedback on how well our program delivers our science, and it was explained to me, well,
no, the program can't get the statistics. In fact, it's not clear that USGS is going
to get the statistics. In fact, it's not clear if anybody other than
GSA is going to get the statistics, and nobody seems to know what they're going to do with
them. And so other than wrap them up at the departmental CIO Christmas party, what are
you doing with these statistics, and why can't he programs use data to improve their delivery
capabilities? Tim: So you're very right. We don't know
what GSA and/or the CIO, the White House plans to do with all the metrics that they collect
from the entire federal government. However, here at USGS we plan to share the information,
and we are working on developing some standardized reports. We hope to also offer ad hoc custom
reports so people can do campaign management type activities with their websites. If you're
releasing a new product or whatever it is, we'd like to be able to work with you to be
able to understand the traffic that your release of your new product has generated and how
we can potentially steer more traffic to your site or your new product.
It's going to be a lot of data that we're going to collect, and we have to make sure
that the data is disseminated in an appropriate manner. I think it's probably going to be
a few months after the implementation deadline that we come forward with these standardized
reports. We want to make sure that the information
gets out there, but also in a responsible manner, because a lot of websites here function
and do different things. They have different targets, and they have different goals, and
it's not comparing apples to apples. We have a lot of apples, and oranges, and bananas,
and grapefruits so we have to be careful how that information is disseminated, but it is
our intent to get it out to you guys as soon as we possibly can.
David Hebert All right. I'm going to have to cut it short here. I appreciate your input.
Paul, Rich, I'm sure if you want to mingle, people will have plenty to ask you about IT
transformation and unified messaging. At 3:20 we will begin our discussion on the future
of our science, with Marcia.
Transcription by CastingWords p.