________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
We hammered all that out in, I think, a rather creative effort. So, you see now, what we had
done is respond to Page's requirements. We let requirements drive. We built a requirement in
each of the fifteen functional areas. We then integrated them, came up with a solution of how
we would do that, specified the parts, left some things to the districts, which provided for that
sense of decentralization we wanted. At the same time, we recognized that, out of that
process--I'm a little ahead of the game--in the economic analysis, that they would really be
spending a lot more money down in the districts to develop their individual things than we
would if we did it centrally.
We knew we had to have discipline in our future approaches, and we just couldn't let
everybody have free reign to drive on and develop on their own. That's the bad side of
decentralization.
So, having done that, we took it up. I promised the division engineers we'd interact with
them during the year. We had a briefing for them, and in the summer time frame we had all
these things culminating together. The pilot test had been ongoing, and it was producing
good results. We'd had to convert an awful lot of our programs and legacy systems into the
database requirements and into the CEAP environment, and that had taken a lot of work.
The executive committee met on Fridays and monitored the entire process and tried to break
down obstacles to make sure it all happened on time.
All of these events were coming to culmination about the 31st of July, and we programmed
that we were going to come to grips with it on the 9th of August at our Information Resource
Management Steering Committee meeting. I should say that all the other committees were
doing their work too. The users committee was reviewing these things all along. We'd
developed an economic analysis model with Doug Wiley's help, who was from the
secretary's office, and he was very helpful in showing us how we could approach that.
Now, I was going off on leave for eighteen days to Europe in August, and then we were to
brief the Chief of Engineers on the 5th of September and then Bob Page by the end of the
month. We'd finish out the fiscal year with it all approved. Then Bob Page announced he was
leaving and would be gone by the time I got back from vacation. So, we had to advance and
culminate our process much earlier. We really couldn't extend the pilot tests. We really
couldn't accelerate configuration management and all those things that were really coming to
a head on 31 July. So, we really had no way of accelerating a decision before 31 July.
So, the period from 31 July to 9 August was very intense, as simultaneously the configuration
management board met and determined the configuration. They chose to have two regional
centers and not deploy hardware to each division location as we had originally envisioned.
The users committee met, under Art Denys, and pored over all the issues.
We tried to pull together all the economic analysis and the numbers to fit the model. Mike
Yeomans, out of Information Management, worked very diligently with his folks on that.
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