Mr. Chairman, Congresswoman Millender-McDonald, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to testify about the vision for the future of technology in the House of Representatives and the next steps for attaining the vision.  My colleague, Kathy Goldschmidt of the Congressional Management Foundation, has already provided you with the background for this project and the results of our research on the current state of technology in the House.  What I would like to focus on now is the vision for technology over the next decade which we helped the House develop as well as the work we have done since – and which we are continuing to do – to help guide the House in attaining its vision.

1.  To-Be Vision Roundtable Discussions

Using the results of the current state research, the project team identified possible visions to guide House technology adoption over the next ten years and developed a process to vet these visions with different groups of House stakeholders and agree on a common vision for technology in the House in the future. 

Between January and July of 2005, Gartner and CMF facilitated six roundtable discussions with high-level House stakeholders.  The discussions involved Members from committees responsible for management and oversight of the House, leadership Staff Directors, House officers and legislative branch officials, committee Staff Directors, Member office Chiefs of Staff, and high-level House and legislative branch technology administrators.  In a series of meetings, these groups addressed a range of issues related to House culture, policy, process, and technology adoption. 

The first four of the roundtables were conducted as a unit.  Separate discussions were held with three defined groups:  Member office Chiefs of Staff and Staff Directors; House officers and legislative branch officials; and House and legislative branch technology administrators.  Because each of these groups had different perspectives on House needs and operations, we convened a fourth roundtable with representatives from each group to reconcile the areas where their visions diverged.  Through this process, representatives from each group discussed their views and developed a vision on which the participants agreed.

The result of these four discussions was then taken to the Staff Directors of House leadership offices for review, discussion, and feedback.  Through this process, the vision was more finely honed and the challenges and opportunities were further defined.  This information was then presented to the Member group, which provided feedback and made decisions about key components of the vision.

Through this process, we identified visions for the five key House business functions:

1.      Legislative process:  The systems and processes that support the movement of a bill from concept to public law

2.      Institutional operational support:  The systems and processes that enable staff in institutional support organizations to provide their services to Members and staff

3.      Member office operations:  The systems and processes that enable Members’ personal staffs in Washington and the district to perform their responsibilities

4.      Member activities:  The systems and processes that enable individual Members to personally perform their duties and responsibilities

5.      Party organization:  The systems and processes that enable political party leaders and their organizations to perform their official duties within the House

These visions are presented below.  Each section provides brief background and context for the vision, describes the vision identified by the participants, and discusses the tradeoffs the House would have to make to attain the visions.

Legislative Process

Background

Integration of technology into the legislative process is currently compartmentalized.  Each organization involved – including the Office of Legislative Counsel, the Office of the Clerk of the House, committees, GPO, and the Office of Law Revision Counsel – is responsible for identifying, acquiring, and supporting technology to conduct its work.  Although they contribute to a single final product – public law – there is little coordination or standardization among them of processes, formats, or technologies.  In a paper-based environment this has little impact, since there are few benefits to greater coordination and standardization.  In an electronic, networked environment, however, significant benefits are now available.  To realize the benefits, however, the House must make significant changes.  Currently, the standards and coordination that does exist – such as that being employed by the Office of Legislative Counsel, the Office of the Clerk, GPO, and the Library of Congress – is implemented on a voluntary basis.  Organizations that do not voluntarily participate must be accommodated or worked around.  This significantly limits the potential for greater efficiency, effectiveness, and cost-savings.  It also severely limits the ability of the House to make the legislative process more effective by:  integrating technologies to simplify and expedite the legislative process; improving information access by Members and staff; and improving the production and publication of legislation, official documents, and public law.

The Vision

1.      During consideration in committee and on the House floor, Members should be able to see the specific changes amendments would make to bills and that bills would make to public law.  Currently, the affect of amendments on bills or of bills on public law can only be seen after they have passed and are included in committee or House report language.  Additionally, the Ramseyer Rule (which requires that committee reports document the changes proposed committee language would have on existing public law) is often waived because of the time and difficulty of complying with the rule.  As a result, the specific changes legislation will have on public law are unclear until well after the law has passed.  This leads to contradictions, conflicts and avoidable redundancies in public law.  To help limit these problems, the Office of Legislative Counsel is in the process of developing a system for their own use to automate the preparation of Ramseyers, but progress has been limited by budgetary constraints and the lack of timely compilations of public law.

2.      Members and staff should have timely access to updated U.S. Code after legislation is passed into law.  Currently, there is a one to two year delay after a given Congress before the U.S. Code – the official codification of U.S. public law – is updated to reflect changes made during that Congress.  As a result, new legislation – usually based on existing law – is drafted and considered without access to an updated official version of current public law.  This leads to contradictory and redundant legislation and confusing law.

3.      Members and staff should be able to access all bills in searchable electronic formats before they are considered on the House floor.  Although many bills are available in searchable electronic formats prior to consideration, many are not, including some key bills, such as appropriations bills.  As a result, Members and staff find it difficult to adequately review these bills prior to consideration.

4.      Members should have electronic access to relevant legislative information during committee and floor sessions.  Currently, Members do not have electronic access in chambers to any legislative information during committee markups or floor consideration of legislation.  As a result, Members must either have the relevant paper documents on hand or must consider, debate, and vote on bills and amendments without the benefit of legislative history, information about bills in other committees, the text of public law, or a variety of other resources that could influence their decisions.

5.      The House should automate the management and production of official legislative documents.  Currently, technology is used at every stage of the legislative process, but, for the most part, the systems are not integrated or coordinated among legislative organizations.  The Office of Legislative Counsel, the Clerk of the House, the Government Printing Office, and the Library of Congress have developed electronic standards that have enabled them to automate the management and production of most bills and amendments, but since committees are not using these standards, documents produced by committees cannot be automatically managed and produced.  Consequently, there are time-consuming and sometimes redundant administrative tasks that must be performed throughout the legislative process that could be eliminated if the House were to adopt uniform standards, systems or processes.  For example, the drafters of legislative documents (e.g. the attorneys in the Office of Legislative Counsel and committee clerks and stenographers from the Office of the Clerk of the House) must learn different document formats and processes for each committee.  Having to learn and apply more than a dozen different formats for legislative documents takes far more time and requires far more staff and training than it would if all committees used standard formats, systems, or processes.

6.      Electronic documents should be part of the official legislative record.  Currently, only paper documents serve as the official record for the House, although electronic documents are produced throughout the process.  This leads to discrepancies between the paper and electronic versions, as well as administrative burdens that could be reduced if electronic documents became part of the official record.  For example, the producers of legislative documents from the Office of the Clerk and the Government Printing Office must manually compare every official paper version of bills and amendments against electronic versions to ensure they match, and, when electronic versions are not available to them, they must retype entire documents prior to printing, which adds significant administrative time and effort to the production of documents.  Members expressed reservations about making electronic documents the official record, but senior staff viewed this as necessary.  As a result of this discrepancy, this component of the vision will require further discussion and clarification before the House develops an implementation plan for this capability.

The Tradeoffs

Attaining this vision will not be easy, but it would lead to significant benefits to the House, including:  enhancing Member and staff access to critical information on which to base legislative decisions; improving the flow and production of documents throughout the legislative process; facilitating easier and more user-friendly access, use, and collaboration on legislative documents; reducing the administrative workload and staff resources necessary to produce legislative documents; and reducing administrative and technical costs. 

Technologies already exist to attain the vision, but implementing them will require making difficult tradeoffs.  Making changes in this area can have unintended consequences on the legislative process and Member deliberation.  As a result, the real challenge for the House will be to carefully consider the benefits, weigh the tradeoffs, and identify the implications the changes will have on the legislative process before developing implementation plans and making large investments.  Attaining this vision would also require making changes to existing rules, policies, and practices to enable truly effective technologies and systems to be implemented.  These would potentially include:  changing how legislation is drafted; facilitating agreement among all House committees on standard processes and document formats; modifying House rules to allow for new processes and procedures; modifying the format, and possibly the content, of the U.S. Code; and preparing and training Members and staff to use and feel comfortable with the new systems and processes. 

Member Office Operations

Background

Each Member office independently acquires hardware, software, and vendors to support its operations, with some notable exceptions (e.g. anti-virus, central networks, e-mail, etc.).  This provides offices with the flexibility to choose what works best for them, but it also requires that each office devote significant effort and resources to managing these technical matters.  In addition, the financial and staff resources expended in aggregate by individual offices, the institution, and vendors to support this decentralized model are significant and could be greatly reduced if efforts were more coordinated.  Gartner estimates that the House currently pays 33.5% more for Member office hardware and software than a comparably-sized organization with centralized technical administration. 

The Vision

1. The House, as an institution, should bear the bulk of Member office technology expenses, minimizing the cost to individual offices in exchange for offices accepting new limitations.  Currently, each Member office must use its Member Representational Allowance (MRA) to acquire and support equipment, hardware, and software.  As a result, because individual Member offices are small, they cannot realize economies of scale that would come from bulk institutional purchases.
2. Systems administration services should be provided to Member offices by the House to free Member office staff of those duties.  Member offices currently hire or contract their own systems administration services.  In the House’s decentralized technology model, these staff are intended to be the primary technical support resources for Member offices.  However, many Member offices assign this position to staff without technical knowledge or training, which leaves their offices vulnerable to mismanagement, mistakes, inefficiencies, and security problems.  Additionally, there is often confusion and dispute among Member offices, technology vendors, and the House about who is responsible for solving problems that arise. 
3. The House should provide greater information access, service, and technical support to district offices.  The House currently provides basic technical service and support to district offices, including connecting main district offices to the House network and to Members’ Washington offices; providing technical training options on-demand; and providing Internet and e-mail access to staff in the primary district office.  The House also provides fee-based services to secondary district offices.  However, the House does not emphasize technical services and support for district offices to the same degree as to Washington offices, in part due to the expense and challenges associated with providing for and supporting remote offices throughout the country.
4. The House should provide greater assistance to Member offices in meeting constituent demands.  Currently, the House does not provide or support technological applications and services that support or facilitate interactions between Member offices and constituents, such as correspondence management systems, advanced Web services, or casework management systems.  For the most part, technical decisions related to these interactions have been left to individual Member offices to make.  This places offices in the position of identifying and acquiring necessary hardware, software, equipment, and expertise to support their efforts.  However, few offices can afford robust systems to support many-to-one and one-to-many communications and information sharing that could potentially be provided by the House as shared services.

The Tradeoffs

Attaining this vision would require the House to move to a more centralized technology service and support model.  This would relieve Member offices of most or all of the responsibility to research and acquire equipment and software and maintain and support the systems.  They would also likely realize cost savings through bulk purchase rates which would also enable the House, as an institution, to leverage greater control over vendor practices than can individual offices.  Additionally, centralizing technical support would increase the level of training and expertise of the staff providing the IT support services.

A more centralized model would also likely reduce the cost to the House of supporting the many systems and configurations currently in use, as well as reduce the House’s reliance on systems integrators and support vendors.  The greater diversity of systems and configurations in use in an organization, the more difficult and expensive it is to support them, since technical staff knowledgeable in the range of systems must be available.  This requires either a technical staff with significant and diverse training or a greater number of technical staff than would be necessary if fewer systems and configurations were in use.  Currently, this technical expertise is provided to Member offices mostly by vendors, who factor this diversity and training into their fees.  Standardizing on a smaller range of systems would reduce costs, as well as increase satisfaction with technical support, since technical staff would be trained to support the specific systems in use and could more quickly and easily identify and solve problems and replace faulty hardware and software. 

However, adopting a more centralized technology service model would reduce offices’ autonomy and flexibility to purchase the hardware, software, and service they want.  To maximize the benefits, the House would need to standardize systems and configurations or reduce the options from which to choose.  It would also possibly require offices to give up physical control – but not security or access control – over some of their data in order to realize the greatest security, cost, and service benefits from centralized services. 

A more centralized technology service model would also require modifications to the current technology budgeting structure.  Currently, each Member office purchases technology using its own MRA.  If technology service and support were to be more centralized, it would be necessary to modify budgets accordingly.  For example, it would be necessary to increase the budget of the office or organization providing the centralized services in order to fund the new responsibilities, purchases and services.  This could possibly occur by shifting funds from the MRAs to the central authority or through an increase in appropriations for the central authority without reducing the MRAs.

Institutional Operational Support

Background

In the House, technology support, planning, and decisions are made by each organization independently.  Each House office provides technologies and services to fulfill its role.  Currently, there is no institution-wide process for coordinating their decisions or establishing priorities and making strategic technology decisions for the House, as a whole.  As a result, there is generally little coordination of technology projects, objectives, and budgets at the institutional level, so efforts are sometimes in competition or conflict with one another, and sometimes efforts are duplicated.  This results in greater costs and fewer benefits to the House than would be realized if technology planning were coordinated at the institutional level. 

The Vision

1. Effectiveness, rather than efficiency, should be the primary objective of technology in the House.  The House does not currently have an overarching objective for technology adoption.  Some efforts are geared toward efficiency, others toward effectiveness, others still toward being as responsive as possible to the demands of individual Members and staff.  As a result of this lack of a primary objective, technology goals and strategies are often in conflict from organization to organization, and even, occasionally, within organizations.
2. The House should minimize the cost of technology to the institution.  Committees and institutional offices, like Member offices, each use their own budgets to purchase hardware and software and hire or contract technical support.  Because this model requires each office to be an independent actor, the House, as an institution, faces challenges in taking advantage of significant cost savings that could be realized through bulk purchases, shared system support, and shared services.
3. The House should assign formal jurisdiction for technology planning to a specific House organization or group.  There are some organizations – including the Office of the CAO, the Office of the Clerk, and CHA – with mandates that cover specific aspects of technology planning for the House, as an institution, but each has a limited jurisdiction.  There is not currently a single group or organization with formal jurisdiction over technology assessment and planning for the institution, as a whole.  Coordinated technology planning at the institutional level tends to occur only when crises arise, such as the Year 2000 conversion, 9/11, and the evacuations due to anthrax and ricin.
4. Members should be involved in making technology decisions that impact the entire House.  Although some Members are informally involved in some institutional technology decisions, the current operating principle for making these decisions is that they should be primarily left to staff.  There are few formal processes for involving Members in House technology planning, either to provide direction regarding priorities or to review and approve strategies.  While it is true that Members do not come to Congress to manage or plan technology and that the most precious resource in Congress is a Member’s time, efforts to change or improve how the House operates, as an institution, are likely to fail without approval or authority from Members.

The Tradeoffs

This vision is strongly linked with those for the Legislative Process and Member Office Operations.  To achieve them all, the House will likely need to move from the current decentralized technology adoption and decision-making model to a more centralized or coordinated model.  Working to achieve the visions will lay the groundwork for a process that will result in technology that is better targeted to the needs of Members and staff and more cost-effective to the institution.  Developing such a process will also enable the House to be more proactive in its selection and implementation of technology.  Rather than crises driving institutional technology decisions, the House will establish processes and authority to enable it to strategically adopt and use technology to respond to evolving forces on the House, as well as to avert, mitigate, or more quickly respond to crises.

Additionally, involving Members in technology decisions would increase the effectiveness of those decisions, since they would have the input and authority of Members behind them.  Many of the visions outlined in this document will face cultural and organizational resistance which can only be overcome through the visible support of Members. 

However, the House will face significant challenges to achieving this vision.  Increasing the coordination or centralization of technology adoption and decision-making will reduce the flexibility and independence that House offices currently exercise.  The benefits of relinquishing this flexibility and independence will need to be clearly articulated to overcome the resistance the House will face. 

Another challenge will be to engage Members and senior staff at key points in the decision-making process.  Many already feel overwhelmed by their current workloads, which makes it difficult to involve them in institutional planning processes and decision-making.  Additionally, most do not believe they have the technical knowledge or skills to effectively participate in technology decisions.  As a result, the process would need to convey the critical importance of Member and senior staff involvement, respect their time, and enable them to make good decisions without significant technical knowledge.

Member Activities

Background

Most technological efforts in the House are geared toward enabling staff to support Members, rather than toward providing Members, themselves, with technological capabilities.  Notable exceptions include the House pager system and the BlackBerry system.  However, there are potential opportunities for the House to focus efforts on technological projects targeted specifically to Members.  Technology can, for example, help facilitate the work of Members when they are out of their offices or traveling in their districts.

The Vision

1. Members should have greater access to House information and to their staffs when they are out of their offices.  Whether they are in Washington or in their districts, Members seldom stay in one place for very long, but their work is dependent on timely, reliable access to information and communications.  However, few of the House systems and information resources are currently developed with Member access and mobility specifically in mind.
2. The House, as an institution, should provide technology to facilitate greater communications between Members and their staff, their colleagues, and their constituents.  Most of the technologies available to facilitate real time communication and collaboration – such as video teleconferencing; online meeting, presentation, and collaboration tools; and even audio conference calls – are more expensive and require greater technical expertise than individual offices can manage.  As a result, there are few offices taking advantage of business tools that other knowledge organizations commonly use. 

The Tradeoffs

The major benefits of working toward this vision of Member mobility, access, and communication would be to increase the ability of Members to do their jobs effectively.  Attaining this vision would provide Members with access to the latest information from their staffs and from the House, as well as the capability to use this information more effectively.  It would also allow Members greater freedom and independence to conduct their legislative and representative activities remotely, as necessary.  For example, Members could more easily and more productively meet and interact with their staffs while they are traveling.  Members could conduct task force, caucus, party, or committee business with one another without all of them being in the same place at the same time.  Members could also more regularly interact with constituents while they are in Washington.

The challenges that would arise with attaining this vision are that Members and staff already feel inundated with information, so capabilities that would lead to more information without better tools to process and use the information would likely meet resistance or fail.  Members and staff already have cell phones, laptop computers, and BlackBerry devices, and they are seeing their workdays extend farther and farther into their personal lives.  Providing more ways to access and exchange information could increase the amount and speed of this information overload, making Members and staff less effective rather than more effective.  For this reason, such capabilities would need to provide better, rather than simply more, information access and communications capabilities.

Members and staff also strongly feel that face to face interaction among Members is absolutely critical to the deliberative and legislative processes.  They are resistant to technologies that would erode or negate this interaction.  There are already concerns about the effect that technology is having on the deliberative process and the impact that introducing more technology to enable Members to be more independent may have.  They are reluctant to consider anything that might further reduce the amount of time Members spend interacting with one another in person, and therefore, might undermine the deliberative process.  As a result, any capabilities the House provides would need to offer ways to strengthen and enhance these interactions that are at the core of deliberation.

Institutional Leadership Organizations

Background

Currently, the institutional leadership organizations – the Speaker, Majority and Minority Leaders, Majority and Minority Whips, Republican Conference, and Democratic Caucus – identify and develop the systems and capabilities they need to support their operations.  For the most part, the technological efforts of the institutional leadership organizations are not coordinated with or supported by the institution, nor are the party leaders involved in determining the strategic direction of technology adoption in the House, as a whole.  Each leader devotes the resources they deem necessary to perform their duties and accomplish their goals.  Often, however, leaders spend resources and develop systems that are replaced by their successors, which results in unreliable tools for Members and staff and high costs to the institution over the long term as a result of investing in sophisticated systems that will be used only during the tenure of a specific leader.

The Vision

1. Leadership should have a role in working with the House to determine the direction of technology adoption in the House, as an institution.  The participants in the visioning workshops clearly stated that the institutional leadership organizations’ party affiliated and official institutional roles need to be viewed separately.  The vision states that institutional leadership organizations should continue to adopt technology independently to support their party responsibilities, but that in their official institutional capacity they play a critical role in determining and achieving change in the House.  Therefore, in any technology decision-making structure the House must develop processes and mechanisms to include institutional leadership organizations.

Currently, there are no formal processes for leadership or Members to be involved in determining the strategic direction of technology adoption in the House.  This often results in conflicts and tension between the needs and objectives leadership offices have for technology to support their goals and the technological capabilities and support the House provides.

The Tradeoffs

Better coordination between the institutional leadership organizations and the House would result in House-provided systems and services targeted to meet the needs and support the goals of the leadership.  It could also result in more reliable, consistent, and cost-effective technological systems to support the institutional leadership organizations.

However, changes in the relationship between the House and leadership offices and in the services the House provides to leadership offices would potentially be difficult to bring about and would probably require the active support of the leaders, themselves.  Additionally, getting leadership engaged in strategic technology decisions may require establishing official processes and policies for doing so.  Strategic technology decisions ideally support institutional strategic decisions, which the House currently has no process for identifying.

These visions were described in report entitled House IT Assessment:  To-Be Vision Report, which was delivered to the House in the fall of 2005.

2.       Gap Analysis

Using the information collected during the first two phases of the project, Gartner and CMF analyzed the gaps between where the House currently is and where it wants to be in the next decade.  This analysis was based on what has been learned from the House over the course of this project, as well as on Gartner’s significant technical expertise and CMF’s knowledge of House culture, policy, processes and operations.

For each of the five business functions addressed in the House To-Be Vision, Gartner and CMF identified gaps in five categories:

1. Cost/Budget Gaps.  These gaps address the types of expenditures the House will need to make for new equipment, services, software, or technical systems to achieve the vision.  To close these gaps, the House will need to increase investments or modify budget allocations to better support the vision.
2. Effort Gaps.  These gaps address the areas where existing House staff will be required to expend significant effort to change existing processes or systems or learn new ones to achieve the vision.  To close these gaps, the House will need to reassign or retrain staff or devote employee time and effort to attaining the vision.
3. Technology Gaps.  These gaps address the categories of hardware, software, and technical systems the House will need to develop or acquire to achieve the vision.  To close these gaps, the House will need to identify, purchase, and/or develop technology to support the vision.
4. Cultural Gaps.  These gaps address the areas where the changes necessary to implement the vision will face resistance from Members and/or staff as a result of their current thinking, attitudes and/or methods of conducting business.  To close these gaps, the House will need to conduct outreach and/or educational campaigns to persuade Members and staff of the benefits of change and the drawbacks of the status quo.
5. Policy Gaps.  These gaps address the areas where implementing the vision will require changes to current House rules and/or policies.  To close these gaps, the House will need to review and modify current policy or develop new rules or policy to support the vision.

Because of the complexity of the gap analysis, we have chosen not to address it in any greater detail in this hearing.  However, the results of the gap analysis can be found in the report delivered to the House in the spring of this year entitled House IT Assessment:  Final Gap Analysis Report.

3.       House IT Decision Making Working Group

The processes, bodies and mechanisms used to make technology decisions within an organization are critical to successfully adopting new technology and capabilities.  Therefore, the House IT Assessment included a parallel effort with the Gap Analysis to examine the structures in the House for making decisions about technology that impact the entire institution, key segments of it, or key House processes, such as the legislative process. 

House Officers and Officials have been participating in a working group to examine the current technology decision making and budgeting relationships within the House; identify limitations to how technology decisions are made and funded that might prevent the House from reaching the ten year vision; identify options for addressing the limitations; and discuss the options’ impact and feasibility in the House.

This portion of the project has not been completed at this time, but, so far, the officers have identified a number of key issues that will need to be addressed in order for the House to effectively make the kinds of decisions that must be made to reach the ten year vision for technology in the House.  These are:

• The current model for making significant institutional technology decisions is based primarily on ad hoc or informal relationships and coordination.
• Greater and more formal coordination and cooperation will be required by the offices that provide technology and other critical support services to the institution.
• Members and leadership will need to have a role in making the decisions that must be made to attain the House’s vision, but their involvement will need to be carefully considered in order to use their limited time effectively and efficiently.
• The offices responsible for supporting the legislative process will need to establish a collaborative body, which will be integrated into the larger House technology decision-making structure, to address the significant challenges and opportunities of the 10 year vision for the legislative process.
• The House will need to design a formal House technology decision-making structure carefully and thoughtfully to ensure that mandated and traditional jurisdictional responsibilities are respected.
• The House will need to devise a technology decision-making structure which is not overly bureaucratic or inefficient and which enhances, rather than stifles, innovation and progress.  The structure must be flexible enough to enable rapid responses to emerging needs while thoughtfully and responsibly planning for the future.
• Although initial options, structures, and ideas have been discussed within the scope of the House IT Assessment, further analysis, refinement and consideration will be required before concrete recommendations and conclusions about a future House technology decision-making structure can be made.

The results and outcomes of the technology decision-making workshops will be documented in a House IT Decision-Making Structure Report to be delivered in late October or early November of 2006.

4.       Strategic Technology Roadmap

The final piece of the House IT Assessment project is to develop a Strategic Technology Roadmap.  All of the preceding work has been building toward this final report which will provide the House with more detail about and recommendations for processes, technologies, and capabilities the House can implement over the next decade to attain its vision.  This report will focus on key technologies and capabilities the House should consider implementing and the trends for the technologies over the next decades; concrete and actionable steps for the House to implement the technologies and capabilities; and critical management and support processes to ensure successful implementation and operation of the new technologies and capabilities.  The Strategic Technology Roadmap will be developed in three steps:

• Focused Vision.  Through extensive analysis, we will provide more detailed descriptions and narratives of the milestones the House will need to reach over time to attain its vision for technology in the House in the next decade.  This step is in progress and a draft version of the Focused Vision is available.
• Strategic Technology and Management Process Analysis.  We will analyze for applicability and feasibility in the House the key strategic technologies and management processes necessary for the House to consider implementing in order to achieve its vision.  This step is early in process.
• Final Report and Presentation.  We will develop both a detailed written report and a final executive briefing for key House stakeholders on the final results of the analysis.  This step will begin once the proceeding steps are competed.

5.       Next Steps

Through this project the House has established its desired direction and options for technology over the next decade.  However, this project is only an initial step toward achieving the House’s vision.  Once the Strategic Technology Roadmap is delivered, there are additional critical steps the House must take. 

First, the House must vet the vision and strategy with stakeholders to get approval and support for this long term transition that, if realized, will have significant impact on the House.  A key component of this vetting process will be to develop a business case that clearly articulates the benefits, challenges and costs to implementing the vision.  This will enable stakeholders to make informed decisions about their support for the vision by illustrating its impact on them, their organizations, and the House, and the tradeoffs necessary to realize the vision.

Once the strategy has been vetted and agreed upon by the House, then implementation strategies and plans must be developed to minimize the risk to the House and ensure that the new capabilities are developed in a way that meets the institution’s goals.  These plans would include stakeholder and user requirements-gathering processes, prototyping new technologies to gain an understanding of their potential benefits and risks, pilots to test new systems and capabilities and metrics and mechanisms to measure success and capture feedback to further refine and improve the systems and capabilities.

As you can see, there is still significant work to be done over the next ten years for the House to attain its vision, but the work will be worth it, in the end.  If attained, the vision the House developed for technology will enable the House to reach a level of effectiveness that Members and staff can only dream about today.  There are already legislatures that have realized similar visions, and they are already reaping the rewards of increased effectiveness, efficiency and cost savings that the House would like to realize.  These change processes are never easy, especially because they often require changes to business process and cultures that have been in place for a long time.  Technology is usually the easiest part.  It is the changes to traditions and cultures that people are comfortable with that takes the most significant time, thought, and planning.  The fact of the matter is, however, that the House is going to have to make these changes someday.  Through a targeted and well-planned process, however, the House can change on its own terms, rather than being pressured to change by outside forces.

I thank you, once again, for the opportunity to be here today to discuss this important project.  I look forward to answering your questions.