The Office of Personnel Management has brought in a 25-year IT veteran, David Bowen, to serve as its new chief technology officer, an OPM spokeswoman confirmed today. His mission is to concentrate on the agency’s outdated retirement system and ensure that its new governmentwide hiring site, USAJobs.gov, continues to function properly after a rocky start in October.

Bowen, who until earlier this month had been the Federal Aviation Administration’s CIO and Assistant Administrator, will be working as a detailee with OPM’s CIO, Matt Perry, in an effort to tackle a growing backlog retiree applications.

OPM is in the midst of modernizing the government’s retirement system. Cumbersome business practices, aging technology and a shortage of qualified staff have hampered OPM’s efforts to overcome a backlog of some 60,000 retirement applications.

On average, it takes 133 days to process requests for employee salary records from various agency in order to calculate retirement payouts, according to OPM Director John Berry in testimony delivered last month to the House Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, U.S. Postal Service and Labor Policy.

Berry said OPM falls behind by 1,900 retiree applications a month.

“I am deeply troubled by the timeliness of processing retirement claims,” he said then, especially since the agency has seen a surge in retirements in 2011.

How much help Bowen will have at OPM, or will be to OPM, remains to be seen. Bowen is no stranger to running large scale IT systems. Prior to taking the CIO job at FAA in 2006, Bowen was senior vice president for IT and CIO at Blue Shield of California, which was recently reported to have had more than 2.5 million members.

During his tenure there, Bowen directed Blue Shield’s information technology, telecommunication, business recovery and web implementation resources with an operating budget in excess of $100 million.

As Bowen has surely learned over the past five years working at a federal agency, where yearly annual budgeting efforts can be held hostage to Congressional politics, trying to modernize any federal IT system is an uphill battle.

At the same time, Bohen made significant headway in bringing program management disciplines to FAA, based to a large extent on the work he accomplished at Blue Shield.

Among the key principles he brought to FAA, was the importance of a standard project organization structure that defines key roles and which drives clear accountability and decision making. He described those in a 2008 FAA presentation:

• Owner: primarily (and financially) responsible for the project; has the last word on project decisions (the accountable executive)
• Driver: typically a business unit director responsible for driving decision-making by gathering input and formulating recommendations
• Involved: those on the project team and in the business unit that are actively working on the project -the project team
• In the Loop: Outside specialists that may be brought in on assignment, or raise an issue to the project team
• Project Manager: responsible to the “driver” for successful project execution. Accountable to deliver the desired project outcome-–on time, on budget, and helps ensure planned benefits are realized.
• IT Project Manager: accountable for delivery of the information technology components of the project (the “IT Team Lead”)

“Who has these roles on your project?” Bowen asked his audience. “Not knowing may indicate a problem,” he said.

Bowen was not available to be interviewed for this article and OPM declined to add further detail about the nature of his role at OPM.

But OPM Director Berry made clear in his November report to Congress that resources have been shifted in a number of areas, including the hiring and training of additional processing specialists.

In addition, he said, “OPM also created a proof of concept of an online retirement application to demonstrate how an electronic, web-based application could be used to collect data from an applicant and his or her agency human resource office that is required when an employee retires. This information could be used to reduce dependence on the current paper process.”

Presumably Bowen will be bring some of the needed program management backbone to ensure that and other concepts get properly developed.