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As the government looks to operate more efficiently with fewer resources during the current budget crisis, it is crucial that the president and congress communicate a clear vision for what the federal government should deliver and allow agencies some flexibility on how to best achieve cost-reduction targets, according to a new report.

The report, released Tuesday by the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton, recommends that the president and Congress communicate a clear vision for deficit reduction, in part by designating a high-level official to lead the cost-savings effort and establish measurable goals that include mechanisms for accountability and transparency. The report examines some of the lessons learned from the Clinton-era government downsizing initiative during the 1990s.

"Congress should also use its oversight role to make sure agencies consider mission, employees and customer impact when making cuts," the report states.

The report also recommends that agencies play a role in considering alternative ways of delivering services and performing functions, including embracing information technology. Clinton's reinventing government initiative, for example, was instrumental in changing regulations that made it hard to justify and buy technology because it was considered an office expense. "The regulatory change helped to foster agencies' adoption of new technologies," the report states.

At the same time, however, budget cuts in the 1990s also prevented some agencies from taking advantage of emerging technologies, forcing them to put off IT investments that resulted in outdated systems and unsupported software, the report noted. In addition, agencies that were able to make up-front investments in IT during that time tended to customize off-the-shelf software, which often was costly to maintain and upgrade, the Partnership and Booz Allen found.

But now, agencies can find significant technology savings in ways that were available in the 1990s, in part through buying new systems with lower maintenance costs, employing cloud computing and consolidating data centers, the report states.

"However, no investment in IT will be successful unless agencies take people and process into account," the report states.

In addition to IT investment, the report also calls on government to look at the costs and benefits of other strategies, including across-the-board cuts, programmatic cuts, decreasing administrative costs, personnel reductions, consolidating or centralizing functions, reengineering and outsourcing.

As the debate over insourcing versus outsourcing continues -- in part thanks to a recent Project on Government Oversight report that says contractors cost more than federal employees doing the same work -- NASA announced that it has developed its own private cloud using mostly in-house technology expertise.

AOL Government reports that NASA's scientists and engineers, with the help of NASA contractors, have built the agency's own private cloud, called Nebula, to host most of the applications and services destined for the cloud at NASA.

NASA values its "engineering expertise and it is critical to nurture the technical knowledge of our in-house employees so they can make sound technical recommendations or decisions [on cloud initiatives]," Tsengdar Lee, NASA's acting chief technology officer for information technology, told AOL Government.

Meanwhile, agencies like the Homeland Security Department have been evaluating the levels of contractors versus federal employees, particularly in fields like information technology. Earlier this year, DHS Spokesman Larry Orluskie told Wired Workplace that DHS identified about 3,500 jobs performed by contractors that could either be eliminated or converted to civil service positions, many of which were in the IT field, as part of its balanced workforce initiative.

What are your thoughts on the insourcing versus outsourcing debate, particularly as agencies like NASA and DHS are increasingly looking to in-house expertise for IT projects and programs?

The White House on Thursday sent Congress its long-awaited proposal for comprehensive cybersecurity legislation. The bill includes several provisions that seek to recruit, retain, hire and train the federal cybersecurity workforce.

The goal of the proposal is to help Senate lawmakers craft passable cybersecurity legislation from more than 50 bills currently pending in both chambers.

Like many previous bills introduced, Obama's proposal would give the Homeland Security Department more flexibility in hiring cybersecurity experts. It also would allow the government and industry to temporarily exchange cyber professionals, so both can learn from each others' expertise.

"The recruitment and retention of highly-qualified cybersecurity professionals is extremely competitive, so we need to be sure that the government can recruit and retain these talented individuals," the White House said in a fact sheet on the proposal.

The bill also would require the DHS secretary to report each year for four years on specific metrics, such as the number of qualified employees hired, retirements, separations and recruitment, relocation and retention incentives paid to cybersecurity workers.

A bill introduced late Thursday in the House would freeze the hiring of most federal workers until the federal deficit is eliminated.

The bill (H.R. 1779), introduced by Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., would freeze hiring at all federal agencies, with a few exceptions -- for law enforcement, national security and during times of war. The proposal also would not affect the U.S. Postal Service, the Postal Regulatory Commission, seasonal hiring, reassignment of personnel within the same agency, or transitional positions involving a new presidential administration.

"We cannot allow the federal government to grow at record levels while we ask our business owners and families to be more frugal and to get by with a lot less," Marino said.

The bill does not cite technology hiring as exempt from the freeze, so it's safe to assume that tech hiring would stall if Marino's bill were to pass. But with new demands for mobile computing, cloud services and social media at agencies, more tech workers and new types of skills are sure to be needed by government in the coming years.

What are your thoughts? Are blanket freezes to federal hiring an effective way to cut the deficit?

Few federal chief information officers are planning to hire new federal employees and contractors to work in areas like IT program management, security and enterprise architecture in the coming years, a new survey suggests.

The 21st Annual Survey of Federal Chief Information Officers, released Wednesday by TechAmerica and Grant Thornton, found that most CIOs do not expect their IT budgets to increase for the balance of fiscal 2011 and into fiscal 2012. Further, most CIOs also do not anticipate adding IT staff or contractors over the next couple of years, and a few think they will decrease the number of contractors.

In the cybersecurity field, 21 percent of CIOs anticipate an increase in contractors, while 14 percent foresee a reduction. Twenty-nine percent anticipate hiring new federal cybersecurity professionals, while 7 percent anticipate decreases in the federal cyber force.

The IT project/program management field was where CIOs anticipate the greatest increases in hiring, at least for federal employees. Thirty-six percent of CIOs foresee an increase in federal IT program managers -- a new job classification -- with none projecting a decrease. Thirty-three percent of CIOs anticipate an increase in the federal enterprise architecture force, the survey found.

CIOs also ranked human capital issues as some of their top priorities for spending. After lowering costs, integrating systems, implementing security measures and improving project management, CIOs ranked staff development, retention and recruiting as their top budget priorities in the coming years, the survey found.

Meanwhile, many CIOs indicated that agency attitudes on social media have changed. Fifty percent of CIOs said their agency now provides access to social media and encourages employees to use it, up from 45 percent in late 2009. Seven percent of agencies are now developing social media policies, while 7 percent have no current plans to allow access to it.

Are you a federal manager looking to engage your employees using online tools? The National Academy of Public Administration's Collaboration Project just released a new guide that compares 10 online tools for idea generation and provides guidance on what to consider when choosing a tool.

"The plethora of platforms and variety of functionalities available can make a manager's choice of technology challenging," the guide says.

The authors encourage managers to consider eight factors when selecting a collaboration tool:

Duration of engagement: how long will the idea generation project run?
Community: do you need to make some users stand out from the rest?
Responsiveness: do you need to respond to ideas and comments immediately or provide updates on the status of particular ideas?
Output: what kinds of data and analytics do you need the technology to provide?
Structure of dialogue: do you need the ideas organized?
Cost and resources: what budget and staff resources do you need for the project?
Support: what level of technical support will you need?
Deployment: how quickly do you need to launch the project?

Most important, managers should make sure they align the technology to their core purpose for engagement, allowing the tools to fit their needs, not vice versa, the guide says.

Which of NAPA's 10 tools could be useful for engaging employees and generating new ideas at your agency?

The Homeland Security Department has made some notable progress on an initiative that aims to strike the perfect balance between federal employees and contractors within its workforce.

In 2009, the department identified about 3,500 jobs performed by contractors that could either be eliminated or converted to civil service positions. By January of 2011, DHS had eliminated about 77 percent, or 2,700, of those jobs and hired about 1,800 federal employees in their place, said DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie on Monday.

Between 2009 and 2010, he added, DHS reduced contract spending by 11 percent, or $420 million, in large part because of the balanced workforce initiative.

Orluskie cautioned against using terms like "insourcing" to describe the initiative, noting that in many cases, not all of the 2,700 contractors that were eliminated needed to be replaced. "The goal is to make sure that we have a balanced workforce - that we have a federal employee doing a federal employee job and the right level of contract support when we need it," he said. "Insourcing always rubs people the wrong way."

Orluskie did not have details on what types of jobs were eliminated, insourced or created as part of the department's balanced workforce initiative, but noted that several of the jobs were information technology-related. Other jobs were in the information and analysis field, he added.

DHS Chief Human Capital Officer Jeffrey Neal last year set up the Balanced Workforce Program Management Office to steer the initiative and come up with a repeatable process for reviewing outsourced work. In the fall of 2010, the office issued guidance to DHS components and developed a tool for evaluating contracts. That tool will serve as the basis for the next phase on the initiative, which involves reviewing 68 contracts by fall of 2011, Orluskie said.

Meanwhile, the news comes as Customs and Border Protection announced last week that it planned to cut about 1,200 contractors in its Office of Information Technology and replace them with 1,000 new federal employees. The technology office employs more than 3,200 contractors.

Federal information technology workers earn slightly more pay than their counterparts in the private sector, new salary data suggests.

Dice.com's 2010-2011 salary survey found that while average salaries for federal IT workers stayed relatively flat in 2010 -- down just 0.1 percent to $83,292 -- they're still higher than the overall average salary for tech workers, which was $79,384 last year. Average pay for federal IT workers also is up significantly since 2005, when average federal IT salaries were $69,078, according to Dice data.

"Even though the trend is relatively flat, government and defense workers are better than average in terms of their salaries," Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice, said Monday.

Still, as the economy recovers and federal IT workers face a two-year across-the-board pay freeze and the potential for other budget cuts, the government could lose some of its competitive edge with the private sector for IT talent, Silver said, pointing to Dice's research that shows 40 percent of tech pros overall think they can make more money if they change employers in 2011.

"Market conditions are improving, and perhaps the private sector is going to do a little better than the public sector," he said. "I think more people are going to be looking for other opportunities as the market starts to improve, and employers need to be paying attention to that more than they have in the past."

In order to attract and retain top IT talent, the government should be touting its job security and branding its top-notch opportunities to show tech pros how they can develop and enhance their career and keep their skills up to date, Silver said. "The government works on some pretty cool projects, but yet it's the government," he said. "They should be working with leading edge technologies and making sure they are investing in their people."

If you're a federal information technology professional who's disappointed about the two-year across-the-board pay freeze, rest assured: Private sector IT pros have endured a second straight year of nearly flat salaries, according to a new survey by Dice.com.

Dice's 2010-2011 annual salary survey found that technology salaries increased by an average of only 0.7 percent, to $79,384, last year. Nearly half of those surveyed (49 percent) received salary increases in 2010, compared to just 36 percent who saw raises the previous year. Twenty-nine percent received bonuses, up from 24 percent of respondents in 2009, the survey found.

Even with the marginal average increase, however, tech professionals expressed slightly more satisfaction with pay, with 50 percent somewhat or very satisfied, an increase of 4 percent over the previous year. Still, nearly 40 percent of tech professionals believe they can make more money if they change employers in 2011.

For those entering the IT field, however, it appears wages have been reset lower, Dice found. For the second straight year, average salaries of IT professionals with less than two years of experience have declined to 6 percent below their peak average wages in 2008.

Technology professionals in Silicon Valley saw the largest average increase of 3 percent, raising average salaries to $99,028. Average salaries in New York ($87,298) and the Washington D.C./Baltimore area ($89,149) also inched higher in 2010, while average salaries in Atlanta ($82,944) and Philadelphia ($81,986) jumped 5 percent. Average salaries in Los Angeles dropped 4 percent to $84,551 and average salaries in Chicago declined 1 percent to $79,933, the survey found.

Meanwhile, demand for Oracle experience is up 57 percent over 2009, and the national average salary for tech pros with experience in Oracle Database is $90,914. For Oracle Application Server it is $88,063. Demand for J2EE/Java is up 50 percent, commanding an average salary of $91,060. Demand for C, C++ and C# is up 46 percent, while demand for SQL programming expertise is up 47 percent, the survey found.

Like the federal government, demand for IT project managers also is high (up 50 percent), with companies requesting project management experience in a wide variety of job postings. The average salary for project managers is $100,143, according to the survey.

How do your skills, salary and other incentives stack up? Do the survey results make you more satisfied with your government IT job, or do they make you want to jump ship for the private sector?

Looking to fine-tune your IT skills and certifications in the new year? This month's issue of the Dice Report provides some clues on what IT skills are particularly hot this year, with demand for some skill sets up more than twice the market rate.

Cloud computing skills top the list, Dice found, with job postings up 294 percent over last year. The boom in cloud-based applications also is one factor that is likely driving demand for other skills, such as JavaScript, which had a 98 percent increase in job postings, and HTML, which had 85 percent growth, Dice found.

Information security also is a promising career field, with job postings up 109 percent over last year, Dice found. Employers frequently look for information security candidates who have earned the Certified Information Systems Security Professional credential, which requires candidates to have at least five years of experience to qualify.

Demand is also up over last year for other skills, such as VMWare experience (92 percent), IT infrastructure library (89 percent), SAP (87 percent), PeopleSoft (98 percent) and telecommunications (97 percent).

The top metro areas for technology remain Washington, New York/New Jersey and Silicon Valley.