CTO of the year

WHEN DAWN MEYERRIECKS makes decisions, lives are at stake. As CTO of the $4 billion U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), her mission is to identify, create, and implement technology to give U.S. service personnel proven and adaptable C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence) capability. Since the New York and Pentagon attacks on Sept. 11, the systems she implemented and runs have been battle-ready and battle-tested.

The day the attacks occurred, Meyerriecks knew U.S. involvement in some kind of military action was likely. Even though she wasn’t sure where the theater would be, DISA’s CTO had to make quick decisions. One of her earliest, on Sept. 12, was to lease satellite communication transponders that covered the areas of the globe where the military might respond. This quick action proved critical.

“As it turns out, had we not done that we would have been in real trouble later on,” Meyerriecks notes, adding that once nongovernment organizations realized war was coming, the competition for commercial satellite communications time became intense, and the government would have found itself in a fierce bidding war.

Tools such as whiteboarding, news groups, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) have proven important in meeting the military’s goal of putting fewer and fewer people in harm’s way, while giving those engaged in battle the benefit of Defense Department expertise. “We get a lot of support from our expert analysts that stay home but are very much engaged with prosecuting the fight 3,000-plus miles away,” Meyerriecks says.

Wireless communication and “military-unique radio” have been part of the military communication structure for a long time. Meyerriecks is not using 802.11 in the war theater yet, although she is testing new wireless technology in the lab. “Because we can’t secure it, we haven’t employed the technology,” she says. “What we’ve sent to the field is the stuff we know works.”

Logistics and SCM (supply-chain management) are a huge part of the war effort. DISA supports the Department of Defense’s (DOD) logistics and supply-chain infrastructure. “We do a lot of work for the Department, building out the infrastructure that allows contractors to register with us to sell us pencils and water and toilet paper and all those things,” Meyerriecks says.

DOD uses CRM tools, and DISA provides “plug-in points so that folks can get data to support their CRM requirements,” Meyerriecks says. “We provide the tool box and the infrastructure and the network that let [groups] like the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense accounting service do their back-office sorts of things.”

DISA also provides the applications that the Joint Task Force Commander (responsible for prosecuting the war) needs for deployment, planning operations, and monitoring the execution of operations. “At the end of the day, we’re delivering weapons on target,” Meyerriecks says. “We’re very much intimately involved in that.”

Even while overseeing day-to-day support and operations for the war in Afghanistan, Meyerriecks keeps an eye on future technology that may be critical for the next engagement, or for handling threats to the homeland. To that end, she is collaborating with leaders in the venture capital and IT communities, and is currently working on a panel with the president of Google and the CTO of Loudcloud, among others, on “both near-term and more strategic technical issues that we could team on effectively and bring capability much more quickly to the operators, to the war fighter.”

Down the road, Meyerriecks sees Web services as an important new trend. “We believe, like every-body else, that Web services are where we need to go,” she says. “We are talking about the underpinnings, the enterprise services that need to underpin that, and designing our look at where we need to go with that today.”

Despite all the mission-critical technology, Meyerriecks still sees communication as the most powerful tool she has — and it’s more important than ever in war time. “It’s all about communications and relationships,” she says. “Especially when you’re under stress, people are looking for leadership, and they all want to be working toward a common vision. Being able to communicate and having a relationship [in which] people trust [that] you’re taking them in the right direction is a force-multiplier.”