In the Beginning
The e-government revolution has arrived at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service with an impact that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. As recently as 1993, Deputy Director C. Richard Barnes recalls, only nine FMCS field and regional offices had computers. A few more could claim fax machines. Copying machines were so scarce that mediators and staff relied on carbon paper for most duplication purposes. “The new agency director at the time, John Wells, believed we could use technology to bring ourselves into the 21st century,” says Barnes. When Congress concurred, and provided funding, the seeds of transformation had been planted.

The shift to technology-enabled processes picked up significant momentum in

	"Anonymous brainstorming quickly gets the real issues on the table and focuses the group on legitimate concerns rather than personalities."

1999. At the time, Barnes led the agency as its Director, appointed to the position by then-President Bill Clinton. He approached a federal mediator stationed in Central Texas named Michael Wolf and asked him to come to Washington for a meeting. “I wondered if I had done something wrong,” remembers Wolf. Instead, the Director offered him the opportunity to become the lead FMCS technology innovator and implement Barnes’ vision to develop technology tools that enhance the way mediators perform their work.
Wolf said yes, and immediately began focusing on how groups can better solve problems, make decisions and implement decisions – critical activities for any negotiation. Wolf and a small team of mediators built the FMCS approach around customized off-the-shelf software. After purchasing several dozen laptop computers and setting up a web site in early 2000, a small cadre of specially trained FMCS mediators began to apply technology tools to mediation cases. A traditional collective bargaining negotiation between Levy Foods the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union was an early test, with the parties using FMCS mediators for the first time. Even though dialogue took place simultaneously in three cities, the negotiation over a new food service contract for Chicago’s Navy Pier moved along smoothly. “They trusted us,” says Wolf, today the Director of FMCS Mediation Technology Services “and it worked.”
Within the first several months, the agency’s collection of customized technology tools had morphed into the Technology Assisted Group Solutions system, or TAGS as it’s commonly referred to by FMCS customers. TAGS is based on a unique software suite, and about 200 agency-owned laptops in eleven cities that wirelessly connect to powerful mobile servers and Internet servers located at FMCS headquarters in downtown Washington. FMCS mediators have already used their TAGS technology tools in hundreds of cases, including successful interest-based bargaining negotiations between the Teachers Federal Credit Union in Minneapolis and the Office and Professional Employees International Union, and between the Rhode Island Department of Education and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals; a strategic planning session for the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers Union and its union-employing contractors, and a relationship-by-objective program involving Sunoco Chemicals and the Paper and Allied Chemical Employees union.

The Emergence of TAGS
With the TAGS infrastructure in place, Wolf and the FMCS mediators found plenty of opportunities to enhance the ways that mediators apply their skills. Meeting notification and participant preparation went more smoothly. Large audiences discovered their individual voices could still be heard electronically. Electronic conferencing eliminated the requirement that everyone had to be in the same room. Inputs were captured verbatim and completely anonymous. Consensus was achieved more quickly by using tabulated ratings and rankings to focus group discussion. Surveys allowed participants and leaders to instantly evaluate ideas. Time could be used more efficiently. “We couldn’t have accomplished in a week the work we completed with TAGS in two half-day sessions,” observed Thomas Haun, Director of Apprenticeship for the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers, after a strategic planning session involving 200 participants.

Jennifer Wood, Chief Legal Counsel for the Rhode Island Department of Education, was similarly effusive. In an article on TAGS and its potential as a collaborative technology tool for dispute resolution published in May 2002 in Pepperdine University’s Dispute Resolution Law Journal, attorney Wood was quoted as saying that, with TAGS, participants could work offline effectively to frame issues. “We were not always faced with taking a group of people out of the office to work at the same time, which resulted in a tremendous human resources saving. We had a broader conversation without enormous amounts of time invested.” Employing TAGS for interest-based bargaining, said Wood, was revelatory. “The collaborative bargaining process using TAGS altered the labor-management relationship,” she concluded, elevating respect and trust on both sides.

“ With TAGS,” recalls FMCS Deputy Director Barnes, “we were employing high-technology tools for conflict resolution, a leading-edge approach.” Barnes encouraged Wolf and his team to think even further outside the traditional boundaries of dispute mediation. New groupware applications like eRoom, mimio, Facilitate.com and NetMeeting and vendors such as BallotPoint and TrueBallot led FMCS into new alternative dispute resolution arenas, including voting services for contract ratifications, and both corporate and union officer elections.

With over 100 mediators now familiar with TAGS technology, and approximately 200 TAGS-supported events – conferences, meetings, negotiations – completed, the value is becoming more quantifiable. “We can see that the technology correctly used will lead to more and better ideas, quicker decisions and time-efficient processes,” says Wolf. “It is improvement in the 35-to-50 percent range, sometimes even more.”

One recent success was an election in Florida in 2000. The agency’s fledgling voting services accomplished something that eluded even the U.S. Supreme Court – a controversy-free, challenge-less election. Or, to be more precise, 11 concurrent elections, all held by the Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). With state-wide, regional, local and institution-specific officers on the ballots of more than 13,000 dues-paying members, the potential for, at least, confusion was there. But a program that coupled individual identification and password-protected ballots with kiosks for e-voting that recorded and tracked every action ensured, as Wolf put it, “no hanging chads.” In 2002, AFSCME Council 79 again invited FMCS to administer is officer elections in Florida, which once again were flawless and far less expensive than what AFSCME paid election administrators for past elections.

“ If there’s any certainty in this world,” observes FMCS Director Peter Hurtgen, “it’s that the impact and influence of technology will be felt to a greater and greater extent in our world, our services and our customers’ requirements. The President has urged all of us to think how to better provide e-government services, and – for FMCS – TAGS is an important part of that answer.”


Look at an IBB agenda and brainstorm session