GPO's Competitive Strategy

A colleague asked me for my thoughts on GPO's competitive strategy. He was working on a paper for his MBA and was looking for input from other GPO managers.
To address this question, I think we need to start by looking at the agency’s mission, and then examine our strength, weakness, opportunities and threats. From here, we can look at our strategy to remain competitive (and viable) in the market to serve our mission.

From the 2004 Strategic Vision document, our mission is stated as follows:
- To provide the agencies and organizations which make up the three branches of the Federal government with expert printing and publishing services, on a cost recovery basis, in order to avoid duplication and waste of government resources.
- To provide, in partnership with Federal Depository libraries, for nationwide community facilities for the perpetual, free and ready access to the printed and electronic documents and other information products, of the Federal government.
- To distribute, on a cost recovery basis, copies of printed and electronic documents and other government information products to the general public.

The vision was stated as follows:
- To deliver Federal information products and services from a flexible digital platform.

Competitive strategy
Our strategy to meet the opportunity and fend off the threats can be outlined.

1. We will understand the market we serve in light of our mission as outlined in Title 44.
This isn’t a new action, but one that needs to be carefully addressed given the rapid changes in technology, which translates to rapidly changing market needs. For FDsys, we worked closely with our end user community; librarians, agencies, congress. Focus groups and councils were formed to communicate with these groups to get their input into what they felt was needed in a new system, and to also validate that we understood them. These groups formed a good basis for candidates for beta testers. This process of involving the customer/partner is critical in successfully meeting market needs.

2. We will accurately capture requirements.
We have a number of examples, both good and bad from which to draw. Concentrated requirements working groups work well for this, with customer/partner follow up as required to validate these requirements are understood.

3. We must innovate.
Innovation is the process of devising a product or service that addresses the customer’s/market’s unmet needs. The output of the innovation process is a concept that, with a supportive business case, enters the product development process, where product design is completed and design conflicts are resolved. Practically speaking, a winning concept must also meet GPO’s success criteria. We need to maximize GPO's value through innovating solutions to meet or exceed needs, delivering solutions to position GPO to be the natural source for authentic Federal information.

4. We must organize in a way to assume a posture of serial innovation to efficiently meet new market needs as they emerge.
We need to have plans to continue to anticipate and understand GPO’s market needs and be prepared to address these with effective solutions in a timely fashion. Our organizational structure coupled with new policies (like our System Development Life Cycle process) and governance (Planning and Strategy board serving in an oversight role for strategic direction and capital investment planning) will support this, coupled with continued diligence into market assessment and active voice of customer work.

5. We must deliver.
We need to develop the integrity within the agency to do what we say we are going to do. This can be accomplished through prioritization of initiatives and through establishing effective organizations to implement projects to meet our goals.


Reference: GPO's Strategic Vision

FDsys goes live!

The initial launch of GPO's FDsys went live yesterday. This release includes the search and access elements of the system, introducing a vastly improved user interface over the GPO Access tool that has been in production since 1994.

The team has done an outstanding job getting a very complex system completed. In early 2008, the program management of FDsys was changed, moving GPO into the role of the prime contractor. Harris Corporation was ineffective at getting this difficult task completed. When this change was made, the team committed to delivering the first release in January. In less than a year, the GPO team contracted new subject matter experts, completed the system design, and led the development, integration, and test activities to launch this system. It was an terrific example of excellent teamwork and collaboration, doing whatever it took to complete the job on schedule.

Innovation

The Rochester Institute of Technology is putting additional focus on innovation and, being a member of the dean's council for their Golisano College of Computing and Information Science, I was recently asked to comment on my definition of innovation. I feel innovation is the process of devising a product or service that addresses the customer’s unmet needs. The output of the innovation process is a concept that, with a supportive business case, enters the product development process, where product design is completed and design conflicts are resolved. Ideally, only winning products enter the development process. Practically speaking, a winning concept must also meet company success criteria and societal criteria.

Additionally, I believe that innovation should be approached on a “needs-first” basis. This is an approach to innovation in which companies first uncover all the customer’s needs, then determine which are unmet, and then devise solutions to address those unmet needs. This approach to innovation has, at times been difficult to use effectively, mostly because it is difficult to identify and capture the customer’s needs. Capturing customer needs to drive innovation is a critical step and enhances the performance of the eventual product or service in the market and therefore is worth the effort required.

Cloud Computing: Pilot Results

In an earlier blog, I discussed how cloud computing may be a good option for help converting paper publications to searchable digital files. We embarked on a pilot test of cloud computing to evaluate this option.

The cloud was used to convert uncompressed TIFF images into searchable PDFs, requiring an optical character recognition (OCR) engine and a PDF distiller. This is a computationally intensive operation typical of image processing and therefore seemed to be a good application for distributed cloud computing.

Our pilot at the Government Printing Office consisted of processing nearly 20,000 pages of the Statutes at Large collection that had been scanned to our specifications. To assess the cloud capabilities, samples of the collection were processed with four different instance types; small, large, high-CPU medium storage, and high-CPU, large storage. The characteristics of these instances are outlined in this table:

Virtual instance details

Results were developed to assess the cost of processing a 100 page publication, which is roughly a 90MB package of TIFFs. Calculated costs included the upload/download transmission cost and the computing cost.The results were very interesting, indicating additional processing capability (virtual cores) improves the performance, to a point.

The transmission costs actually turned out to be higher than the processing costs, but it was clear that the high-CPU, medium storage processing solution was the most cost effective. Licensing costs for the OCR tool were not included in this evaluation.

Pilot cost summary

Special thanks to our to our awesome engineering co-op student, Isaac Jones for developing the test plan and collecting to data for this evaluation.

References:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
FDsys Operational Specification for Converted Content

Printed Electronics

In late 2007 silicon ink and inkjet printers were used to print a transistor with respectable performance. And now, a year later, there have been good advancements in demonstrating a product using this technology -- RFID tags using printed ICs (PICs). The past year has boosted nFET thin-film transistor (TFT) performance from electron mobilities of 80 cm2/Vs to nearly 100 cm2/Vs and full CMOS functionality has been achieved.

This is extremely cool. It was not too long ago that printed electronics was used for conductors as a part of an assembly. Now, printed electronics is moving into an area where effective active electronics can be built using low-cost printing technology. The flexibility and scalability enabled with printing technologies in the electronics market is mind-boggling, making the production of billions of devices seem reasonable.

One key market for this technology is for supply chain item inventory marking using RFID tags. Once a cost effective solution for individual RFID tags is available, this technology will quickly move to the mass market making inventory control and consumer transactions nearly painless. These low-cost RFID tags are expected to become increasingly common as a means of identifying every type of consumer product. Some device cost ~20 cents today, with a gaols to achieve a sub 1 cent cost.

References:
RFID Tags Using Printed Electronics
First Printed Silicon RFID Platform for Item-Level Intelligence

Crunch time

It seems like all projects experience a big crunch at the end. This is certainly the case with GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys). This ambitious program to develop and launch a world-class information management system for Federal publications has been underway for some time now and has experienced a number of difficulties over the past few years. But since March of this year, the team has achieved traction and has been making terrific progress. Nonetheless, as the promised launch date approaches, knuckles are starting to turn white and some folks are starting a nasty habit of gritting their teeth.

I think things will turn out fine for this project despite the end-of-year vacations and holidays -- this team is focused and dedicated to getting this complex information system launched.

I was rummaging through some old files recently and came across a drawing that fit the FDsys situation well. Needing only a few Photoshop edits, this drawing was customized to fit bill perfectly.



To learn more about FDsys, check out the website -- www.gpo.gov/fdsys

Colorado Inventor Showcase

I had the pleasure of being invited to attend and judge the 4th Annual Colorado Inventor Showcase on November 10th at the Cable Center on the Denver University Campus. The event was terrific, where a number of Colorado companies came and displayed their innovative products. A group of judges reviewed their products and made some pretty tough assessments on their innovative nature and their ability to meet a market needs.

My pictures of the event can be seen on my Smugmug page: http://mlwash.smugmug.com/gallery/6573530_VjaLs#418504358_8Ev7S

Winners included the following:

• Inventor of the Year Award: Inventor - Beacon Biotechnology Team; Company - Beacon Biotechnology - Beacon’s BrightSPOT Reader, a hand-held device to provide instant diagnoses of any disease imaginable.
• Consumer Product of the Year Award: Company - re-thought; Inventor, Robert Irwin; BioHAWT - A biomimetic horizontal axis wind turbine designed for power generation
• Commercial Product of the Year Award: Company - VanDyne SuperTurbo; Inventor - Ed VanDyne; Fuel efficiency device called a SuperTurbocharger, designed to increase fuel efficiency by 25%
• Software Product of the Year Award: Company - Alchemy Grid - Inventor, Elliot Turner - Orchestr8 transforms the way you distribute and consume Internet content
• Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Philip Hartman (Age 14); Company - Fiberlight Int'l;
• Honorable Mention Award: Company - Smart Lid; Inventor - Bill Miller;
• Honorable Mention Award: Company - ET Squared; Inventor - Pete Tovani; Product to mitigate the negative impact of Human Beings on planet Earth.
• Honorable Mention Award: Company - Think Like a Genius; Inventor - Todd Siler, Ph.D.; Three dimentional imagination tool for bringing new ideas to life
• Honorable Mention Young Entrepreneur Award: Company - Kyle Invent; Inventor - Kyle Myhra; Spot Sucker stain remover technology