It's a long, hard road to homeland security

The FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence gathering agencies have been encouraged to play together nicely. The FBI acknowledges that it needs significant changes--especially on the technology front--to be more effective in the 21st century. And to top it all off, we have the proposed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as an umbrella agency empowered to protect the American people from terrorists.

While most politicians and U.S. citizens believe the concept of the DHS makes sense, it would be an enormously daunting transformation to execute. Think of the DHS as a government mega-merger. You have to pull together 169,154 employees dispersed among 100 different government organizations at an annual cost of $37.5 billion. Whoever runs the new department would answer to the White House and both houses of Congress. This command and control structure is not a manager's dream come true.

Compared to the nearly $400 million Trilogy program to install new computers and software at the FBI or getting the CIA and FBI to share data, the DHS proposal is hugely complex. The convoluted government bureaucracy and lack of a coherent IT plan make this endeavor an extraordinarily high peak to scale.

In an interview with News.com, Mark Forman, associate director of information technology and e-government at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, described the problem aptly: "[The U.S. government] is by far the largest buyer of IT products and services in the world, but we're not getting the results in terms of better quality of service and improved productivity."

The DHS project entails a massive re-engineering of several government agencies at once to replace the piecemeal, stove-piped and often redundant IT systems that exist today.

Keep in mind that technology alone is not going to prevent terrorism. In fact, it is the easier part of the equation. The government has budgeted $50 billion for information technology in the 2003 federal budget, but it will not be well spent unless the turf battles, insular culture and lack of accountability cited in the recent Congressional hearings are eliminated.

Don't expect instant results simply because a new mega-agency has been formed and some business processes automated. If the new department expects to make good on Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge's pledge to "put together all the pieces of the puzzle," and to improve response time, a clear mandate to share data as well as technology must be instilled and enforced within the culture.

Yesterday, President Bush appointed 15 members to his Homeland Security Advisory Council to provide advice on matters pertaining to homeland security, which I presume would include the formation of the DHS. The group includes a variety of distinguished former government, intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as executives from companies such as UBS Paine Webber, Dow Chemical, Interpublic Group, Eli Lilly and ABS Consulting.

Expertise from the technology sector is not well represented within this advisory council. As the practical steps are taken to formulate the DHS or whatever Congress approves, I would hope that the President and his appointees involve those who have been down the large-scale re-engineering road and can help ensure that the technology strategy is well conceived.

Foremost, the DHS would need executive leadership that can bring together the disparate organizations and create a culture closer to Silicon Valley than the Beltway. The government should get advice from companies like Intel, Dell, Cisco and others that have built strong corporate cultures and who use information technology as a key competitive weapon.

The Gerstner example
Louis Gerstner's tenure at IBM provides a practical example of how to reshape a distressed, torpid organization. When he took over IBM in 1993, the company was like a huge ocean liner headed for the rust heap. After tenures at RJR Nabisco and American Express, Gerstner stepped into IBM with a fresh perspective and shook up the entire 260,000-person organization. Over several years he built the culture in his own image: focused, customer-centric, and with no room for complacency or showboating.

FBI Director Mueller has already tapped into Gerstner's talent pool. Bob Dies, a 30-year IBM veteran, is the chief technology officer of the FBI, and Mueller just hired W. Wilson Lowery, another 30-year IBM executive, for the role of Special Assistant to manage the re-engineering and reorganization of the agency.

Maybe Gertsner needs a new challenge when he retires at the end of this year. If approved by Congress, the DHS should be looking for a chief executive who has fought the corporate turnaround battles, not just political battles.

In addition to leadership, the government needs to bring the staff of the DHS and existing agencies into the information age. The awareness, tools and skills necessary to compete with the terrorists and other tech-savvy criminal elements must be in place across the entire intelligence and law enforcement workforce.

Finally, a comprehensive IT strategy that takes into account the goals of the proposed DHS and related agencies must be formulated before any major expenditures or decisions are made. A task force should be formed consisting of business and technology experts from inside and outside the government to assess the current set of technologies, practices and capabilities across the organization. The assessment should include evaluating current RFPs or projects under way at the agencies including the FBI, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Transportation.

Based on that 30,000-foot overview, the task force could draft a plan that takes into account the strategic goals and current infrastructure of each major group within the DHS, and determine what technology elements should be common across the entire organization.

Expectations should also be clear. A fully formed DHS that cuts across federal as well state and local agencies is a 5- to 10-year project. Given that the various parts of the DHS must continue to operate while the backbone and part of the brain are transplanted, a staged deployment over several years should be plotted out, with priority given to the most critical technology issues needed to meet goals, such as collecting and analyzing data.

I am sure some government officials and others will say that the problem of getting data into the system from all ports of call, keeping it secure from outside intruders as well as unauthorized insiders, and escalating costs to outfit the DHS with more up-to-date computing tools make this approach difficult and unrealistic. Too bad. Down the road, the cost of not having a more integrated, collaborative homeland defense organization will be far costlier.

If we can put men on the moon with prehistoric computers, we can certainly figure out how to build more secure, flexible networks and applications that make it far easier to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Like any other organization in the throes of a major turnaround, it will be about leadership, focus and a little luck.

What will it take to build the technology backbone of an effective homeland defense organization? Share your thoughts in the TalkBack below.

Dan Farber is the Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet.

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