Agencies must marry workforce and tech planning

Agencies must combine workforce planning with technology planning to ensure they are not left with \"skills atrophy,\" said Frank Jones, chief human capital off...

Agencies must combine workforce planning with technology planning to ensure they are not left with “skills atrophy,” said Frank Jones, chief human capital officer at the Defense Manpower Data Center.

Jones spoke with The Federal Drive Tuesday at the Human Capital Management Defense Conference in Arlington, Va.

“We have to marry the plan for technology with the plan for people so that we’re bringing our workforce along in a manner that says we’re able to fully engage and use the technologies that are planned to be fielded not just today but 24, 36, 60, 90 months into the future,” Jones said.

Agencies today are faced with a multigenerational workforce, with an older generation that has institutional knowledge and a younger generation that has “rapid access to information,” Jones said.

“Bringing those two together in a synergistic way makes a very powerful, powerful workforce for the government,” he said.

One way DMDC is leveraging those different skills is through Microsoft’s collaboration application SharePoint. The agency is using the software in three ways — enterprise-wide, by teams and individually.

The tool is an alternative to “hooking a document to an email and sending it out to 25 individuals to ask for feedback and trying to do version control,” he said.

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