PROPOSED HOUSE AND SENATE JOINT LEGISLATIVE SYSTEMS WORKING GROUP Background
The fragmentation of legislative information policy has been a continuing problem within the legislative branch. A variety of informal operating arrangements has been undertaken in the past to coordinate information policy, but with little permanent success.
The 1977 Commission on the Operation of the Senate identified major areas of overlap, duplication, and fragmentation in Senate administrative operations, including information policy. Based on these findings, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee (from 1977 through 1981) encouraged informal collaboration between itself and the offices of the Secretary of the Senate and the Sergeant at Arms to establish a comprehensive information policy in the Senate, to define the appropriate roles for each entity, and to eliminate administrative fragmentation in other policy areas as well.
This informal arrangement was supplanted in 1981 when the Senate Majority Leader directed the Secretary and Sergeant at Arms to establish a working group comprised of senior administrative staff in their respective offices. Again, numerous informal arrangements were agreed to concerning merger and consolidation of services to Senate offices, including establishment of revised standards for providing computer and information services to Senate offices. Similar informal arrangements have existed in the House to coordinate work among House officers, the former House Information Systems, and the former House Administration Committee. But, these informal units have had no permanent authority and have not yet been able to overcome bicameral differences in setting Congress-wide information policy standards.
The issue was again reviewed more formally by the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress in 1993. A study commissioned by the Joint Committee and carried out by Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government recommended the creation of a bicameral committee to coordinate information policy for the legislative branch. Its recommendations specifically urged that Members of Congress be in control of any informal coordination mechanism in order to assure that disputes and deadlocks at the staff and administrative level could be quickly resolved.
[The bicameral committee] should have the responsibility to resolve policy issues on the deployment and use of information technology within the Congress. While many issues concerning guidelines and procedures for collaborating and coordinating activities can be worked out by senior staff managers and officials, they are often helped if they know that if they fail there is the option to take the matter to an elected official with the jurisdiction and knowledge to work it out.3Proposal
The new system will be Congress' primary legislative information system, and should be developed and maintained collaboratively by all the offices and legislative support agencies that serve the Congress. The Library recommends that the system be identified as the legislative information system of the U.S. Congress, not of either chamber alone or of any one support agency. Each office and agency which currently creates, prepares, maintains, prints, or provides access to legislative information should contribute to the system based upon its legislative responsibilities and its areas of expertise. In order to take advantage of the efficiencies inherent in modern technology, it should be a distributed system, enabling it to mirror the distributed organizational responsibilities within the legislative branch.
Because no single entity has responsibility for all legislative information, and because the system will serve both the House and the Senate, the Library recommends, as already proposed by the Committee on House Oversight, the creation of a joint House and Senate legislative systems working group to carry out oversight and coordination responsibilities for the new system. For the remainder of this report, this proposed joint legislative systems working group of Members will be referred to as the Working Group.
The Library suggests that the Working Group be created by the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, that it be chaired by a Member, and that it be composed of Members and officers from both chambers. These committees have lead policy and oversight responsibility for information technology within their respective chambers and should therefore take primary responsibility for formation and operation of the Working Group. The Library suggests that the Working Group also have official representation from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the Joint Committee on Printing, the Joint Committee on the Library, the Secretary of the Senate, and the Clerk of the House. Regarding the chairmanship of the Working Group, the Congress may wish to consider having the chair jointly appointed by the Committee on House Oversight and the Committee on Senate Rules and Administration, in consultation with the other participating committees and officers.
The Working Group would need to be supported by a formally established team consisting of the senior technical managers of the legislative organizations that would be tasked to build and maintain the legislative information system. Many of the issues to be addressed in creating a single system, such as data standards, database architecture, transfer protocols, etc. are very technical in nature and require a high degree of coordination. They cannot be resolved without extensive discussions and consultations among the various entities of the Congress which prepare, distribute, retrieve, display, and print legislative data. This team would provide the technical and management expertise necessary to make informed recommendations and to develop a viable system. They would also be able to bring together staff for subteams that will be needed to analyze various issues and then to develop agreed upon solutions. The Legislative Branch Telecommunications Network team, established several years ago by the Appropriations Committees, is a good example of a group that has worked effectively in the manner envisioned in this plan to improve and support technology that serves the entire Congress. The technical team proposed here will be referred to as the Senior Technical Team.
The Library assumes that no separate funding would be provided for staff to support the Working Group and that the Senior Technical Team would therefore provide such support. The Library believes that this would be an appropriate role for the staff involved because they are people who are already tasked by their organizations to provide legislative information system support to Congress. In this capacity they should be integrally involved in the design and development of a new system.
Finally, while the Working Group should be authorized to make decisions and resolve disagreements among organizations, the Working Group should avoid imposing requirements that would interfere with the ability of any of the contributing organizations to fulfill their other legislative mandates or achieve other elements of their mission. The Senior Technical Team should include staff who could advise the Working Group on the potential impact of the legislative information system requirements, and who could propose alternatives for achieving the goals of the system which were in concert with current operations and business practices.
The tasks of the proposed Working Group will include the following:
A. Establish policies.
B. Ensure user input.
C. Establish technical standards.
D. Set development priorities.
E. Approve implementation plans.
F. Assign responsibilities.
G. Monitor progress.
H. Make adjustments to the plan and assignments as needed.
I. Resolve disagreements over technology.In addition, the Library recommends that this report, which discusses the major technical and organizational issues and enumerates several required tasks in the development, maintenance, and operation of a new legislative information system for Congress serve as the Working Group's initial agenda.
Should Congress choose not to create a joint Working Group, it will be more difficult to achieve the goals of the legislation to create a single, integrated system that reduced duplication within the Legislative Branch. Each chamber and each support agency would continue to develop its own system, with a high probability that there would be uncoordinated, wasted effort. Congress could choose to designate one office or support agency to be responsible for coordinating the development of a single system, but it is unlikely that any one office or agency would have sufficient authority to succeed.
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