Q&A: Kevin Carroll
Procurement Visionary
Delivering Results for the Warfighter
Kevin Carroll
Army Program Executive Officer
Enterprise Information Systems
As the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Enterprise Information Systems, Kevin Carroll is responsible for the program management of the Department of Defense and Army business and combat service support systems, as well as the Army’s communications and computer infrastructure. These systems support logistics, medical, personnel, training and transportation operations.
Prior to becoming PEO, Carroll was the assistant deputy chief of staff for research development and acquisition, Army Materiel Command. He also served as acting director of the Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM) Acquisition Center, Fort Monmouth, N.J., and as associate director of the CECOM Acquisition Center–Washington. During more than 25 years of government service, Carroll has served primarily as an acquisition manager and as a contracting officer on top priority DoD and Army information technology acquisitions. He entered the federal Senior Executive Service in 1996 as director of the Army Information Systems Selection and Acquisition Agency.
Carroll was interviewed by MIT Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: What do you see as the key procurement decisions facing your office in 2007?
A: We will be working on a lot of program re-baselining due to requirement changes and funding reductions, especially for our operational and maintenance-funded programs. On the positive side, we’ve delivered a lot of results for the warfighter and have made a lot of major procurement awards this year, through the Army Small Computer Program, PM Defense Communications and Army Transmissions Systems [DCATS], PM Defense Communications and Army Switched Systems [DCASS] and Biometrics. These new procurements are in place, and we think are going to be pretty successful. We’re also continuing our enterprise integration efforts, to bring things together across the various portfolios. In addition, we’re supporting new programs, such as Biometrics, the Defense Information Management Human Resources Systems [DIMHRS] and Walter Reed.
Q: You have referred recently to what you see as good and bad trends affecting military IT. What are some of the most important good trends that you see?
A: One is enterprise integration. We’re finally having people talk to each other from different domains or portfolios, such as the logistics, finance and personnel. They’re starting to look across programs to figure out how they relate together. It’s not perfect yet, and there is still a long way to go. But this business transformation push is really starting to catch on. That’s a good trend. It is driven from the Business Transformation Agency [BTA] in OSD, down into the Army. Now we’re beginning to see portfolios managed better, and working with each other to make sure that things flow from a soldier perspective—from part ordering to finance, to personnel to installing the part, to getting the people you need to do a job. That’s a good thing that’s been happening.
Another good trend is that we have been able to support the war effort with our current systems and have put money in to modernize and make sure the current systems we have are up and running and doing their jobs. We’ve been able to deliver to the soldiers with the systems we have in theater. That’s been a daily and major accomplishment. Support for the warfighter has been a very good trend; the systems are working and have gotten better. That’s what we, at PEO EIS, feel the best about.
Information assurance is another good trend. Even though we continue to experience break-ins, and are always on guard, the truth is that IA has been getting a lot more attention, from more than the information technology and security staff. The security focus on both products and on the network has improved a lot. A good example in the Army is that it used to be that when you developed software, you had to get Defense Information Technology Security Certification and Accreditation Process [DITSCAP] approval for the security approach in your developed system. But now, in addition to that, you also have to look at how the software will operate on your network, so that you have to get approval for the total solution. The push to make sure that the enterprise is protected, rather than just your application, is a very good trend, which helps to protect our information. Security has become more important in our sensitive but unclassified world, which is what most of our business systems are. So I would identify business transformation, enterprise integration, support for the warfighter and IA as some of the good trends.
Q: One of the bad trends you have referred to involves the increasing number of protests of government contract decisions. Your office recently lost a protest ruling on the Information Technology Enterprise Solutions-2 Services [ITES-2S] contract. What lessons did you learn from that experience, and, in general, how do you see protests affecting the procurement process?
A: Over the past decade, the number of protests in IT procurements has gone down. We rarely saw a protest on our procurements. But now, it seems like every one is getting a protest. ITES-2S was a big one, but we’ve also experienced them on our other programs as well. ITES-2S might have been unusual, in that it was $20 billion over 10 years. That’s a big potential carrot, and it’s hard to lose that kind of a contract. So one of the lessons we learned was that it may be better to keep our contracts somewhat smaller in scope and length. Unfortunately, we would have to do more procurements, which adds to the contracting workload. The contracting community is really overworked. But the lesson for us is to keep contracts to a five-year period, and therefore keep the ceiling dollar amount down.
Another thing was that we took a long time going through the process of oral presentations, and talking to them about their deficiencies. I’m not sure that’s always so good. Sometimes it may be better to move to a decision quicker, just as it’s better to end a personal relationship in the first year rather than the 10th year. The discussions enabled the competitors to get better over time, if they were smart, which they all were. As a result, price became more of a factor, which was not our intent. The reason we lost on ITES-2S, according to the Government Accountability Office, had to do with how the labor rates were evaluated. The judge said that the rates were not evaluated consistently. That’s why we lost it, but even the vendors in the protest were surprised that that was the issue that decided it.
In general, the reason we’re seeing more protests is in part because we’re doing more of our own contracts internally. Before, if you lost a procurement with the Army, you just kept selling through the General Services Administration or a National Institutes of Health, Transportation or Commerce contact. You always had other vehicles you could market to the Army. But because we’re pushing to get our contracting done using DoD contracts, and you now have to get a waiver from a contracting officer to go outside the DoD contracts, it’s making the stakes higher. If you lose, you might be cut out of Army contracts for five or 10 years. You can’t sell around them as easily as you did before. So that’s a factor that increases the chance of protest.
In my opinion, the contracting work force was downsized during the 90s, but the workload has gone up as we’ve outsourced more. The contracting workforce has started hiring, but a lot of the experienced people have left, so that we have a lot of younger and more inexperienced people now. From the industry people I talk to, they’re not as confident that the people they’re working with know what they are doing. If you’re not confident of the contracting staff, you think you’re going to get a procurement, and told your boss you would, and then don’t get it, you’ve got to reconcile why you lost. If you’ve got an inexperienced contract person across the table from you, and you’re not sure that he or she knows what they’re doing, that’s a factor in these protests also, I believe.
Q: You recently issued a contract on the ITES-2 Hardware program. Was the process any different as a result of the experience on ITES-2S?
A: The process was different, because it was hardware rather than services, and everyone wants to be in the service business. But what we did was to try to be sure that we got the procurement moving more quickly. If you look at the timeline, you’ll see that the time from request for proposal to the award was a lot faster. Also, the scope and potential value was more limited.
Q: What is your vision for the Single Army Logistics Enterprise [SALE] program? Where is that initiative today?
A: We have an acting PM SALE right now, Cathy Doolos. At some point, it will be a Senior Executive Service position. What PM SALE is trying to do is to bring together national and tactical logistical processes, and is an excellent example of enterprise integration. We picked up acquisition management of the Logistics Modernization Program this year, and we already had the Global Command and Control System-Army [GCCS-Army] and Product Life Cycle Management Plus [PLM+], which are the data hub and the interface from the logistics world to the rest of the world. The PM SALE’s job is to bring all those pieces together and make an end-to-end solution for the logistics community. Its logistics focus is on bringing the national and tactical levels together, and to do that with shared data and a common hub and interface. For the first time, it will give us an integrated logistics picture, and everyone from the soldier who needs something to the commander looking for a readiness picture, to the financial and command and control reporting systems.
We’re of the opinion that you can’t have a national-level Logistics Modernization Program [LMP] without a tactical-level GCCS-Army. You’ve got to have them both, and they’ve also got to be integrated with the General Fund Enterprise Business System [GFEBS]. They’re all tightly coupled together as one Army integrated solution. GFEBS will never have balanced books without SALE, and SALE might be able to do its logistics missions without GFEBS, but will always have trouble keeping track of the money without GFEBS. What’s also gotten a lot better within that community of the G-4, Army Materiel Command and Training and Doctrine Command is that they’re really working together in an integrated way. So our customers are much more SALE-oriented as well, as are our program managers. Our program managers are chartered to deliver something, and the SALE is sitting above them and making sure that they are integrating things and doing them in a smart business way.
Q: What is the role of your office in the creation of Defense Knowledge Online [DKO], and what issues and challenges have arisen as Army Knowledge Online [AKO] is being used as the base for the departmentwide Web portal?
A: The biggest issue is that everyone has been developing their system for their own purpose. The trains are running on different tracks, and it takes some maneuvering to bring them together. The Air Force has been using their portals largely for logistics purposes, and has a contract that runs for a couple more years. The Navy has been less of a portal, and more related around the IT stuff rather than functional areas. Our portal is more e-mail. We do other things, but it really came up as an e-mail system for the soldier. We’ve also been able to do authentication and authorization for people to get to applications. DKO was interested in the net-cent stuff, and doing collaborative services through their portal.
So we have all these people with different aims, funding, contractors and contracts ending at different times. Part of the hard part for the DoD is bringing that all together. [Lieutenant General Charles E. Croom Jr.], the CIOs from the services and the DoD guys have a board that meets monthly and is trying to bring all of that together and do it in a smart way. So that’s our biggest challenge—getting everyone moving in the same direction and toward the same goal, where it makes sense to do that. What’s happening right now for AKO and DKO is that, over the next two years, DISA and the Army, and maybe some of the other services, are going to start doing some things together. They’re working now on changing the appearance towards a DoD appearance.
Q: GFEBS will be a massive enterprise financial system. Are you confident this will be up to the task of managing some $100 billion and bringing order out of a tangle of legacy systems?
A: It will replace a lot of those legacy systems, some of which are 30 years old. So it’s definitely needed, and I think we can do it. One of the “bad” trends I didn’t mention is that all the future systems, such as SALE, GFEBS and others—any futuristic thing designed to replace current programs—is getting pushed further to the right as a result of funding. GFEBS is suffering from that now. They did the demonstration phase, proving that in real property they can bring value to the Army. But now they’re going to get pushed off to the right because of funding reductions. We’ll get it back on track, but will lose a year, if it doesn’t get cut again. But we believe this is the answer, and the people at OSD and BTA are trying to get finance fixed across DoD, and they know that GFEBS, LMP and SALE are the Army’s answer to getting the financial books auditable. It’s the right thing to do, and from the demonstrations, we’ve been able to prove that we can do a piece of that, and bring added value to the Army. The Air Force is doing the same thing with the Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System, and the Navy with the integrated SAP program. So it’s doable.
Q: PEO EIS now has responsibilities in regard to DoD biometrics programs. What are your plans and goals for the office recently established to oversee this technology?
A: Our mission on biometrics is to do two things—to help provide for the database in West Virginia, and to create a more modernized architecture in order to make the turnarounds on the database go more smoothly. Right now the Army is running biometrics for DoD through the Biometric Task Force [BTF] run out of the office of the G-3 of the Army. They’re in charge of the whole thing, and our job is to support them. We’re doing that through the database in general, creating a new, more modern approach to handling data such as fingerprints or irises, and the ability to turn that around more quickly. That’s the “red” force, trying to catch bad guys. We’re also working in Iraq, putting in trailers with biometric collection devices, which will allow us to check the “gray” forces—the workers who are coming on the installations. It’s to get them in more quickly and securely, and to keep out people who shouldn’t be coming in. One program is called the Biometric Identification System for Access, and the other is the Automated Biometric Identification System. Those are the two procurements that we just awarded and are responsible for executing. The BTF has a lot more responsibility, looking across the Army and supporting the entire biometrics solution, working closely with OSD.
Q: Performance-based contracting offers potential for improved operations, but also increased government workload and need for negotiations. Is it worth it?
A: It depends. On AKO, we weren’t able to pull it off the way we wanted to, because of money. For being able to run and keep open AKO, there’s no question in my mind that performance-based contracting would work well. It’s like paying someone to keep an AOL site up and running, and bringing content on occasionally. It’s within the control of the contractor to do smart things. But the trouble we have in the government, not just the Army, is that performance-based contracting works well in industry when you have stability of requirements and funding. Our problem is that we have trouble keeping both. We change our requirements a lot. And we tell you we’re going to have $10 million, and then end up with only $7 million. We end up not being able to keep the performance-based approach, because the contractor says that it only got $7 million, and so can’t do certain things. So you end up renegotiating a lot of times, and there’s an extra workload. If we could run these right, like industry does, it could be a one-time investment, and the performance-based contracts would run smoothly.
Q: The Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care [MC4] program has won praise for improving medical information for deployed forces. How is that program benefiting warfighters in Southwest Asia and elsewhere?
A: It’s the first time ever that DoD has had a digital patient record in theater. Finally, you as a soldier have a medic who has your name and records, and when they do things to you it’s kept track of. When they get back to a facility, if you’re sick or injured they can now sync the data up and it can be shared by the enterprise. So if you’re being flown back to Germany for injuries, your records will be there. In the old days, they sent a bunch of paperwork with you, and maybe it got back. Usually it didn’t, and the doctors had to reexamine you all over, and maybe treat you again with the same medicine because they didn’t know what you had received. This is so important because it enables you to improve patient care. There’s no doubt in my mind that having a record of what was done to a person as they move through the medical system is going to lead to better care. It’s a really dramatic change in the Army medical community. People realize how big a change this has been for the tactical medic.
Q: What are some of your other important recent projects to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan?
A: The Movement Tracking System has been very successful, and we’re up to almost 7,000 users now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The logistics systems that we have out there today, of which there are about 15, are working very well, and we’re very happy with them. In the comms area, we now have VSAT solutions and other solutions including cell towers that we’ve been putting up in Iraq and Afghanistan. That infrastructure has paid off. You can’t use AKO, or the personnel or medical systems, without connectivity. Before, the combat service support area that PEO EIS supports wasn’t on the list to get stuff like that. So our PMs, such as DCATS and DCASS, are putting in infrastructure that has really expanded the bandwidth for our communities. That’s been very successful, and has been done under harsh conditions. Putting up a cell tower in Iraq or Afghanistan is life and death, so we’ve been fortunate with that. We’ve had only a couple of local contractors killed. So that whole comms backbone has been a big thing.
Also, there is the personnel stuff that we’re doing. For the first time ever, they now know exactly where a soldier is. In Desert Storm, there was trouble when they believed chemical weapons had been used, but they didn’t know where people were or what they might have been exposed to. We didn’t have records of where individual soldiers were. Now we have a record of where everyone is every day. Even if they go somewhere, it records where they went. It’s not a GPS system, so a person might have gone off somewhere. But we can pin pretty closely where everyone has been at all times in theater. So the Deployed Theater Accountability System has been a big success. [Undersecretary of Defense Personnel and Readiness David Chu], who’s the head of DoD personnel, has been a big supporter of making that standard from here on out across the DoD. That was something we put together for the war. ♦
