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

We reorganized our customer service unit to include teams of individuals assigned to specific departments and agencies. These teams are providing conventional printing support and are available to work with program managers in planning the best solutions to their information dissemination needs, such as content development, graphic design, Web site design and hosting, rich media, and print-on-demand.

Last year we augmented our expert printing procurement services by partnering with FedEx/Kinko's to provide innovative new convenience duplicating and printing services to federal agencies across the country. This contracting mechanism features provisions for capturing federal documents electronically, which will significantly assist our efforts to broaden the availability of federal information for public access and reduce the incidence of "fugitive documents"--documents that belong in the Federal Depository Library Program but which don't get included, frequently because of printing performed outside GPO programs. We also significantly increased the dollar limit on our popular simplified purchase agreements, expanding and simplifying the ability of federal agencies to procure products and services directly from lists of prequalified vendors without first having to go through GPO.

Investing in Modern Plant Capabilities

Our internal production capabilities will be focused in support of the official journals of government, including the Congressional Record and Federal Register, Congress's requirements, and security and intelligent documents. We will engineer a new, more flexible and cost-efficient printing platform for these documents in conjunction with the move to new facilities.

To improve plant production efficiency and broaden the range of product and service options for Congress and federal agencies, since 2003 we've invested in a variety of new color and digital production technologies. The product offerings that have become possible with this equipment can lead to significant future savings for Congress and other customers of our plant production services. We've also retooled our preproduction digital design services and relocated them to enhanced facilities to provide improved services to our customers.

Providing Security and Intelligent Documents

Security and intelligent documents--including passports, federal identification cards, and potentially other documents--will be a growing and increasingly important business line for GPO, perhaps as much as 50 percent of GPO's business in the future. There are new statutory requirements for these documents in the recently passed legislation that GPO is working to implement. And from our standpoint, there are certain digital technology synergies that can be brought to bear to improve the security of these important documents.

We created a new business line for security and intelligent documents in 2005 that consolidates our longstanding expertise in security documents and offers a broad range of consultative services to the Congress and federal agencies attempting to respond to new standards and statutory requirements in this area. An early product of the unit was the security printing requested by the Joint Congressional Committee on the Inauguration to support the first Presidential inaugural ceremonies since 9/11, in January 2005.