________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
I asked them to present that for now, the present, and then how they would like it to be in the
future because every one of them would want to do their functional area better--how they'd
like it to be in 1995. "Come back and tell me how you'd really like to do work in 1995 with
automation helping you." They did that. Each one of them came back, and I had them brief
our executive committee.
I need to stop, pause for a moment, and talk about our framework for dealing with our
automation. It had to do with an Information Resource Management Steering Committee,
high level, both headquarters and the field represented, and a senior level committee with a
lot of SESs and general officers.
Underneath that we had some other committees because we had started data scrubs and we
started considering configuration. We were going to have to get into configuration
management once the pilot test was done.
Page wanted to influence the action down there, so he wanted his office represented on a
users committee to represent the user. Now, I really took umbrage to that. I mean, we're
going to put people from his office to represent the user? I mean, after all, we had users-- the
district level folks--who knew a lot more than his people about users. Why should somebody
be telling us what users want? Why don't we find out ourselves?
The idea of the committee wasn't bad, but I thought the idea of his putting people on it was
bad because--as they quickly turned out--they'd just be a quick channel to him and then the
next thing you know I would be getting memos telling me how to proceed.
That certainly happened. After the first meeting of the users committee, I had a memo signed
by him from Bob Sterns--he was Page's representative on the users committee--before I
even had communication from the committee chairman, Art Denys, Southwestern Division.
So, I went to see Mr. Page and said, "Look, that's no way to operate. I mean, your guy's on
there to contribute, to help find the right solutions, not to come back with his own agenda
and, because he failed to get it in the committee, come back up here, get you all to sign a
memo telling me I have to do that and tell the committee to do certain things. I mean, that's
just not the right way to work."
Page understood and he agreed. He said, "Well, didn't he come through the chairman?" I
said, "No. The chairman offered him the opportunity to write a minority opinion, but he
didn't even do that."
He says, "You're right. They'll come through the chairman henceforth." So, we got that back
in place.
I guess I started talking about our process structure. We used that structure, then, with the
Information Resource Management Steering Committee as the overseer of the whole thing,
and each of the subordinates had a role to play as we went through the yearlong process.
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