Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
see, I had an affinity for what Bob Page was saying because my own predilections were that
you should do those things.
Then I remembered back, and all my years in USACE, in 1975, '76, I heard about CE80, my
time in the Ohio River Division when I got briefed, who were the guys always talking about
the automation? It was Information Management. Now, we've taken some people, given
them the mission, come up with this Corps automation program, left them alone, really. In
our own Army, Corps way, the staff and the agency in charge have got to run with the ball.
That's true. In USACE it was really an Information Management-developed product, not a
functional component-developed product.
So, he, the Chief of Information Management, goes in to the Director of Civil Works and
says, "Let me have some time. What do you need?" The Civil Works guy says, "I'm too
busy, you know. Go develop it; go talk to my underlings." So, we had an information
management system that was developed, but it never had a buy-in by functional chiefs. So,
we had to be able to tell Bob Page that, yes, we had based it on requirements, and we had to
be able to solve his problem of our always sending somebody different over, and always a
technical guy, rather than one of Bob Page's fellow engineers. I established a very quick
principle. I put it under the "Let's make sure we win" principle, that we wouldn't send
anybody over to Page's office anymore from our Information Management shop. I would go
over. I would lead the team. I might take technical guys with me, but we were not going to
send technicians over as messengers just to get shot because he would see who they were and
shoot them just on sight.
I was doing a little damage control as I tried to grab hold of it to begin with so we could get
organized and I could do my own thinking of how we could progress. Basically, the way we
did it was, as I told Bob Page, I will accept the rose. I'll pin the rose to my chest to deliver to
him all the things he asked for.
Having gotten the rose pinned on my chest, I went out to find some other rosette getters. That
was to be the functional chief of each of the fifteen functional arenas in the headquarters.
The Director of Civil Works was really not the expert. He's got so many different parts, like
project management, like engineering. I mean, those are the people in Civil Works who ran a
stovepipe of activity who really were the Corps' experts on how you do that functional arena.
Those were the people that I wanted in charge of that functional arena.
We set up a process. It started with them. The first thing was to put together the inventory, a
list of the whole world of USACE automation, every program that we use, and match them
against each of the functional arenas.
Having done that, then each of those functional leaders was charged with figuring out how
people in that function do their work now and, second, how automation helps them do their
work. Notice I was talking requirements. I didn't start with the automation; I started with
work. That's requirements. So, the requirements are driving their automation needs rather
than automation driving their requirements, from the Page comments.
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