Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
came out of congressional directive, and it came out of the Assistant Secretary for Civil
Works. Correct?
A:
Well, I will elaborate on that.
Q:
I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about what it is and why, and the problems
and considerations that have been involved for the last year.
A:
Sure. The Corps of Engineers has been embarked for a number of years, like all corporations
in America and all other government entities, in trying to figure out who handles all the
information requirements they have, and how to automate it, and do all of those things at
reasonable cost. Because there are big bucks involved and because the state of the art
changes all the time, it's a very difficult arena.
It's hard to find anybody that's done it right, you know, in government. Certainly our airlines
must have done theirs right because they can get all these tickets and do all that stuff so much
better than they could fifteen, twenty years ago.
Way back, when I was here in the Public Affairs Office, '75 to '76, we were talking about
CE80 [Corps of Engineers in 1980]. We were going to have this kind of architecture for
automation, and we had people working on it back then.
Then when I got to the Ohio River Division, '81 to '84, we would get briefs at all the annual
conferences about what the Corps' approach would be to do this and do that in automation.
Then, I arrived back last year as Ken Withers' replacement. He told me one of the things I
would have to do right off was to consider whether I wanted to be the source selection
authority for our CEAP contract. It had to do with a contract solicitation for firms to provide
the hardware, software, and communications to provide for our Corps of Engineers'
automation requirements in our MACOM role--that is, the headquarters, divisions, districts,
labs, and other field activities.
When he talked about that, the first question was whether Bob Page should be the source
selection authority, but he decided he did not want to be it. So, I inherited being the source
selection authority. Now, that came up very early in my tenure, I would guess probably
September of '89, which was my first or second month.
Q:
The contract was awarded on the 6th of October.
A:
Okay. It was immediately prior to that. The source selection really follows a process. Since
you asked me to bring you up to date on this, the Corps had gone out a year and a half or so
before that to ask for proposals to provide for Corps needs over eleven years in hardware,
software, and communications. Several firms responded, and I guess this was winnowed
down to a smaller number of three by the time I got into it.
Those three had gotten into doing certain show and tells, benchmarks, and other activities
with our staff. We had an evaluation committee, which had met and gone through a rather
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