During fiscal year 1996, the Division of Budget and Finance negotiated a cross-servicing agreement with the Department of the Interior for Commission personnel and payroll processing systems to be provided by the Department of the Interior's Administrative Service Center in Denver, Colorado, and worked with the Commission's Division of Personnel to implement those systems. The Commission's contribution to the agreement included the design and implementation of the Department of the Interior's first fully automated time and attendance payroll reporting system.

The Division of Budget and Finance managed the Commission's financial services, such as maintaining a general ledger accounting system; ensuring that effective financial policies and procedures are developed and maintained to support mission operations and to take full advantage of available technologies; issuing accurate and timely financial reports to program offices, the Department of the Treasury, and the Office of Management and Budget; and providing oversight of services received from the Administrative Service Center. The Division also carried out Commission-wide management programs for audit follow-up and reviewed and reported on internal controls. The Division planned and carried out the fiscal year 1996 budget, supported the fiscal year 1997 budget request through Congress, and developed the fiscal year 1998 budget request.

Personnel

In fiscal year 1996, the Division of Personnel managed the Commission's human resources activities, which included such services as recruitment, position classification, employee relations, performance management, and labor relations. During the year, the Division of Personnel continued working with Bureau/Office Directors in filling several key senior positions. The Division also provided valuable support to the agency's Partnership Council in implementing recommendations for improving the role of secretaries and making changes to the Commission's performance management system. Specifically, the Division of Personnel coordinated an array of seminars and training sessions geared toward maximizing the effectiveness of the agency's secretarial resource. Staff from the Division also played a key role in facilitating the Commission's transition to changes in the performance management system. These efforts included sponsoring training to foster increased managerial feedback to employees.

Also during fiscal year 1996, the Division of Personnel began utilizing the Department of the Interior's Payroll Personnel System for all payroll personnel activities. Agency managers now have the capability to generate requests for personnel actions and time and attendance records electronically through an integrated payroll personnel system.

Procurement and General Services

In addition to providing the day-to-day administrative support to the Commission, the Division of Procurement and General Services completed several significant initiatives during fiscal year 1996. These accomplishments included major contract awards for the following:

Personal computers,
Services of experts,
Legal training,
Court reporting services,
Records management,
Administrative support services for Eastern Europe, and
Facility management services.

The Division submitted reports to the Federal Procurement Data Center and the Small Business Administration describing goals and accomplishments in the procurement area for the year. The Division also administered the Commission's credit card program for purchases, which accounted for over $1 million.

Procurement and General Services completed several facility projects. These included renovating the Mail Management Center to accommodate X-ray equipment, remodeling offices on the sixth floor to obtain better utilization of office space, installing safety glass and fragment-retention film on the windows in the Child Care Center, and coordinating the relocation of regional offices with the General Services Administration.

Information and Technology Management

At the beginning of fiscal year 1996, the Planning and Information program implemented a restructuring of its functions and staff. That restructuring was the result of an extensive analysis of the organizational structure and the methods of providing the products and services needed by the customers of the Commission's information and technology resources. The program was renamed the Office of Information and Technology Management (ITM) to more clearly reflect the scope of responsibilities of the organization.

The restructuring was designed to enhance ITM efforts to meet the overall goal of the program: increasing Commission productivity and effectiveness by helping agency programs and staff make use of information and technology to improve the quality and quantity of their work. The strategy for meeting that goal has four elements:

Installing and maintaining the infrastructure of modern systems and other information resources that are necessary for the Commission's lawyers and economists to do their work,
Training and supporting Commission staff in the use of the infrastructure as effectively as possible,
Working with program managers and staff to focus resources on the Commission's priority law enforcement and consumer/business education goals, and
Coordinating and supporting a majority of the Commission's information retrieval and dissemination efforts.

New Organizational Structure

In order to more effectively meet program goals, ITM was structured into eight teams. The Chief Information Officer Team provides overall management and direction to the program, as well as administrative support in all areas. The Commission's Chief Information Officer is the leader of this team and of the ITM program. The other teams, which provide products and services directly to ITM customers, include the following: Litigation and Customer Support, Library, Information Dissemination, Information Management, Software Development, Technology Operations, and Technology Development.

Customer-Directed Approach

In general, the organization was refined to provide a closer link between the program and its customers and a more streamlined structure to improve communication and cooperation within the program. One of the most significant accomplishments of the year was the creation of the ITM Board of Directors. That group, made up of Bureau Directors, a Regional Director, and the Executive Director, met several times throughout the year to review ITM's proposals, issues, problems, and accomplishments. The Board provided invaluable assistance in ensuring that ITM concentrated on the products and services that were most important to the missions of the agency.

Management

Overall, the budgets and resources of the entire program were combined into one to provide more effective and efficient formulation, execution, management, and oversight. At the major initiative level, ITM created a structure for each project that includes a Commission sponsor, who is a senior manager from outside ITM and who has considerable knowledge about the initiative's subject matter; a project steering committee, composed of representatives from each organization that has a significant stake in the project, which helps to ensure that the project's scope and course are designed to achieve the needed results; an ITM sponsor, who coordinates the cooperation and communication between the ITM teams and the Commission organizations involved in the project; a technical project manager, who is responsible for planning and executing the project; and the project team, which is composed of staff from any ITM team that has some role in completion of the project. Each proposed major initiative is presented to the ITM Board of Directors for approval of the scope of the project and approval of the sponsors and manager. That approach ensures that each project that will consume significant resources falls within the priorities of ITM customers.

Products and Services

In addition to the ongoing maintenance of basic information and technology services, ITM completed or made significant progress on the following major initiatives.

Windows Desktop/Open Network Computing Project.--ITM completed the project, which was begun in fiscal year 1995, to acquire and install the hardware and software required to meet Commission-wide staff needs for improved local area network (LAN) services, Windows-based software, direct access to Commission data resources in various media forms, and Internet access to the outside world. The upgrade was designed to provide the requisite amount of power and capacity at the desktop, at the server, and at the central computer to support future open-network, client/server computing for mission-critical systems, along with a graphical user interface and LAN-based Windows applications.

Videoteleconferencing Services.--ITM purchased, installed in both Headquarters' buildings and each of the 10 regional offices, and trained staff in the use of videoteleconferencing equipment, which permits staff to conduct face-to-face meetings when needed, without incurring travel expenses. The new service was used very successfully to provide training to regional staff and to receive regional involvement in important discussions held at Headquarters. This technology also provides the same type of service between individual regional offices.

LANDOC Document Collection.--The collection of documents that are available to Commission staff through the automated document storage system, LANDOC, grew to over 27,000 documents by the end of fiscal year 1996. In addition to increasing the number of documents from various collections of historical documents, including important documents issued by the Commission, ITM implemented procedures to ensure that newly issued documents are added to LANDOC as they are created.

Internet Services.--The success of the Commission's Internet site (www.ftc.gov) continued in fiscal year 1996. As the number of customers who gained access to the site continued to increase, ITM and the Internet Steering Committee selected a contractor to redesign the Commission's Internet site to gather the benefits other, more mature sites have found. The result of the redesign will be a more intuitive structure that may attract more customers. During the year, procedures were implemented to ensure that both Commission news releases and underlying documents were available through the Internet soon after they were released to the public.

Telemarketing Complaint System.--In fiscal year 1996, ITM worked very closely with the Bureau of Consumer Protection to redesign the Telemarketing Complaint System. That system has been extremely important to the Commission on two major fronts. First, it captures information about problems and concerns that consumers have about the telemarketing practices of businesses throughout the country. That information is invaluable to the Bureau in identifying businesses that may be in violation of various statutes and rules. Second, because the system is available to law enforcement organizations at all levels of government, it is a powerful tool in the effort to coordinate enforcement of the law. The previous system was several years old and was based upon technological infrastructures that had become unwieldy or obsolete. In fiscal year 1996, a version of the new system, which uses current technology and is much easier to use, was made available to Commission staff. A very similar version will be made available to other users in 1997. Not only was the ultimate product successful, but the process used to produce the product, which followed the cooperative and structured approach ITM is using on all major initiatives, proved successful. Both ITM and the Bureau agreed that the close working relationship that developed during the effort will help to make future developments easier and more effective.

Matter Management System (MMS).--The effort to replace the Commission's Management Information System (MIS) with a new application made significant progress in fiscal year 1996. ITM built upon the requirements analysis, completed in 1995, which determined the types of information and functional needs that the agency has for overall management of its activities, for historical purposes, for conducting law enforcement and administrative activities, and for integration with other agency automated information systems. Software was purchased to serve as the basis for the new application, which will be called the Matter Management System (MMS), and customization of that software was begun. By the end of the year, much of the customization was completed and the new system was made available for limited testing by staff from each major organization within the Commission. Implementation of the first phase of the new system, which includes virtually all of the functionality found in MIS, is scheduled for 1997.

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