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

Our transformation program was aided significantly by the release in 2004 of a major study of federal printing and publishing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress's watchdog agency, in which we participated. Fundamentally, the GAO stressed that GPO should envision itself as a disseminator of information and place greater emphasis on direct electronic dissemination methods as our primary goal, rather than printing.

The GAO's confirmation of our approach laid the groundwork for the release of our Strategic Vision for the 21st Century in December 2004. Based on months of discussions with Congress, our customer agencies, the library and information communities, the printing industry, our employee representatives, and others, the vision is a road map of where GPO needs to go in order to fully embrace the technology capabilities of the twenty-first century in the coming years.

Creating a New Digital Platform

Today, our strategic vision forms the core of our management operations. All policies and procedures--including budgeting and capital investments, workforce development, hiring and promotions, industry partnerships, customer relations, operational decision making, and related actions--are tied to it.

The core of our future operations will revolve around a GPO-developed Future Digital System, which we're currently calling FDsys, that is being designed to organize, manage, and output authenticated content for any purpose. This system will ingest into a central repository all the public information of the government and reduce that information to a common denominator, which means having a uniform character set and coding structure for the data. This system will preserve the content independent of specific hardware or software so that it can be migrated forward for the benefit of future generations.

Eventually, all known federal documents, whether printed or born digital, produced both prospectively and retrospectively, will be cataloged and authenticated and then entered into the system according to GPO metadata and document creation standards. Content may include text and associated graphics, video and sound, and other requirements that may come to be. Content, which may be stored at various quality levels, will be available for Web searching and Internet viewing, downloading and printing, and as document masters for conventional and demand printing, or other digital requirements.

This strategic goal took a significant leap forward last month with the award of a contract to Harris Corporation for master integrator services to guide the planning and acquisition of the FDsys component system. This partnership represents the culmination of careful analysis and planning to specify our system requirements, and it marks a major milestone as we forge ahead to develop a robust and flexible digital platform that will provide permanent public access to information from all three branches of the federal government.

Refocusing Customer Services

For our customers in federal agencies, we're continuing to provide traditional printed products through private-sector vendors, using GPO's experience and buying power to create the best value for taxpayers. However, we're working with them more cooperatively, offering them more flexibility in choosing and working directly with vendors, especially with small-value purchases and complex purchases involving multiple functions such as data preparation, personalization, and distribution.