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Today, much of our work is done in groups. Whether on a Federal committee, on a project team in support of Agency mission or at home serving our communities, much of what we do is through participation in groups. What makes a group successful (or not)?

Thanks to Jonathan Grudin of Microsoft Research for the wonderful reference to Joseph McGrath's Time, Interaction and Performance (TIP): A Theory of Groups. Prior to 1991, behavioral research focused on controlled studies of small groups in well defined experiments. Experiments accurately measured a group's ability to produce results, known as its production function. Experiments typically included solving single task problems. The researcher supplied the complete set of resources required to solve the problem and group members were kept in isolation during the experiment. Needless to say, this approach of measuring how groups produce the best output is a very Industrial Age approach, in the same vein as the famous time and motion studies conducted by the industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Today, thanks to McGrath’s research, we know that group success is about much more than widget output. Factors such as the overall well-being of the group and support for members in that group are critical for a group’s success in the real world over a period of time. Group well being describes the activities of the development and maintenance of the group as a whole and the relationships among members. Member support describes the ways in which the individual is embedded within the group and the relationship between the individual and the group as a whole. These two functions encapsulate the nature of interaction in McGrath's Theory. To gauge the effect of time, McGrath studied the effect on group functions when groups are embedded in society and groups whose members change.

All too often the groups in which we work focus exclusively on the production function with little regard to group well being and member support. But I believe that emphasizing group well being and member support leads to better outcomes. This is especially true as our groups become more geographically dispersed and we have less day to day contact. Professor Steve Kelman of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, in his post entitled Collaboration success - The Facebook model redux cites a study in which what Kelman calls personalized groups were 18% more successful than depersonalized groups in achieving settlement in a negotiation. Kelman's personalized groups are composed of negotiators who had pictures and biographies of their negotiating partners and were able to exchange emails prior to starting their negotiation.

McGrath's group well being is most likely at work in personalized groups. Because members were able to personalize relationships through pictures and biographies, group production increased significantly. Kelman's post on personalized groups doesn't speak to member support, but I think there are many stories out there to be told about member support. Do you have a story to tell about your role in a group? It could be a success, or how the group could have done better with more member support. Where do you see the role of leadership in member support?

What about group well being? Have social media, or collaboration tools changed group well being in your groups?

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I wrote a few weeks ago about cloud computing and its promise to reduce energy consumption in data centers. That research got me thinking about other natural resources, and our quest to conserve and use those resources more efficiently. Take water, for instance, one of our most critical natural resources. Farming is the largest single consumer of water nationwide. I grew up on a farm and have been amazed to see how technically sophisticated every element of farming, including irrigation, has become. Technology innovations have radically reshaped the farm industry. Nowadays, farmers use GPS to create straight furrows and to tell them where to apply fertilizer. They harvest crops using highly mechanized methods that do the same work in a fraction of the time. And nowhere has there been more innovation that in the use of groundwater for irrigation.

For example, the state of the art 30 years ago was to flood the space between rows of crops, where most of the water was wasted due to evaporation. Later came sprinkler systems, coupled in 20-foot long sections of aluminum pipe along the ground, each with a sprinkler on the end. This method required unhooking each section, lifting and draining the water, moving it over 30 or so feet, and reattaching the sections before restarting the irrigation. This method was more efficient in conserving water but very labor intensive, to which I can personally attest!

If you have ever flown over farms in the Midwest you have no doubt seen green circles on the ground below, reflecting the modern circular pivot irrigation systems. Farmers today frequently grow their crops in circles and station a rolling sprinkler system in the center, which sweeps around the field like a minute hand on a watch. This method is even more efficient, because the sprinklers are just above the top of the plants and very little water flies through the air to be lost to evaporation. Each of these developments has meant that each bale of cotton or wheat is sent to market more efficiently than the one before, with less water required to produce it. And the innovation has not halted; many farmers today are installing tubes below the ground to run water directly to the crops’ root systems, reducing irrigation requirements even further.

Of course, like electricity, we may be conserving more at an individual level but overall consumption has not declined. The need for further innovation to get ahead of our consumption patterns is great. However, based on trends of the past few decades, it seems we can expect the innovation to continue in ways that we cannot predict today.

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This year's TechAmerica Annual Survey of Federal Chief Information Officers has just been released. 2008 is the survey's nineteenth year. I enjoy participating in this survey each year and I wanted to share a few observations with all of you.

One of the nicest aspects of the survey is that it identifies trends across the last five years on key challenges to Federal CIOs. These key challenges include security, workforce, leadership, infrastructure, project management, electronic government, enterprise applications and information sharing. These trends provide a useful history. They also serve as a way to forecast into 2009 and beyond. Security remains the top challenge for CIOs.

Some good things happened in 2008. Many more CIOs report directly to the head of their agency. Also, CIOs are gaining longevity in their jobs. CIOs identified both Capital Planning and Enterprise Architecture as mature elements of information resource management.

What's most interesting to me is that in 2008 more CIOs measured customer satisfaction and measured it more accurately. Here at GSA, we are very focused on measuring customer satisfaction and acting upon the results. For instance, we conduct a random survey of GSA employees who use our IT helpdesk. Customer satisfaction is very high (over 90%), but in that feedback we heard a need for more specialized agents to troubleshoot issues over the phone, rather than transfer callers to a Tier-2 engineer. Consequently we revised our helpdesk to staff the phones with specialists for email, Blackberry, and remote access (telework) issues. Since that time, our first call resolution has risen by several percentage points and user satisfaction has risen as well. We also conduct an annual satisfaction survey of all GSA employees. As a result of numerous improvement initiatives, our customer satisfaction rose by over 16 points from 2007 to 2008.

Overall, the TechAmerica survey is a great resource and I welcome your thoughts on the findings.

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I just returned from visiting Microsoft’s TechFest, an annual event in which Microsoft’s research labs come together to present their most promising new research findings. Microsoft has a big research program—over 850 researchers on six campuses worldwide.

I was interested to observe the progress being made in how people interface with and use computers. There are many alternatives arising to the traditional keyboard/mouse model, including greatly improved speech recognition and speech-to-text capabilities. One demonstration focused on computers that can respond to spoken commands while you are driving, recognizing human language to perform tasks such as sending/receiving SMS text messages, playing songs, and placing phone calls. Check out this video of a virtual receptionist that can recognize spoken requests for help. Another demonstration used a web camera to recognize letters and gestures written in the air, and translate those to text or computer actions.

My main interest, however, was in data center and network technologies. The old data center model, with its rigid topology and high fixed costs for cooling, power and management overhead, is rapidly being replaced by the cloud. Cloud computing is everyone’s favorite new buzzword, but it is not just hype, it represents a very different business and technical shift that is radically reshaping our industry. A paper from the University of California at Berkeley explains the value of cloud computing this way:

Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT.

At TechFest, I saw many new developments that will help realize the promise of cloud computing: cheaper, low-powered processors, computers that require significantly less cooling, greatly simplified networks within the data center. Other vendors, such as Sun Microsystems, are producing blackbox data centers, which are sealed, self-contained data centers in shipping containers. These “data centers in a box,” can be assembled like Legos to create larger data centers as needed. The result of all these and other advances will be data centers that run at a fraction of today’s costs, scale and shrink capacity on demand, and are resilient in times of disaster or continuity of operations situations.

We will need all these innovations to stay in front of the growing demand for electrical power supply to the data center. Today’s largest data centers can only be built in select geographical locations, because they draw so much power they must be situated near a large power source such as a hydroelectric power plant. Longer-term, our innovative capabilities will certainly be tested to solve this strategic challenge, but from what I observed this week, there is much reason for optimism.

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