As Published In May 2005

IT Under Stress
By Aaron Lazenby

A CIO on the front lines

It's hard to tell that Dennis Plockmeyer just endured a grueling trip home from his job in Iraq. In his blue suit, Denny—as his friends and colleagues know him—looks every inch the 58-year-old Michigan-born civil servant and former naval officer that he is, not a CIO stationed in one of the most dangerous places in the world. Nevertheless, he's now at the comfortable end of a three-day trip that started with an armored-bus ride in 130-degree heat in Baghdad and ended in a suburban Virginia office park, literally a world away from the gunfire, sand, and servers that have come to characterize his life.

"I came back to get a cap," Plockmeyer says, pointing to his mouth. "Repairing crowns is not a service that military dentists have time to undertake in Iraq. But when my dentist here told me to return in two weeks, I had to make it clear. You'd better make it stick for a couple months. I can't just pop back in for a follow-up appointment."

The isolation from amenities that most take for granted makes an already tricky endeavor—the assembly of an enterprise-grade program and asset management system—all the more difficult. For Plockmeyer, CIO of the U.S. Department of the Army's Iraq Project and Contracting Office (PCO), it's his reality. With mortar shells exploding in the background and without a Radio Shack to provide emergency supplies, Plockmeyer and his small team of IT professionals are trying to do something very difficult—build a solution to manage the massive reconstruction effort under way in Iraq and pass it off to the new Iraqi government, once it takes over.

The Foundation of Reconstruction

Think about the complexity of your IT system. Now, imagine you had to build a new set of applications to manage more than 4,000 construction projects in an area the size of California. Say you had received only 25 percent of the funding allocated to build this system, and once you received the balance, you had only three months to complete the work.

Now, to really raise the stakes, imagine you had to do all of this in the middle of a war.

Staff Matters Every manager will attest that you can learn a lot about management when you work under pressure. Here, Dennis Plockmeyer passes along lessons he has learned. Have a good idea of where you want to go, and clearly understand the underlying business requirements: Define what it is you want to do, and take into consideration the basic design parameters and technology parameters of the system you want to end up deploying. Know the limits of your solution. If you're working really fast, you need to know how much these applications bend and how much support you are going to get from the software organizations. Have a Plan B. Don't fear architectural change. Delegate, and hold people responsible for their actions. If the solution includes risk, be willing to personally accept the risk, freeing up your employees to deliver. Don't wear worry or anxiety on your face. Take time to explain the big picture. Not only will your employees grow professionally but they will also deliver beyond your wildest expectations.

After 40 years of dictatorial rule and war, Iraq's shattered infrastructure is in desperate need of repair and improvement. When it was established, in April 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the international body that governed Iraq until June 2004, made the rebuilding of Iraqi infrastructure—the electrical, sanitation, healthcare, and communications systems that were already decrepit before the war—a critical part of its postwar plan.

"The country's infrastructure was very tired and technologically dated," Plockmeyer says. "I went to a power plant with 900 employees. There were five computers in the entire place, and only one of them was turned on."

To address such inadequacies, the CPA created the Program Management Office (PMO)—the name the PCO held before the handoff of power to the Iraqi government—to manage the US$18.4 billion set aside by Congress to support the reconstruction. Traversing three cabinet-level U.S. government agencies and managing bids from contractors from 63 different countries, the PMO faced a project management nightmare. And the longer it took to get the priority projects moving, the longer the citizens of Iraq would go without dependable electricity, clean water, and reliable communications. The PMO needed a flexible and muscular computing system to do the heavy lifting—and it needed it fast.

Lessons from the Past

A longtime Navy Civil Engineer Corps officer and former CIO for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC), Plockmeyer knows large IT projects and construction. In his position at NAVFAC, Plockmeyer oversaw the IT operations to support the Navy's US$8 billion facilities maintenance budget, 15,000 employees, and more than 152 global sites.

During his tenure, Plockmeyer saw that NAVFAC's operations were built on a cycle of strategy, program design, project management, and maintenance. In this cycle, when a problem in the enterprise demanded some new thinking, a plan was created to handle it; that plan was enacted, administered, and revisited when necessary. But in 1995, when Plockmeyer went looking for an IT solution to support this lifecycle, nothing of the scope or power he required existed.

"What's interesting is that as I watched the technology mature, supporting this vision slowly became possible," says Plockmeyer. "In 1999 we were able to do something about it."

That year Plockmeyer championed a new system to automate and track work at Navy installations around the world, connecting strategic planning applications with project management tools and acquisition tracking. Using Oracle Database and Oracle Projects as its backbone, the system included applications for financial management, asset management, and project management for construction.

@ Home Hometown: Holland, Michigan Education: B.S. in Civil Engineering, Tri-State University, Indiana; M.S. in Civil Engineering, University of Maryland Favorite food: "If you're stuck in Baghdad, the thing you crave is a good charbroiled hamburger." Favorite movie: The Last Samurai Next vacation: Sailing on Chesapeake Bay Things he'll miss about Iraq: "The young people, from 25 to 35. They're the future of the country." Things he won't miss: "Things that go boom in the night."

This system provided the blueprint for his work in Iraq.

The Right Person to Lead

In September 2003, Plockmeyer got a call from his former boss and longtime friend retired Navy Rear Admiral David Nash. Nash was in Iraq working with the CPA on the reconstruction efforts. He needed Plockmeyer's help in reviewing a joint NAVFAC/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers document that defined the characteristics of a computer system they deemed necessary to support the massive construction undertaking his office was facing in the coming years. With his NAVFAC experience, Plockmeyer was able to create a list of questions Nash needed to ask of anyone who was going to help create this solution.

His questions addressed basic but far-reaching issues familiar to many CIOs planning an enterprise computing system. Would the system be Web-based to support remote operations? Were the applications powerful enough to handle a project of this magnitude? Would the applications support a multilingual configuration to broaden the user base? Could Iraqi technical skills be matured to assume the operation of these systems? Are the key applications already operating in the Middle East to facilitate long-term software and consulting support?

"About two weeks later, Nash called me back and said he didn't have anyone on his skeletal team who was equipped to answer these questions," says Plockmeyer. "So he asked me to come on board and answer the questions myself."

Having recently considered a similar request to assist with construction in Afghanistan, Plockmeyer had already prepared his life for a long, tough overseas project. He had secured time off from his current employer—construction giant Parsons Brinckerhoff—but also had other stakeholders he had to consider. "My wife wasn't crazy about the idea," says Plockmeyer, "but with the condition that I could return home for my son's college graduation, we came to an agreement."

Really Remote Computing

Plockmeyer joined the CPA in October 2003 to assess the situation and plot a course for the next six months. And at the end of that period of time, he would need to deliver his first set of functionality—the foundational program management portion of the system that identified and tracked proposed projects. However, testing of the internet link for sending work back and forth between Iraq and consultants in the U.S. showed that the speed of that connection posed some significant problems.

"It took us 15 seconds to get a pull-down menu to open," Plockmeyer says. "You could type faster than the characters could appear on the screen. Without the bandwidth, we couldn't work on the solution from the field."

The alternative was to build the solution on a server in the U.S. and fly the box to Iraq for implementation. Plockmeyer was to deliver the first phase of the program management portion of the solution by April 1, 2004. In the U.S., consultants loaded the first round of software—Oracle9i Database; Oracle9i Application Server Portal, for user access and reporting; Oracle Projects, as an integration point for open jobs; MRO Software's MAXIMO suite, for asset management; and Primavera Systems' suite for construction project management and scheduling. This first round of functionality would allow the PMO to collect information about the projects on which the team needed to work, associate these projects with a geographic location in Iraq, and start building the requirements for each project. Plockmeyer waited in Baghdad for the arrival of the system he had designed.

Commercial shipping to the region is inconsistent at best, so when the solution was completed and loaded in February, the server was put on a military cargo plane and shipped "space available." This means the server holding one of the key elements of the reconstruction of Iraq was put into a crate without a tracking number, placed on the first military flight that had room for it, and deposited in a hangar at the Baghdad airport.

"It sat in a box with my name on it until we went and picked it up," Plockmeyer recalls. "We hoped that between the airport and the palace, it wouldn't get a bullet hole in it."

Spotlight U.S. Army's Iraq Project and Contracting Office www.rebuilding-iraq.net The mission of the Iraq Project and Contracting Office is to serve the people of the United States and Iraq by contracting for and delivering services, supplies, and infrastructure identified within the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund, US$18.4 billion in resources allocated by the U.S. government for the rebuilding of Iraq. Oracle products and services: Oracle Database; Oracle9i Application Server Portal; Oracle E-Business Suite, including Financials (Financial Analyzer, Balanced Scorecard), iLearning, Projects, Purchasing, Self-Service Human Resources, and Tutor; Oracle Collaboration Suite Other products and services: MRO Software's MAXIMO Extended Enterprise, Primavera Systems' Expedition suite

The final destination for Plockmeyer's crate was the Republican Presidential Palace, the gold-plated compound that once served as Saddam Hussein's Baghdad headquarters and home to his elite military forces. Situated inside the heavily guarded "green zone," the palace now houses the U.S. embassy in Iraq as well as other administrative entities that support the reconstruction. It was in this palace—among marble pillars and swimming pools—that Plockmeyer set up his system.

"We took a ballroom at one end of the palace and converted it into offices," Plockmeyer says. "We plugged the machine into the wall, turned it on, and prayed it would start up."

The Right Information at the Right Time

It did start, and Plockmeyer's team spent the next couple of months devising ways to get project data into the new system. The information about the work that needed to be done in Iraq had been collected by a number of sources: private-sector contractors, military commanders, and Iraqi citizens. As a result, the existing details lived in a variety of systems, including computers owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and the United States Agency for International Development—both in Iraq to assist with reconstruction.

"Data standards developed in the field didn't always match the way we set the solution up," says Plockmeyer. "It became an issue of how much the database could deliver. That's where the heart and soul of this whole thing is; the applications all ride on top of it. Thankfully, the database is very forgiving and the applications are malleable."

As project data began to flow and more servers arrived from the United States, Plockmeyer's team began to assemble the project management portion of the solution. This required the integration of a number of newly installed and legacy applications to deliver the needed functionality: advanced reporting, project tracking, financial management, and others. Additionally, because Plockmeyer has no dedicated training staff and because most military construction staff is deployed around Iraq approximately 90 to 180 days at a time, the tool had to be easy to operate.

Plockmeyer wanted to give his users access to the information they need without requiring them to open up the integration engine and interact with each application. So Plockmeyer delivers reports and functionality from the different applications through the portal functionality of Oracle9i Application Server. Users can look up individual projects, drill down into details, and retrieve the information they need.

Planning for the Future

One of the other purposes of the system is to support the construction projects planned by the Iraqi government. In June 2004, the U.S. officially handed over sovereignty of Iraq to an interim government. Plockmeyer and his staff, now employees of the Project and Contracting Office under the Army, are not expected to stay on in Baghdad to support the reconstruction indefinitely. And with the first round of elections completed in Iraq, Plockmeyer needs to plan for the day he hands the system off to an Iraqi authority.

As a result, Plockmeyer's team created a redundant layer of some critical applications in the system. For example, Plockmeyer had to use some legacy systems to handle funding from the U.S. government, specifically designed for the secure transfer of money from the U.S. Treasury. Down the road, Iraq will be paying for its own construction and won't need a direct connection to U.S. coffers. So the system that currently transfers money from a source to a project needed a shadow system to take over once the U.S. leaves Iraq. "People might say, 'Why do you have Oracle Financials?' I shouldn't need Oracle Financials if I'm using the Corps of Engineers Financial Management System [CEFMS, the financial reporting backbone of the solution]," says Plockmeyer. "But the minute I unplug CEFMS and turn it over to the Iraqis, my solution becomes dysfunctional, because I'm missing the financial component."

Information technology training poses an additional challenge for the system handoff. "If you talk to young Iraqi computer scientists who have graduated in the past four or five years from a university, most have never seen a three-tier enterprise system," says Plockmeyer. "The bridge we're going to have to build to leave a system behind that native Iraqis can manage will be significant." Plockmeyer is deploying Oracle iLearning and Oracle Tutor to support the documentation and training needs of the incoming technology staff to get up to speed and prepare for the day the U.S. leaves Iraq.

Doing Something to Help

Plockmeyer leaves Virginia in two days, returning to his job in a war-torn city. Watching him relax in the comfort and security of an office complex, it's hard to imagine him dodging bullets and sandstorms to set up computers in the cradle of civilization. It's even harder to figure out, given the daily reports of mortar attacks and roadside bombings, why anyone would go back.

But beneath the buttoned-down appearance and no-nonsense demeanor beats the heart of a quixotic idealist. Plockmeyer is a person who has seen the magnitude of the challenge the international community faces in Iraq and still chooses to do his part to help dig a ravaged country out of turmoil. He says he's in Iraq simply because a friend asked him to help and he knows he can make a difference. But in moments when he takes a break from describing the details of the technology, he reveals his true motivations.

"I'm a federal employee, and my salary is capped," says Plockmeyer. "But I hired an Iraqi who grew up in Baghdad, and he tells me that we give him hope. If you choose to believe that over what you read in the papers, you can't help but stay."