Twitter goes to Court, Career Frameworks, SES Mobility and March Madness Brackets!

Happy Tuesday… Happy Pi Day… yes, March 14… or 3.14… get it? And just so we all feel like we’re back in school again… Pi is is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of any Euclidean circle’s circumference to its diameter. [From the Smithsonian Magazine: I am Pi: Thoughts on the Ratio of the Circumference of a Circle to Its Diameter.]

Excellence.gov Award winners… Yesterday, I got to emcee the American Council on Technology and the Industry Advisory Council’s annual Excellence.gov awards. Some GREAT stuff… and some great programs being recognized. We’ll tell you about them over the next few days. But the big winner — the big prize — goes to a State Department program… Integrated Logistics Management System (ILMS). The State Department, as you know, has embassies and consulates all around the world. And how did they order all the stuff they need before? Yes — paper. The Integrated Logistics Management System has transitioned the State Department from a largely paper-based organization to the leading edge of supply chain technology. The solution is an efficient, accountable and measurable way to support the State Department’s complex, worldwide supply chain–the procurement, storage, shipment, tracking and tracing of supplies and personal effects around the globe. It is now fully deployed domestically and at 245 overseas posts in 175 countries. Congratulations to all of the nominees — it was an impressive group. I was thrilled to be a part of it. The Defense Department CIO Terri Takai was our keynote speaker and she did an amazing job talking about what is possible. So… thanks for the invite. As I say, we’ll talk about other winners in the days ahead.

On today’s program…

• Technology in the courts… We often talk about technology in the executive branch… even in the legislative branch, but there are three branches of government, and we’re going to look at the impact technology has on the courts.
• Setting your career plan: How do you make sure you’re the right career path. Frank DiGiammarino is going to give us an overview of his career framework — the first in a series of conversations with Frank.
• And government mobility — and how to do that effectively.

All that ahead..

But after the break… we start with the stories that impact your life for Pi Day — Wednesday the 14th of March, 2012… your government world in 120-seconds…

• The Office of Personnel Management is ending it’s Results-Only-Work-Environment pilot program.Federal Times says the pilot allowed about 400 OPM employees to decide on their own when and where they would work. OPM launched ROWE in June 2010, and Director John Berry hoped it would radically overhaul the federal government’s workplace culture. But Berry says the program has had mixed results. Berry said there wasn’t a big shift in participants’ work product, but supervisors hadn’t laid out their expectations clearly enough and had problems managing the employees from afar. He said OPM didn’t train them well enough at the beginning of the program. [I spoke with the creator of the Results Only Work Environment. Hear that here.]
• Congress is still not popular. A new poll from the Washington Post finds Congress remains deeply unpopular with the American public. But the poll finds that Democrats fair better than Republicans. One-third of Americans approve of the way congressional Democrats are doing their jobs, compared with a 23-percent approval rating for Republicans.
• The federal deficit is bigger than expected, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It’s more bad news for the federal deficit. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the 2012 fiscal year deficit will be $93 billion larger than expected, to the tune of $1.2 trillion. National Journal says the increase is due almost entirely to the cost of the payroll tax cut. The CBO says the 10-year deficit accumulated by 2022 will fall by $186 billion.
• Gov 2.0 thought leader Justin Herman is joining government. Herman will be joining the General Services Administration’s. He’ll be the social media lead in GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the Center for Excellence in Digital Government. TechPresident says Herman is currently an open government consultant at the Phase One Consulting Group. He starts at the end of the month.
• First there was the Peace Corps, and then Tech-For-America, now there’s FEMA Corps. FEMA is partnering with AmeriCorps to create the new unit to send young adults to disaster response and recovery efforts for 10 months to two years. They said it could save $60 million a year. The five-year agreement is open to 1,600 members a year.
• It’s a sign of the times. After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica will stop production of its multi-volume book sets. CNN Money says, starting in 2013 the company will focus solely on its digital encyclopedia and education tools.
• And over on GovLoop… March Madness. Have you filled out your NCAA March Madness Bracket yet? If you haven’t you better hurray up. Today’s the last day. And one GovLooper, Paul Binkley, says you should pick your new career the same way you pick teams to head to the final four….with your gut. Its a fascinating article and its sparking a lot of discussion on our site. So head over to our homepage and check it out. And we’ll talk about brackets later on in the program.

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Karen Eltis is a professor at the University of Ottawa Law School and the Columbia Law School, and the author of Courts, Litigants and the Digital Age.

Technology has had an enormous impact on government — and we often discuss the impact on agencies… even on legislators… but what about the courts? Yes, that branch of government is seeing big impacts too. Professor Karen Eltis is the author of a new book, Courts, Litigants and the Digital Age. She says judges are “freaked out about by technology,” and the must decide how Google, Wikipedia and other internet sources can be used by lawyers and judges. Professor Eltis told me what spurred her to write this book.

On GovLoop: The Digital Age Pressures Courts to get with the Times

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Frank’s Career Corner

The mantra for the DorobekINSIDER can be found in six words — you hear me talk about them all the time: Help you do your job better. One of the ways we will to do that is to help you further your carer. And if you’ve been to GovLoop’s Next Generation Leadership conference, you may have heard Frank DiGiammarino talk about his career framework — and it really blows people away. Frank has lead a well-rounded government career working across all levels: local, state, federal via private consulting firms, non-profit organizations and federal government itself. He has kindly agreed to join us every other Wednesday to help you chart your career path. We will lay out this framework over the next few weeks. But we start with an overview… and I asked him how he came up with this framework.

On GovLoop: Frank’s Career Corner – Got Career Advice Questions? Ask Here

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Tom Fox, vice President for Leadership and Innovation at PPS.

Whether it is the new iPad or your smartphone, people have access to a remarkable amount of technology. And the government is looking to provide information anywhere — both for citizens AND for government workers. But there are implications — and challenges.

Tom Fox is the vice president for leadership and innovation at the Partnership for Public Service. And he will join us each week here on GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER.

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Before we finish… a few closing items…

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a group of five individuals with insider-trading. The group allegedly scored more than $1.8 million in illicit profits on tips gleaned after an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The Wall Street Journal says Timothy McGee, a financial adviser at Ameriprise Financial Services, is accused of illegally trading in the stock of Philadelphia Consolidated Holding Corp. based on nonpublic information about the company’s pending merger. McGee obtained the inside information from a senior Philadelphia Consolidated executive who confided after an AA meeting that pressure over the merger was leading him to drink. McGee shared the information with a co-worker and family members.

And this isn’t government related, but… if everybody is focused on March Madness… They estimate that 45 percent of Americans will fill out their brackets this year — and yes, that is more people then voted in the 2010 midterm elections. But did you know how the brackets got their start? Chess. Yes, a chess tournament. An interesting piece in Slate that has the history of brackets. They started in the mid-1800s. One of the first single-elimination tournaments was in London… 1851… a chess tournament. No, they weren’t the kind of brackets that we see today, but… The oldest, ongoing single elimination competition… Wimbledon tennis… dates back to 1877, Slate says.

Meanwhile, amid all the focus on the sport in college, sometimes education gets overlooked. The Washington Post has a story about the bracket based on graduation rates. The coach at Virginia Commonwealth University actually gets paid extra money when his players graduate. And for those paying attention to this bracket… Notre Dame does well; UConn, not so great.

Who (Or What’s) Best at Predicting March Madness Winners? Maybe crowdsourcing your picks? Some computer algorithm — IBM’s Watson, maybe? Fast Company finds what we probably already knew… There’s no foolproof method to sports prediction, no matter how knowledgable the human, or how advanced the algorithm. The Wall Street Journal offers up its blindfold approach to the brackets.

The New York Times writes about What Your N.C.A.A. Tournament Bracket Says About You.

And finally, not to be outdone, Foreign Policy has its brackets — its Democrats vs Dictators 2012… a bracket of whether democracy or tyrants will come out on top. And in the first round for democracy… it’s President Obama going against French president Nicholas Sarkozey… while for the dictators, it is the leaders in Egypt up against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

OH — and to check out Paul Brinkley’s piece on GovLoop comparing how you pick your NCAA brackets… to how you pick your job.

And a delightful book: The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything

The producers of the GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER are Emily Jarvis and Stephen Peteritas.