Beth Cobert, who became acting director of the Office of Personnel Management after a pair of data breaches forced former Director Katherine Archuleta to resign, found that stepping into a rapidly-growing crisis gave her virtually no time to learn her way around.
“Since we all know that the greatest learning occurs on the job, especially in new situations, you could say we had the ultimate talent development program in progress,” she said.
Cobert, delivering the closing keynote speech at the Association for Talent Development’s Government Workforce Conference, reiterated OPM’s commitment to protecting federal employees whose information was exposed by the hack. OPM has recently signed a contract to provide identity theft and credit protection and updating the audience on its ongoing information technology and cybersecurity programs.
“This incident is a major cyber intrusion carried out against the U.S. government and demands a whole of government response, and that is how we are responding,” she said.
The response, Cobert described, includes technology and cybersecurity experts from “multiple agencies, camping out in our basement, doing work on our systems.”
Turning from the breach, Cobert also highlighted the focus on new management strategies to imbue the federal workforce with purpose and drive innovation.
“Engaged employees are more productive, they speak their minds, they think about innovative things to do. They are committed to their mission and, therefore, more likely to deliver,” she said.
As part of that engagement, Cobert pointed to OPM’s Innovation Lab, a Silicon Valley-styled think space where officials strive to streamline better approaches to bureaucracy.
OPM is also adopting is more user-friendliness regarding government services, she added.
“We need to fully understand the experience of the people for whom we are solving a particular problem in order to know the best course to take for solving that problem,” she said. “It starts with the person whose problem you are solving, not with the people doing the problem solving.”
For example, OPM is working with the Department of Agriculture to streamline applications for free-and-reduced lunches, she said.
Cobert is taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to agencies problems, large and small.
“Whether it’s helping an agency find ways to get kids more access to school lunches or managing the government-wide response to a major cyber breach, the one constant is [that it] takes talented, engaged, committed employees to tackle these challenges and to solve them,” she said.
