A printer makes his mark: GPO has been transformed, thanks to the indelible leadership of Bruce James

Public Manager, The, Spring, 2007 by Carl A. Fillichio

* What's the best way to go about making legacy information content--the content now stored in millions of printed government documents housed in library and agency collections nationwide--digitally available?

* Now that information content is easily separated from the form and format in which it can be delivered, what kind of system can be developed that most efficiently permits content to be repurposed?

* In the vastly decentralized information marketplace that the government has become, how do we create a system for capturing that information for convenient and effective public access?

To be sure, GPO already had considerable experience with electronic technology when I arrived. The agency had successfully navigated the transition from hot metal to computerized typesetting in the 1960s and 1970s with little if any of the strife that accompanied that change elsewhere in the industry, and in fact up to and beyond that era it continued to be known as a technological leader. And in the early 1990s GPO set up one of the government's earliest and most comprehensive Web sites, GPO Access, which achieved considerable acclaim.

But subsequently the agency fell behind the pace of digital technology innovation. This was due to a variety of factors. For example, there was a period in which GPO's future status was being debated intensely, which led to a decrease in investments pending the resolution of that question.

But there was also the absence of a comprehensive vision of GPO's future in a digital environment. Fundamentally, GPO hadn't been organized around a digital platform. The agency didn't have a good concept of what that digital platform would look like, and as a result the questions and challenges posed by the digital transformation were left only partly resolved. The print-centric culture of the agency, which had served printing well, was not well suited to moving the agency forward in the digital era. Even where GPO's digital activities were concerned, we were putting data in typesetting codes and formatting the data as replicas of the printed page.

Moreover, the print-centric culture of the agency imposed recurring costs on the taxpayers that weren't necessary. From product categories to equipment profile, from workforce skill sets to even the structure of the building itself, GPO's ability to transform to modern digital platform was burdened by a cost structure dictated by technologies and systems from the previous era, resulting in a continuing series of financial losses and impeding the ability to make the critical investments in technology and personnel to move the agency forward and solve the problems presented by the digital environment.

Restoring GPO's Finances and Organization

To build the foundation for our digital transformation, we first put GPO's operations back on a business-like basis, both organizationally and financially. Relying on best practices found throughout the private sector, we carried out a broad reorganization to redirect GPO's management and instill a new focus on preparing for the future, bringing in experts from the outside and refocusing GPO veterans from the inside on our new direction.