Three Questions with Carolyn Austin-Diggs

Carolyn Austin-Diggs is the Director, Office of Asset Management and Senior Real Property Officer for the Department of the Treasury. She recently spoke with the editors of “Managing Change” about the importance of Real Property Asset Management within the Department of the Treasury.

Q: What do you see as the relationship between federal real property asset management and fiscal responsibility?

A: Fiscal responsibility can be defined from varying perspectives. I, however, see the relationship between Federal real property asset management and fiscal responsibility as a compelling need to avoid unnecessary spending, achieve cost savings through improved utility, and ensure a maximum return on investments. This could lessen demand on the Federal budget, with the ability to address other important Treasury and/or national priorities/needs.

Within the Treasury Department, fiscal responsibility is paramount to our mission and an important aspect of the Treasury Strategic Plan. For example, the Treasury Strategic Plan has a Strategic Objective: “Manage Treasury resources to effectively accomplish the mission …” The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) is the framework being used to achieve this objective.

Q: Which top challenges face real property professionals in the next two to five years in complying with the President's Management Agenda?

A: The challenges may vary by agency. However, a top challenge is to ensure mission decisions include the effect of all resources, particularly real property.

Treasury’s real property portfolio consists mostly of General Services Administration (GSA) leased space, with less than approximately 10 percent of federally owned properties. Complying with the PMA requires effective policy/strategy formulation and implementation that promotes comprehensive planning, use of good performance metrics, and the optimal use of space.

Good forecasting of future needs, readdressing those needs in alignment with mission responsibility, and ensuring that those needs can be accomplished with existing authorities, can be challenging. Making the best possible use of impacting programs (e.g., Telework and Alternative Workplace programs), a robust data capture and analysis capability, and systematic performance assessment process is also important. We are working to ensure the effectiveness of our non-information technology capital investment process, life cycle cost analysis and evaluation of business cases for major real property requirements.

Q: What advice would you offer for better real property asset management?

A: Have real property asset management as a high-level strategic objective and measurable management level performance metric. While allowing for an appropriate level of organizational component autonomy, the Senior Real Property Officer has to be able to exercise an effective amount of corporate program oversight and be proactively involved in the capital planning investment and Office of Management and Budget processes for real property.

Continuing communications and close coordination of the real property program with the chief financial officers, chief information technology officers, and human capital officers is important and our current focus. Involvement and integration with these organizations, early on and continuously, is vital leverage to improving and sustaining real property asset management.

My office, under the direction of our Deputy Chief Financial Officer, is working to provide the kind of leadership, vision and commitment, policy guidance, and program oversight that facilitate good ideas and management decisions.