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2008 Federal Real Property Association Conference Yields Surprising yet Subtle Messages
On May 6th and 7th, the Federal Real Property Association (FRPA) held its annual conference at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC. With the title “Achieving Sustainable Results” and supporting tag line “Green Building Initiatives & Sustaining Green on Your Scorecard” the conference promised and delivered a diverse program of presentations, keynotes and panel discussions on those topics of concern across the FRPA’s constituency. During his opening keynote address, Acting GSA Administrator David Bibb spoke to a series of initiatives that are affecting the design, construction and sustainment of the government’s real property assets. His keynote focused separately on sustainable green initiatives, tele-working, green data centers, energy savings performance contracting, LEED, alternative office provisioning strategies and other innovations that GSA is spearheading across government. Other speakers and panels throughout the conference dove deeper into these and other content areas. Stepping back and taking a summary view of the proceedings, the underlying theme of the two days that became apparent is convergence; in best practices, performance mandates, legislation, technology and the workforce itself. Taken in total, the practice of Federal real property management is transforming itself in several simultaneous and important ways. Convergence in Best Practices From asbestos management to tele-working to facilities condition assessments, almost twenty (20) presentations contributed to the overall focus of achieving sustainable results in real property management. As an example, and in response to a Congressional mandate, GSA is establishing a new Office of High Performance Green Buildings, supplementing the work by a similar staff office in the Department of Energy. We even heard that the break-even return on investment to achieve a LEED gold standard is as little as just three to five years. It appears that the momentum to right-size the Federal real estate portfolio is within our grasp. Just a few years ago, we were being told simply to find ways to cut waste in our portfolios. Now, we are being encouraged to use the portfolio to support a dramatically changing workforce while accomplishing a broad series of sustainability initiatives. In an earlier edition of Managing Change, we reported that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had achieved substantial reductions in required facilities space in Northern Virginia and, therefore, reduced annual lease costs by several million dollars simply by aggressively embracing a tele-working program. That’s one example, but it clearly shows that solving the facilities sustainment challenges is broader than a facilities-only solution in isolation. Best practices in going green, sustainable energy and workforce management are converging with our traditional facilities management practices. This convergence is creating avenues to new solutions in managing our facilities that were not visible (or possible) just a few years ago. Convergence in Mandates A few years back, Executive Order 13327 was the talk of the profession as agencies tried to figure out new requirements and, subsequently, how to best work with OMB to get and stay green on their PMA scorecards. Today, there is a whole lot more going on. EO 13327 has been joined in force by EO 13423 that requires environmental sustainability management and EP 13450 that requires agency-wide performance improvement management. This isn’t three problems, it is one with several parts and is supplemented by supporting and converging performance initiatives in individual Departments and agencies. At the core of these combined requirements, are a few simple truths:
Over the past several years, Managing Change tracked and reported on stalled draft legislation in the House of Representatives that aimed to codify EO 13327 and embark upon a new property disposal process for Federal agencies. For both political and administrative reasons, this draft legislation never made it out of committee. Today, we see that potential benefits (and challenges) in real property management are appearing in several Legislative initiatives and in both houses of Congress. HR-5787, HR-4106 and S-1000, plus others, are readdressing facilities disposal programs with provisions that allow for agencies to recover their costs, require aggressive towards tele-working wherever possible and mandate energy conservation and sustainable construction. We cannot predict how all this will unfold. Especially given the highly variable environment election years bring, many of these initiatives may be stalled in committee until 2009. Nevertheless, there is a legislative convergence occurring that can ultimately serve us well. By handing us a combination of new capabilities combined with mandates that will force shifts in spending priority, we have an evolving and substantial opportunity to advance our portfolio management programs. Convergence in Technology At every FRPA annual conference, we see the latest automated tools and software applications; all aimed at helping us do our jobs. Up until 2008, all of these solutions targeted information that was mostly inside our buildings or isolated to individual structures. While this trend in information management solutions continues, we were struck by the convergence of geographic information systems (GIS) into the suite of more traditional facilities and work management solutions. In our view, the industry at large is taking a giant step forward. It is certainly possible to use GIS technology to manage several types of facilities data, even though GIS was not specifically designed for that purpose. Several agencies have done this and we applaud the efforts. But, it may be that some of this occurred, in part, because GIS software was already available inside organizations and that there was some standing level of familiarity and expertise to be leveraged. Other than dealing with alternative databases, using GIS inside a building really didn’t require the same level of attention to work processes or the decision support capabilities that the marketplace delivers through the commercial tools uniquely created for these requirements. What we do think is extremely significant is that recognized best-of-class software in both the GIS market and our traditional facilities and asset management market are voluntarily coming together to create a suite of meaningful new capability. The vendor community is working together and is advancing new products that work seamlessly together, interoperating in ways that create capabilities never before available. Using GIS tools, we can now drill through to the interior of buildings and tap the data management processes and information that our facilities management systems hold. The reverse is true as well. And, the combined capability can be displayed through a single view, including performance dashboards, so that casual users can work unencumbered, receiving the information they need without having to master one or more complex applications that are now working harmoniously in the background. Planning for and analyzing the consequences of portfolio management decisions just got dramatically better. All of us should evaluate and plan for the convergence of these technologies in our workplace. And, we should all be pleased to witness that the software vendors supporting us are taking the initiative to make our work both more robust in outcome, while technologically less complicated. Convergence in the Workforce One striking observation was that this year’s conference was not particularly well attended by Federal employees, relative to their private sector peers. Many of the “regulars” from the FRPA monthly luncheons were no-shows at the conference. Why?
It is possible some decisions not to attend were the result of the typical logistical issues of workloads, schedule conflicts, expense decisions and the like; professional obstacles we all face. However, it could be viewed as something more.
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