By Lynn Scarlett, Assistant Secretary - Policy, Management and Budget

Frustrated with administrative processes, a Bureau of Reclamation manager laments the 30—yes, 30—passwords needed to log onto systems that house acquisition, real property, financial, and other business information. This is the sequence: log on, enter information, log off, log onto the next system, re-enter the same or similar information, and log off again, and again, and again.

Elsewhere, a fire manager in a Western field office laments the piecemeal hiring process in which one location advertises and might get a handful of applicants; another office might get another handful. Why couldn't this recruitment effort be streamlined and coordinated?

Across America, citizens seeking outdoor recreation opportunities struggle with multiple reservation systems among different land management agencies. These scenarios have one common thread—they point to opportunities for improvement.

The Department of the Interior is on a journey toward management excellence—excellence defined by results. Our journey is, in part, self-propelled as each of us shares this aspiration for excellence. It is also driven by growing public demands for greater transparency, accountability, effectiveness, and efficiency. Citizens expect—and deserve—excellence.

The details of each bureau's mission vary, but the challenges are the same: How do we achieve the intended results for America in a complex and changing world of increased urbanization; new law enforcement and security challenges; public demand for improved service and accountability; and aging infrastructure?

Meeting these challenges requires new thinking and new ways of doing business and it requires focus: Are we fulfilling our mission? Are we delivering anticipated outcomes? Are we efficient in how we manage our programs? How do we know? Can the public review our progress?

Our improvements in financial management and e-government, our workforce planning, our efforts to integrate budget and performance, and our other initiatives to enhance effectiveness and efficiency all center on helping us address these questions and meet these challenges. Think of these efforts as Interior's Accent on Results. Reflect for a moment on why these questions really matter. Interior's vital statistics connect the Department to all Americans. Collectively, we:

• Manage one in every five acres of the United States;
• Provide water to farmers who produce 60 percent of the nation's vegetables and drinking water to 31 million people;
• Manage lands and waters that generate a third of the nation's domestic energy supplies;
• Protect communities by cleaning up abandoned mine lands;
• Manage 544 wildlife refuges, 262 million acres of multiple-use lands, and 388 national park units that attract more than 360 million visitors each year;
• Help educate some 48,000 Indian children; and
• Generate mapping and earth hazards information that help communities manage lands and infrastructure.

Our success requires mission clarity, good metrics, and management excellence—the three M's of performance management. Success also requires that we have the right people, in the right place, with the right tools, systems, information, and incentives.

Management Excellence Is a Journey, Not a Destination

Interior and its bureaus do many things well, but we face problems, too. We all know about our IT security challenges—each of us has experienced the effects of not having had secure systems when a federal court required that we de-link from the Internet.We all know the challenges we confront in facilities management. With some 37,000 facilities (second only to the Department of Defense), jointly our agencies have large maintenance backlogs.

We all know problems that come with having a pot pourri of more than 80 financial management systems, separate acquisition and real property systems, separate systems for grants management—or no electronic system at all, each requiring separate systems to log on and often generating replicated data entries.

In short, the status quo is not okay—that's why we are on a journey toward excellence. Our Accent on Results is helping us achieve our missions better by addressing these and other challenges. It is improving our accountability, transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness. Our ultimate goal is results for the American public—using their tax dollars well and wisely.

Managing for Mission Performance, Sustained Results

Interior's Accent on Results, initiated by the President's Management Agenda, is an integrated effort across many fronts. It centers on:

• Mission Clarity, Measurable Goals, and an Integrated Performance Strategy;
• Human Resources Management;
• Linkage of Goals to Budget Formulation & Financial Management;
• Facilities and Asset Management;
• Information Technology and E-Government; and
• efficiency through Management Improvements and Competitive Sourcing Reviews.

Mission Clarity and Measurable Goals

We have our first-ever, integrated departmental Strategic Plan (www.doi.gov/ppp/strat_plan_FY2003_2008.pdf), which replaces eight separate bureau plans and identifies common outcome goals to help us focus our efforts to achieve better results.

Consider facilities management. We are now using a facility condition index to rate the condition of different kinds of facilities. Our National Park Service had no complete facility inventory and no condition assessments; this year, NPS will complete initial assessments for all 388 park units.

Our other bureaus are moving forward with their own assessments, using the facility condition index as a common metric to identify and better manage maintenance needs. Citizens, both as public lands visitors and as taxpayers, will benefit.

Headlines about catastrophic fires and the need to bring our forests and rangelands into better health underscore the imperative of successfully completing wildland fire fuels reduction projects. We now have common goals across all Interior bureaus and the Forest Service and a unified tracking system to see if we are achieving our goals.

With this system in hand, we can let managers know where we are falling behind in achieving our goals—whether due to weather, personnel shortages, or other constraints—and shift resources to areas where we can get more work completed.

Goals from the Strategic Plan are now integrated into Senior Executive Service employee performance plans to provide a clearer understanding of roles and expectations. These goals include programmatic performance targets as well as management goals. Managers have IT security targets and financial audit goals within their performance plans. This helps managers know what they are expected to accomplish and, with a multitude of daily issues and challenges, how to prioritize the efforts of their workforce.

Human Resource Strategic Plan and Workforce Planning

Aligned with our integrated Performance Strategic Plan, we have generated our first-ever department-wide Human Resources Strategic Plan (www.doi.gov/pfm/human_cap_plan/) Interior's employees are its greatest asset. Each office has its unique challenges, but Interior employees also face common programmatic, demographic, and technical challenges.

Some business systems are antiquated. The world around us is changing through greater urbanization, growing homeland security challenges, and aging infrastructure. As a result, we face skill imbalances—too many folks with some skill sets and too few with other skills. These changes require doing our work differently—for example, partnering across jurisdictional boundaries, building law enforcement capacity, and developing facility management skills.

We're using new HR technologies. Consider our Fire Integrated Recruitment and Employment System (FIRES). Before its development, all recruitment for wildland firefighters was done manually, taking many hours and costing each participating bureau thousands of labor dollars each year.

The FIRES system (www.firejobs.doi.gov/) has automated most recruitment processes, saving the bureaus time and money. And there's a bonus: the number of qualified applicants received during the FY03/FY04 pilot increased by 44 percent. Many of these gains came in remote districts that traditionally have not received good applicant pools.

We're realigning our workforce. For example, we have realigned our IT workforce to achieve consistent management structures across our eight bureaus to reduce redundancies and capitalize on increased efficiencies from our Enterprise Service Network. Chief Information Officers in each bureau now have a common set of responsibilities, enhancing our ability to coordinate IT planning, purchasing, and management.

We're restructuring our workforce. Our bureau workforce plans are guiding workforce decisions to enhance results. The U.S. Geological Survey is undertaking a realignment of its mapping workforce to take advantage of modern technologies and take into account private-sector capacities. In a world where many public and private entities are making maps, the USGS best value resides in mapping analysis and standards setting. By aligning its workforce to provide this best value, USGS is improving its service.

Savings from the realignment allow USGS to redirect $12.5 million to value-adding mapping activities. The Department's Office of Policy, Management and Budget (PMB) has reorganized to align better with the growing federal focus on integrating budget, performance, and workforce management. Our diversity efforts will be more closely tied to personnel recruitment, so that we can better recruit qualified, diverse candidates.

Within PMB, the Department has also reorganized its delivery of land appraisals to ensure high-quality appraisals that meet unified appraisal standards. As a bonus, the reorganization is enhancing efficiency through consolidation of all land-management bureau appraisal programs into the Department's Office of Appraisal Services (OAS).

In its first four months the new OAS has put into action a web-based appraisal request and tracking system by which bureaus request services and inform the OAS of specific items that require priority attention. The system enables the OAS to manage its considerable workload.

At the same time, the office is helping bureaus to realize other benefits. For example, appraisal reports prepared for the National Park Service's national trails program were previously backlogged due to the limited availability of appraisal staff for that program. OAS has eliminated that backlog.

We're building human resources capacities. Our Human Capital Management Strategic Plan identified Indian trust management, wildland fire management and law enforcement, including homeland security, as growing challenges. Through our workforce planning efforts, we have realigned law enforcement across five bureaus and offices to achieve better coordination, training, and capacity.

During the transition, we are experiencing some "growing pains" as bureaus move from the old to the new structure. But, over time, the new structure will better ensure that we have professional law enforcement teams with the training and tools to do their jobs well.

Results at a Glance… Mission Clarity and Measurable Goals Common goals, strategies, performance measures and financial systems will make it easier for bureaus to work together to achieve shared missions. Tying these goals and measures to employee performance plans will help everyone focus their efforts on top priorities. Human Resource Strategic Plan and Workforce Planning We will know which types of jobs with what sort of skills in each bureau we will have the most challenging time filling over the next few years, so we can target recruitment efforts and make the most intelligent use of contractors. Linkage of Goals to Financial and Budget Management We will have a modern financial management system that will allow us to enter data once into one system, thereby saving time on administrative chores that can be spent instead on accomplishing our mission. We will have current and easy-to-use financial and performance information available to all employees, so we can more easily learn from each other's best practices and get on top of problems before they get out of hand. Facilities and Asset Management We will have a complete Department-wide inventory of our facilities and their condition, so we can make more intelligent choices about funding maintenance. Information Technology and E-Government We will save millions of dollars through volume IT purchases and by adopting Department-wide modern systems, freeing up funds to invest in on-the-ground mission delivery. We will increasingly use technology to handle routine and repetitive tasks like taking campground reservations, so we'll have more time to do the more challenging work that draws on our expertise and taps our enthusiasm. We will have secure IT systems so that our work and service to the public will not be interrupted by security breaches. Efficiencies with Better Management, Competitive Sourcing We will save money to re-invest in mission by routinely challenging ourselves to re-examine how we get the job done, and looking for ways to operate more efficiently and make better use of partners' capabilities.

Linkage of Goals to Financial and Budget Management

Fads and fashions in budgeting ebb and flow, but the trend of these efforts is moving in one direction—toward better information on which to build budgets and manage resources.

At the core of the President's Management Agenda—and our Accent on Results—is an effort to make budgeting decisions based on more and better information about how those dollars are used and how programs might be improved to enhance results. The new Program Assessment Rating Tool (www.whitehouse.gov/omb/part/index.html), our integrated Strategic Plan, and our implementation of activity-based cost management across the Department all provide building blocks to link budget and performance.

This linkage is not about providing more dollars to high-performing programs and fewer dollars to poorly performing programs. It is, instead, about achieving a better understanding of what is working, what is not, and of generating information so that we can better manage programs and resources.

Implementing activity-based cost management: For Interior, a keystone in this information foundation is our activity-based cost management system (www.doiu.nbc.gov/abc/). For folks in the field, recording work effort by activity sometimes seems like "make work."

But if we work hard at identifying the right activities to track and then diligently code our work to those activities, we will be able to manage better. Field managers will, for example, be able to ask: Why am I spending so much time on a particular permitting activity? What are the cost drivers? Where are my leverage points to reduce costs and deliver more results?

Already, our Office of Surface Mining is using activity-based cost management to improve its work effort. OSM developed a comprehensive work force plan that used detailed employee and resource use information by activity to more efficiently align staff resources with functions to be performed. In the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fee Program, this analysis facilitated staff reductions and cost containment, while still maintaining a high level of programmatic compliance.

Improving Financial Management: At the heart of management excellence lies sound financial management. Though financial management woes in the private sector often capture headlines, financial management is no less important in the public sector. Timely and transparent information that reliably presents each agency's assets and financial transactions is essential to upholding the public trust.

Just three years ago, Interior—like most other federal agencies—did not close its financial books and complete its annual audit until five months after the fiscal year. Needed improvements identified through these audits thus could not be undertaken until long after the problems had occurred. Accelerated annual audits will help us tackle financial management and related problems in a timely fashion.

Interior and its bureaus have made a great leap forward in financial management. Last year, we completed our audit within 60 days of the fiscal year end for the first time ever and received an unqualified "clean" audit opinion on our consolidated departmental financial statements for the seventh straight year.

We also corrected or downgraded 21 of 34 material weaknesses at the bureau level from 2002. But we have more work to do. This year, we aim to complete the audit and performance report by November 15, just 45 days after the close of the fiscal year. Achieving this goal will signal that we are beginning to operate with real-time financial and performance information so that we can make better decisions and more efficiently accomplish our mission.

Program Assessments: Interior has implemented many management improvements over the last several decades—sometimes in reaction to crises and sometimes as a part of more sweeping reforms. But continual management progress requires continued efforts and evaluation. Recognizing this requirement, the administration developed a Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) that provides a framework for systematic assessment of program efficiency, effectiveness, strategic focus, and results.

Like all new management tools, PART implementation is neither quick nor easy—and its utility will increase as agencies and OMB gain experience with the tool. It is hard work, but it is not "make work." The PART is helping Interior take a focused look at its programs: Do our programs have clear and measurable goals? Are they well managed? Are particular program designs well suited to achieving their intended outcomes?

Consider a few examples. Our Bureau of Reclamation constructs, at the behest of Congress, numerous rural water projects. But these projects lack any overarching framework regarding respective federal and local roles. Numerous other agencies manage similar projects. Through the PART process, Interior identified a need for greater program clarity to more effectively and efficiently address rural water requirements. The PART prompted Interior to propose legislative changes to create a more coherent program.

The PART also provided a context in which to structure and stimulate the reauthorization discussion for the Office of Surface Mining Abandoned Mine Land Program. The legislative concept that grew out of this assessment became the basis for a major proposed budget increase for the program, aligned with fulfilling the statutory goals set forth in our reauthorization proposal.

But the greatest significance of this effort came in its focus on results—the entire reauthorization package grew out of an analysis of how best to ensure that dollars spent were mitigating the highest risks while maintaining fairness to communities and producers.

Preserving Facilities Through Increased Maintenance In FY 2002, $245,702 was spent to replace and construct new boardwalks throughout Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. President Bush is meeting his commitment to invest $4.9 billion to address maintenance needs. The dedicated employees of the National Park Service have undertaken more than 4,000 infrastructure and facility improvements. Visitors will see improved trails, more accessible campgrounds, rehabilitated visitor centers, better roads, stabilized historic structures, and reduced environmental threats through better sewer, water, and drinking systems. Amounts spent on maintenance include significant increases in three key areas: Repair/rehabilitation funding: These funds have increased $52 million, or 94 percent. The four-year total for repair and rehabilitation is $359 million. Cyclic Maintenance: To preserve what has been repaired and to reduce future maintenance backlogs, routine, recurring maintenance has increased $41 million, or nearly tripled. Over four years, President Bush has proposed $194 million. Park Roads: The President's commitment to address the maintenance backlog in parks includes improving park roads. All federal highway projects are funded through the Transportation Equity Act, which is addressed by Congress every six years. The President has proposed new legislation for FY2004 and future years that will nearly double funding for parks transportation, reaching $320 million. This investment is essential. National parks have experienced longstanding neglect in maintenance of buildings, facilities, and roads. Our parks and the millions of Americans who visit them deserve better. One key reform of the National Park Service's maintenance effort is implementing a state-of-the-art system for inventorying the condition of its more than 30,000 buildings and facilities. For the first time, the National Park Service knows what facilities it has and their condition. This tool will help better manage facilities and set maintenance budget priorities.

Facilities and Asset Management

Interior, with more than 70,000 employees, operates at some 2,400 locations across the United States and in U.S. island territories. That geographic scope and the Department's mission combine to make facilities management a core challenge.

The Department manages just about every type of facility found in America's towns and cities-we have wastewater treatment plants, dams, electric generating facilities, houses, hotels, campgrounds, roads, boat docks, stables, and even landfills.

Put simply, serving the public well means knowing what we have and managing it well. To that end, Interior has embarked on major efforts to inventory its facilities, assess their condition, and develop asset management systems. It also requires re-examining our office structures and locations.

Asset Management Planning: The National Park Service now has an inventory and condition assessment of its facilities. NPS also has an asset priority index. Together, these two tools give the NPS information to set priorities, project near- and long-term asset management costs, and develop budget proposals and work plans based on this information.

Using these tools, NPS has completed, undertaken, or planned some 4,000 projects to improve its facilities and roads. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is using similar information to plan and manage school construction and maintenance projects.

Service First—Co-locating Offices: Interior's Bureau of Land Management, operating in many locations near Forest Service lands, saw an opportunity for efficiency and improved service to the public. Why not co-locate with the Forest Service in some areas? This outside-the-box thinking gave rise to Service First, a co-location of bureaus in combined facilities.

The effort is yielding lower costs and better customer service, with 20 BLM offices now co-located in California, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Twenty-seven additional opportunities have been identified in 11 states.

Information Technology and E-Government

Almost no Interior employee is untouched by information technology. The Information Age sparked investments at Interior in hundreds of IT systems, development of thousands of websites, and installation of equipment at nearly every work site. Interior, like other public and private organizations, moved vigorously to take advantage of the electronic age of information storage, management, and communication.

These efforts paid off with vastly expanded ability to process information. But we now have new needs—needs to better coordinate and integrate these systems, modernize them, and manage them. The payoff of success is cost savings and better citizen service.

Cost Savings and Security: Through better cross-departmental IT systems management, the Department is reaping the benefits of cost savings—with more savings on the horizon—and dramatic improvements in IT security are being achieved.

Through integrated equipment purchasing, Interior is achieving cost avoidance and direct savings of $65 million over a four- to six-year lifecycle of software and hardware, a savings of more than 40 percent over GSA schedule prices.

Interior, testing industry-recognized top-20 categories of external vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis, reduced in just 15 months its vulnerabilities from 957 per month to 0 for the first time in April of this year; system certifications have soared from 21 percent in March 2004 to 72 percent by July 1, 2004.

Through IT systems consolidation, BLM has gone from 71 servers to 17; MMS from 8 to 3; BOR from 20 to 4; and NBC from 6 to 2. Consolidation improves the ability to maintain secure systems and reduces costs over time.

Customer and Citizen Service: Information technologies are tools—tools to improve efficiency and effectiveness. As agencies learn to use these tools, new opportunities emerge to serve other agencies and the public.

For Interior, that public includes those 360 million visitors who come to federal lands—national parks, wildlife refuges, monuments, recreation areas—each year to hike, bike, camp, canoe, or just stroll, relax, and learn. We can serve these visitors better through smarter use of IT.

Through an Integrated Recreation Reservation system being launched in December 2004, we will bring a new consolidated system online to integrate separate recreation reservation systems with Recreation.gov.

We are upgrading our data-sharing capabilities with state and local governments and recreation industry partners by implementing the Recreation Information Database. Already, one park manager using the new system reported having, for the first time in 19 years, full campgrounds on the Fourth of July, success the manager attributes to the new online system.

OMB chose Interior's National Business Center as one of four E-payroll consolidated service providers across the Federal Government, a service that is expected to produce a dramatic reduction in service costs.

Efficiencies through Better Management, Competitive Sourcing Reviews

Interior's Accent on Results builds upon a fundamental perspective that management excellence requires constant vigilance. It requires, paraphrasing British philosopher Bertrand Russell, hanging a question mark on matters long taken for granted.

Competitive sourcing is a way of hanging that question mark on our activities. Often confused with outsourcing, competitive sourcing presumes no favored service arrangement-public or private. Rather, the emphasis is on competition-putting services, activities, offices, and programs to a comparative test: how does the current way of providing a service stack up with alternatives, whether public or private?

For Interior, this competitive scrutiny is helping us achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency. (www.doi.gov/perfmgt/competitivesourcing/) The National Park Service Southeast Archaeology Center reconfigured its operations to a more efficient workforce structure, thereby saving an estimated $850,000 per year over five years.

At the NPS Natchez Trace Parkway, facility maintenance savings resulting from a competitive review will save $1.18 million over five years. The Bureau of Land Management undertook a competitive review of maintenance functions in Oregon and Washington, reorganized, and is achieving estimated savings of $1.8 million over the next five years.

Management Improvements come, of course, in many forms. Some improvements result from reorganization in the context of a competitive review, some result from contracting, and some result from management efficiencies achieved through training, streamlining, elimination of duplication, and a whole suite of other management tools.

These efforts spring from the diligence of our entire workforce. Recent targets include an overhaul of our fleet management, with expected savings and improvements in service quality. Through training and a salary offset program, Interior is significantly improving its charge card management. The effort has reduced charge-offs by 75 percent since 2001 and reduced delinquent payments on individually billed accounts. Interior achieved a 98 percent success rate in prompt payments in 2003.

Rating Interior's Management Achievements The Office of Management and Budget rates agency performance on a quarterly basis for a number of management initiatives. The table below shows how OMB most recently rated Interior, and how we hope to be rated at the end of this fiscal year. How OMB Rates Interior's Progress Currently DOI Estimate E-Government Green Green Human Capital Green Green Budget and Performance Integration Green Green Competitive Sourcing Yellow Green Financial Management Yellow Green

IT Monetary Savings from Mass Buy: Our chief information officer is promoting standardization, consistency, and cost-efficiency in procuring IT products and services across the Department that support Interior's Enterprise Architecture guidelines and principles. To achieve this vision, the chief information officer is working with Interior's bureaus to take advantage of enterprise licensing agreements, as well as other available government-wide procurement tools, to obtain the desired information technology products and services in the most cost-efficient manner.

Results in Summary:
Thumbnail Sketch of Past vs. Present

Sustaining our Accent on Results is not easy. Each of us strives to do our job, but a performance-focused organization is one that constantly—and consciously—revisits two questions: Am I achieving the results the public expects? And, how do I know?

Interior has an inspiring mission. It is in the public sights every day with its on-the-ground complex of missions. Sometimes it is easier to feel connected to those missions out in the field while leading a tour of a park, re-planting native vegetation, building a school, or monitoring an earthquake fault.

But administrative tasks and efficient management of resources matter equally as much—and deserve our fullest attention. Consider just a few ways these efforts make a difference:

• Remember the Bureau of Reclamation manager with 30 passwords who logs on, enters data, logs off, logs on to the next system, enters data, and continues the cycle again and again? Our Financial and Business Management System migration, which will require significant investments of time and people power, nonetheless will yield a dramatically improved work environment. Think about it. Employees won't have to struggle with lengthy password lists and repeated data entries. Data calls that now take hours, even days, to respond to will often be resolved through a few computer strokes. And, we will provide timely, reliable program management information.
• Moving to a Single Messaging System will cost us $4.9 million but save some $20 million over four years.
• Consolidating our web servers is projected to save annually $18 million in direct savings and cost avoidance.

Service First Success Story Collocated BLM-Forest Service Office in Lakeview, Oregon Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the USDA Forest Service have developed a successful process, known as "Service First," to improve service to the public and streamline administrative costs by collocating field offices and developing common business practices. To date, the BLM and the Forest Service have collocated facilities in 21 locations in 9 states, and plan to combine an additional 22 offices by the end of 2005. This effort has improved service by allowing customers and the general public to visit a single office to obtain permits, pay fees, and obtain information. Examples of the Service First approach include: Portland, Oregon. The Forest Service Regional Office and the BLM State Office in Portland were collocated in 2002, which will result in closer coordination of staff offices and annual cost savings of more than $1 million in space leasing costs alone. San Juan, Colorado. The San Juan Public Lands Center is a collocated Forest Service-BLM office servicing the customers of the USFS San Juan National Forest and the BLM San Juan District Office. The Center provides one-stop visitor information services, common permits (firewood, Christmas tree permits, etc.), and also provides the public with joint National Environmental Policy Act processes and public input. For more information, please visit the Service First website at http://www. fs.fed.us/servicefirst/index.htm.

Our Journey toward Management Excellence: The Years Ahead

Our Accent on Results management initiatives are helping us serve the public better-and they are good for our workforce.

• We are delivering anticipated outcomes. We completed 1.258 million acres of fuels treatment projects to reduce risks of catastrophic fire, up 19 percent since 2002. With our electronic geospatial one-stop system, during Hurricane Isabel, we were able to use a new portal (www.geodata.gov) to pool geospatial data from federal agencies, states, and local governments to make it easier for everyone in the southeast to use each other's data to prepare for the hurricane and its aftermath.
• We are more efficient in how we manage our programs. By consolidating purchasing of some IT hardware and software Interior has saved about $65.7 million, or nearly 43 percent below GSA pricing.
• We have a clearer picture of how we are doing—together and individually as civil servants. For example, by setting goals for IT security—and tracking them-we brought our external security vulnerabilities down from 957 to zero between December 2002 and May 2004.
• The public can review our progress. We've all seen the inch-thick annual Performance Accountability Report with all its goal-by-goal detail—and we all know few folks have time to read it. So we're communicating in different ways to the public. For 2003, we prepared, for the first time, a short summary of our performance-easy to read and easy to digest. (www.doi.gov/pfm/results 03/index.html)

Some have emerged as we pursue our Accent on Results management improvements. Some new goals derive from recommendations by our Inspector General, the General Accounting Office, or Congress. Looking ahead, what can we expect?

We can expect continued improvements in our real property management. Through several e-government initiatives across the federal government, we can expect better travel management options, electronic training, and much-improved public access to grants information.

Internally, we'll have much greater coordination among our many websites so the public (and our employees) can more readily access information. And, we can expect much tighter linkage between employee performance plans and agency goals and mission.

Our opportunities abound. While much has been accomplished, we all have more to do.

• Wildland Fire: Our land-management agencies have teamed with the Forest Service to closely examine wildland fire suppression costs in relationship to broader land-management strategies and outcome goals.
• Cooperative Conservation and Partnership Culture: A "4 C's Team" of senior executives is building our capacity for partnering and cooperation. (www.doi.gov/partnerships). Their efforts include coordinating Interior training programs to incorporate mediation and partnership tools; proposing human resource competencies in partnering and cooperation to facilitate recruitment and hiring for these skills; and exploring options for an applied science HR track for scientists engaged in on-the-ground science applications.
• Indian Trust: We have begun major improvements in our Indian Trust management. The BIA trust reorganization will create more accountability in the trust area within BIA's reporting structure. It will reduce duplication of effort and consolidate related functions that had been in different chains of command. It will also build capacity through the addition of some 90 specialists.
• Financial Management—Moving from Data to Analysis: We now have a blueprint for integrating our business systems. As a next step, our Office of Surface Mining, Bureau of Land Management, and Minerals Management Service will begin migrating to the new system. At the same time, we continue refining our activity-based cost/management system, further tailoring the activities to which we are coding our time so they clearly describe our work. We are also providing reporting capability so that the data can be easily reviewed and analyzed.
• Real Property Asset Management: Interior is part of a government-wide effort to better manage our assets, including facilities. We are developing an asset management plan to identify priorities and set management goals; complete inventories of all real property owned, leased, or managed by the agency; and replicate across all our bureaus the types of condition assessments NPS has completed for constructed assets such as buildings, roads, bridges, water treatment facilities, and so on.

Power of Partnership At the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, five Native Plant Nurseries thrived in 2003, propagating more than 115,000 native plants for 38 park restoration projects. Nursery staff conducted 459 community programs through which community members donated 21,271 hours of service. This program offered 153 education programs for school groups, worked with 400 volunteers at Muir Woods Earth Day, operated the Habitarium in the Presidio, and a new education facility for school groups and volunteers. The NPS and Presidio Trust are partners in the native plant nurseries.

Challenges Ahead

None of these efforts is easy. One employee once asked me, "can't we just say we're done?" Many others, keen to achieve better and better results, nonetheless point to a shortage of time and resources and wonder why we can't just set aside some goals, prioritize, and focus on a few efforts.

Still others point out unintended consequences or seemingly dysfunctional aspects of some of our management improvements: Are our activity-based costing accounts the right ones—do they track meaningful activities? Isn't it better to have each field office determine its own IT needs and systems? Why should we consolidate office space when bureau missions vary? The list of "whys" is lengthy, and often these questions illuminate important issues and challenges that deserve to be examined and addressed.

These issues highlight the imperative of constant communications. With more than 70,000 employees, not everyone is always moving in the same direction and not everyone has the same needs or faces the same circumstances. We're trying to find more and better ways to communicate and to underscore that communications is about dialogue not dictation.

It is critical that insights, critiques, and ideas from all employees find their way into discussions about our management initiatives and their implementation. Success of these efforts ultimately resides in the results they deliver—to our workforce and the public. And those results hinge on making adjustments in our plans and actions to fit the realities that folks in their workplaces face.

This requirement underscores the imperative of combining management leadership at the helm with flexibility and innovation in the field. Through our Management Initiatives Team, we have engaged the leadership of senior executives in each of the key areas of the President's Management Agenda and our other management initiatives.

But Washington, D.C. leadership is not enough. If these management efforts—our Accent on Results—really are to succeed in enhancing our performance, we need insights from folks in the field. We've held numerous workshops, town hall meetings, satellite seminars, and created teams that include field managers. These discussions provide the essential feedback that enables us to adjust our course, where possible, to meet on-the-ground needs.Interior's workforce is profoundly dedicated, but success at Interior is not just a matter of doing a job. Success is, ultimately, about fulfilling our mission—on time, within budget, and with our goals achieved.