Page 26 - FCW, November, December 2018
P. 26

 Public Sector Innovations
PROJECT: Ambient Temperature Monitoring in the Global Health Supply Chain
U.S. Agency for International Development
Using sensors to understand
temperature’s effect on the
supply chain
Medicine can be temperamental when it comes to temperature. “It’s important to remember that these products can be less effective if they’re not kept in the right conditions,” said Scott Dubin, team lead for warehousing and distribution at Chemonics International.
The U.S. Agency for International Development is working with Dubin and his team to create a sensor network that can monitor the temperature of medicine at various points of the supply chain, from the truck to the warehouse.
The team has deployed cloud-connected sensors on the exterior and interior of warehouses in Mozambique and is working on doing the same in other countries. The sensors will provide insight into how long it takes the outside temperature to affect the indoor environment, which will lead
to recommendations for reducing so- called temperature excursions. Solutions could include upgrades to warehouses or packaging.
The sensors are connected to the cloud via a SIM card or gateway. In addition, sensor-outfitted trucks will have GPS units so that their locations can be tracked along with temperatures.
In the past, an on-site person typically collected such data as infrequently as once a day. “We wanted to remove the human interaction and have something that’s constantly running and easy to maintain,” Dubin said.
PROJECT: Business Intelligence for Better Oversight Government Accountability Office
Auditing the auditors
The Government Accountability Office analyzes the operations of other federal agencies and points out where they are inefficient or misallocating resources. So it’s only logical that GAO would eventually turn its gaze inward.
The core of GAO’s operational effectiveness lies in the many auditor teams the agency deploys. Approximately 80 percent of its budget is dedicated to employee salaries and benefits, making people by far the agency’s most valuable resource.
Unfortunately, GAO’s leaders had little insight into how efficiently they were putting those assets to use, said Gaurab Shrestha, a systems manager at the agency. Teams tracked their hours using different spreadsheet formats, making it difficult to compare spending across projects, predict future spending needs or identify areas for cost savings.
“There was no efficiency in terms of how we were doing things, and we were not able to provide anything in a timely manner,” Shrestha said. “We would do it, but there was a lot of struggling.”
To address the issue, the agency developed a business intelligence system that delivers insight into a broad range
of key performance indicators. Shrestha
said the system has transformed how GAO manages spending decisions because leaders can now track trends in employees’ travel spending, for example, and analyze where employees go, how long they stay and how much money they spend at each location.
The IT team consulted with a variety of stakeholders to address any concerns about having employee activities measured on such a granular level and to emphasize how the data would (and would not) be used.
Shrestha said GAO is not alone in facing these challenges, and he believes the system
could be a model for other federal agencies. “Every agency does [its] own budgeting, work management or program management differently, but the underlying concept is the same,” he added. “You have budgets, you have staff, [and] you have some sort of succession plan.”
PROJECT: Career PathFinder Los Angeles County
Mapping your career,
LA-style
Los Angeles County has made defining one’s government career path easy and kind of fun. It’s no Hollywood star, but you do get your own icon.
The county’s Career PathFinder system has gathered 30 years’ worth of data
on how government employees — from administrative assistants to department leaders — have climbed up the job ladder. Users can zero in on a specific job they
are interested in moving to and see what percentage of people have taken a particular path to get there.
“It demystifies the process of finding your career option in the county,” said Murtaza Masood, assistant director of the county’s Department of Human Resources. “With over 2,400 job types and...500 to 700 job openings a year across 35 departments
— law enforcement to hospital system to human resources to council — it is easy
to get lost and overwhelmed with all the options that are available. Career PathFinder allows you to plan a very focused approach to career planning.”
The system walks users through a series of questions, prompting them to select a
job classification and asking whether they would like to access 15 or 30 years’ worth of data and whether they are seeking to move to or from a position. Once a user enters his or her name and chooses an icon, he or she can dive into the data.
“Once the system has that information, it can generate the up to 20 job classifications that are the most popular career moves from the user’s starting job,” said Marc Shartzer,
26 November/December 2018
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