This weekend, Casey Coleman, the General Services Administration’s chief information officer, happened to be aboard a United Airlines flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Las Vegas when a passenger attempted to open an exit door on the airplane during the flight.
Coleman tweeted about the event from her seat on the plane: “During our flight to Las Vegas, some lunatic tried to open the front exit hatch in midair. About a dozen men rushed him [and] held him down,” Coleman tweeted at 4:15 p.m. on Jan. 23.
One minute later, Coleman tweeted: “The flight attendant surrounded this nut with big male passengers while we diverted to Denver to drop him off w/the FBI there.”
“There is clearly a new alert and assertive spirit of self-defense among American air travelers!” she added.
According to news reports, the passenger stood up abruptly from his seat, pushing his way down the aisle to the front of the plane. Passengers panicked when the large man tried to open a side exit and made his way to the cockpit, another passenger told the New York Daily News. A number of other passengers stopped him and forced him into a seat, the report states. The plane made an emergency landing in Denver soon afterward.
Authorities were awaiting the man when the plane touched down in Denver, according to news reports.
Once the ordeal was finished, the flight finished the last leg of the trip.
“We are boarding a different plane now and should be on our way to LAS soon. #UA223,” Coleman tweeted finally at 6:16 p.m.
Posted on Jan 25, 2010 at 9:45 AM3 comments
Let’s put the question out there point-blank: Do performance-based pay systems run the risk of exacerbating personal biases in the federal workplace?
The issue was raised by a recent survey that found that women in the federal workforce oppose current efforts to replace the General Schedule with pay-for-performance systems. The primary concern was that the performance-based systems give managers too much discretion in evaluating employees.
The report does not indicate that the respondents were specifically concerned about gender bias, but several FCW readers raised the issue in their comments on the story.
Here is the spark that ignited the debate, contributed by “M”:
The secret's out. Truth is that some women really "bust their hump" and far exceed their male counterparts. The flip side is the vast majority of women work fewer hours than their male counterparts on average. They run errands and are far more likely than male counterparts to extend themselves within normal work hours for the kids or grandkids. So, how does it all average out? Women -- on average -- [work] about 70 percent of [the hours] of men in the workplace. And guess how much they are paid? It's called the gender gap. And it's real!
Such an assertion would not go unchallenged.
“What does women having to do errands have anything to do with anything!!!???” wrote Shelley from Newport Naval SenStation. “A supervisor either signs the leave [slip] and so authorizes the absence or he/she doesn't. Are you saying that even thou the leave was permitted that it is held against women anyway, cause the man in her life doesn't do errands????”
The responses did not fall along gender lines. “I am a man, I have female co-workers and associates, and regarding the comments from ‘M’ about women not working as hard as men: WHAT RUBBISH!!” wrote one anonymous commenter. “The women I work with and around do their part to the same expectations as the men.”
Several readers raised a related issue of bias: married vs. single workers. The perception is that employees who are married are more likely to get raises because they need the money more than the footloose and fancy-free. And it doesn’t stop there.
“There is a difference in attitude among workers that states the single person can work more or later because they don't have a family to go to,” wrote an anonymous reader. “If a married person does the same its thought they must be having marriage problems.”
What do you say?
Posted on Jan 14, 2010 at 1:41 PM5 comments
As former EDS executive James Duffey prepares to become Virginia’s next secretary of technology, one big task looms ahead of him – getting the state’s outsourcing contract with Northrop Grumman back on track.
The $2 billion contract has missed deadlines and fallen well short of expectations. State auditors and the company have traded salvos over who carries the most blame.
The contract is so large and far-reaching – every state agency is supposed to turn over their IT infrastructure to Northrop – that cancelling the contract isn’t really an option.
So who better to face that challenge, or call it a mess, than Duffey?
He was part of EDS when the company turned around its own troubled outsourcing contract, the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. NMCI has gone from being an albatross for the company to being a star.
EDS, now HP Enterprise Services, also manages other huge outsourcing contracts on the state and local level, particularly in the Medicaid and Medicare processing area.
Because Virginia can’t afford to fire Northrop Grumman, it has to help the contractor succeed, and Duffey knows very well what a contractor needs to succeed.
He faces two hurdles, though. First is getting the state legislature to give him the authority to directly manage the contract. Virginia, my beloved home state, has a screwy structure among its secretary of technology, chief information officer and the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. In an effort to remove politics from the CIO and VITA, the state created a structure where no one is really accountable.
I hope that will get fixed.
The second hurdle is that no one has pulled off a successful statewide outsourcing project.
Good luck, Mr. Duffey.
Coincidentally, Northrop Grumman is in the midst of moving its headquarters from California to the D.C. area. I'm not sure what role, if any, Duffey will have in trying to bring the company to Virginia for its corporate headquarters. Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell has pledged that he won’t let the wooing of Northrop Grumman to the commonwealth interfere with pressure on the company to perform better.
Posted on Jan 07, 2010 at 8:36 AM0 comments
Howard Schmidt faced a difficult path to his new job as President Obama’s choice for national cybersecurity coordinator, but now he must tread more carefully than ever, according to news reports and blogs across the Internet.
An administration official speaking on background told CSOonline that Obama took his time in making his pick because he “wanted to ensure that the cybersecurity coordinator had the right mix of public- and private-sector experience.” As it turns out, CSOonline had recently talked to Schmidt about his predictions for IT security in 2010.
But Schmidt, though one of the most prominent candidates for the job in recent months, “was not necessarily the White House's first choice,” according to Information Week. “Several others turned down the job, and former assistant secretary of Defense Frank Kramer was seen as a recent front-runner.”
The Washington Post reports that the search for the cybersecurity coordinator was slowed by “internal tension over how much authority [the cybersecurity coordinator] would have and to whom the official would report.” According to the Post, White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers argued that the coordinator should report to him, but Schmidt in fact will report to deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan.
The appointment still leaves the White House with the challenge of how to “balance cybersecurity decisions between military and civilian organizations,” states the New York Times, noting the “running turf wars” among the Defense Department, the National Security Agency and the Homeland Security Department.
The Politics blog at the Atlantic also highlights the minefield Schmidt must manage, with added pressure from Congress the business community. “Over the next several years, the administration and Congress want to build a cyber security culture that requires the acquiescence of American industry to a new balance between privacy, profit and the transparency and security of their communication infrastructure.”
Posted on Dec 22, 2009 at 9:32 AM0 comments