Tuesday, March 21 | 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
The Honorable Janice Lachance
An accomplished executive, widely experienced leader, and governance expert, Janice Lachance helps both expanding and stressed nonprofit enterprise leaders and boards with transformation and transitions, performance assessment, mission and strategy reformulation, organization re-engineering, new ventures, and executive transitions. With a collaborative style, Janice’s central focus is on how to protect and build value for stakeholders by applying best practices in the fields of strategic thinking, technology advances, social media, marketing, media relations, public policy, human resources, financial planning, fundraising, and team building.
Janice’s career spans high-level work in the government, associations and executive volunteer activities. Prior to her recent work in not-for-profit enterprises, Janice was nominated by President William Clinton and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s independent human resources agency, responsible for all policy and programs affecting the 2.1 million members of the nation’s civil service.
President Clinton charged Janice with the task of establishing and gaining recognition of the federal workforce as a national performance model. She is credited with many seminal achievements at OPM, including: reformulating the agency’s mission and strategy as well as re-engineering its 3,700 employee organizational structure and culture; expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act to permit the use of sick leave to care for a newborn or ailing family member; instituting affordable long-term care insurance for 20 million federal employees, members of the armed services, and retirees; making innovative and cost-effective improvements in health insurance and retirement programs; dramatically increasing outreach and recruitment efforts to first-job applicants from underrepresented populations; revitalizing the Presidential Management Fellows Program; and, establishing USAJOBS.gov, the Federal Government's official source for federal job listings and employment opportunity information and which attracts more than 20 million visits annually.
During the past decade, Janice has served as the managing executive in not-for-profit membership associations. Most recent examples include Interim President of the Better Business Bureau Institute for Marketplace Trust where she was responsible for innovative transformation of the BBB’s 501c3 foundation through the design and execution of comprehensive mission development, including communications, branding, staffing and fund development plans.
Janice also served as CEO of the Special Libraries Association for more than 10 years, leading the global association of 8,000 credentialed librarians and scholars who devote more than 25 million hours annually to the operation and expansion of the global information and knowledge economies on behalf of private, academic and public sector enterprise in 75 countries. Among her many SLA accomplishments as chief executive, Janice guided the reformulation of association’s mission, vision and values statements and strategic plan; nurtured a positive culture of problem-solving, innovation and progression of volunteer members to leadership positions; implemented domestic and international public policy programs focused on intellectual property, the free flow of information, privacy, and internet governance. She pioneered Click University, the first online learning and professional development member resource among library associations.
While serving as global spokesperson and champion of the librarian profession and the association, the U.S. State Department appointed Janice to be a delegate to the World Summit on the Information Society, which led to the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the multi-national/multi-stakeholder platform for Internet policy discussions and governance. Separately, the State Department appointed her as a Subject Matter Expert Speaker on the future of the information industry and librarians in the global knowledge economy and the Internet. Engagements included Germany, Egypt, Italy and Japan.
Although not a librarian, Janice was uniquely awarded SLA’s prestigious Member Achievement Award during SLA’s Centennial Conference to acknowledge her leadership on “moving the association to unprecedented success and international presence in the 21st century.” In recognition of sustained outstanding contributions to the association, the profession, and the information industry, Janice was awarded the CEO Emeritus title at the end of her SLA tenure.
A leader in her profession, dedicated volunteer, popular speaker, and trusted advisor, Janice is the President-Elect of the American Society for Public Administration (President in 2017); a Fellow of the American Society of Association Executives, an honor awarded to less than one percent of its membership; an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration where she served on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee. At the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in The Hague—the international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users worldwide, Janice was elected chairperson of the library association management section and served on IFLA’s governing board.
Among numerous awards, Janice was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Southern Vermont College in 2013 and Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government Hammer Award for advances in government-wide labor-management partnerships. Janice was born and raised in Biddeford, Maine, graduated from Manhattanville College, and earned her law degree from Tulane University. She is admitted to practice law in the State of Maine, the District of Columbia, and the United States Supreme Court.