Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
The steering committee had an executive committee. I met every Friday with that executive
committee that consisted of John Wallace, our Resource Manager; Pat Kenney, our
Information Manager; and the two project managers--that is, Ken Calabrese with CEAP and
Dave Spivey with the software development effort. We also had Terry Wilmer, who was
Deputy Director of Real Estate, and Don Cluff, out of Civil Works. We later added John
Sheehey from Military Construction.
We would meet Fridays and just try to track the process and where we were going. That was
my major sounding board. They really were helpful to me in developing my thoughts and
helping drive the whole process.
Now that I've explained the organization, what we did was have each of these fifteen
functional proponents brief on how they wanted to do business with automation now and in
1995--brief the executive committee.
Meanwhile, now, Information Management had gone to Joan Stolley and, using her as the
point of contact, contracted out to a local firm for information technical expertise. They came
in and listened to all the briefings. Each proponent briefed how he would like to be in 1995,
and we had certain measurements of how many kinds of machines, what size memory, how
many activities, how many connections they would need, so we got a real sensing of size.
I thought that was a good process. A lot of people learned a lot about their own functional
arena. It was good for us because we had the boss involved. A lot of them learned how
automation could support them, and it was a supportive thing in that our technical folks were
available to them to help them understand what could be available.
Each one of the functional proponents developed its own way of doing business. Whether it
was microprocessors or mainframe kinds of things, that kind of advice was there. Each one
built the model of how he thought it would be in 1995.
Then the contractor and Joan put it together, integrated all of that. First of all, they converted
all of the briefs to a common set approach. Then they integrated it all, thought it out, and
came back and recommended to the executive committee an approach to set up an
architecture to solve our problem.
We gave that a lot of deliberation. I don't want you to think it was an easy process. The
executive committee went out to the Fusion Center and spent two days in a workshop. Now,
you know, that was with shirt sleeves rolled up, really dialoguing and trying to figure out
what's what and how we do things--and should do things.
We then fine-tuned a little bit, but essentially put together and brought the recommendation
that we establish a core architecture, which was to have regional centers that everybody,
meaning the headquarters activities or divisions or districts or labs, would connect to for
communications. We at USACE would drive the system, the architecture, and we would
provide the mainframe computers, serve the system, plus do central processing. We'd leave
district organizations to themselves. However, we would buy their communications link.
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