Subject: [NEXTEL-1] After The Handover

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:25:47 -0400

After The Handover

As the transfer of power in Iraq nears, the U.S.-led authority prepares
to turn over tools to manage the assets being rebuilt
By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek
June 21, 2004

URL:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=22100925

In addition to democracy, the United States is bringing business
technology to Iraq. As the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority
prepares to hand power next week to a newly constituted Iraqi
government, technologists within the authority are huddling with Iraqi
officials to complete information systems to ensure the country can
operate and maintain the power plants, refineries, hospitals, and
thousands of other infrastructure elements under construction.

It won't do any good to build facilities if they can't be managed, says
Dennis Plockmeyer.

At the heart of the plan is an effort to introduce an asset-management
system to public officials who, in many cases, have never used anything
more than pencil and paper to manage vital national assets. "It doesn't
do any good if you build all of these facilities and then walk off
without giving the recipients the tools and the wherewithal to manage
them," says Dennis Plockmeyer, director of IT for the Coalition
Provisional Authority's Program Management Office, which oversees
logistics for all coalition initiatives.

Plockmeyer, a 53-year-old military veteran who served as CIO for the
Navy's Facilities Engineering Command, has been in Iraq since September
and will spend most of this year sharing a two bedroom, 12-by-60-foot
trailer in Baghdad's Green Zone, a fortified section of the city from
which the coalition is managing its major reconstruction efforts. He was
in Alexandria, Va., last week and is scheduled to return to Iraq
Saturday, flying on a commercial airliner to Kuwait City before boarding
a military C-130 transport plane for the journey from Kuwait to Baghdad.
"It's the five minutes before you land that you're most worried about,"
he says, referring to the sporadic sniper fire drawn by coalition
aircraft.

Plockmeyer's team could have built an IT system to run just the
coalition's reconstruction effort. That would have been cheaper and
easier, since it would function entirely in English and run on
off-the-shelf software. Instead, they opted for the complexity of
writing additional code that lets the system run in parallel in Arabic
and Kurdish. Plockmeyer needs to ensure that the investment in
technology and processes to manage the reconstruction has ongoing value
that can be transferred to the Iraqis. It's a central part of a vision
held by Ret. Rear Adm. David Nash, the Program Management Office
director and Plockmeyer's longtime friend from his years in Naval
service. "He's focused on what happens the day after the contractors
leave," Plockmeyer says. "If the lights go out and the water turns
dirty, we're right back where we started from."

To ensure that doesn't happen, staffers in the Program Management Office
have begun training Iraqi officials in how to deploy and use the
asset-management system that the office employs to track ongoing
reconstruction efforts by contractors such as Halliburton Co. and Lucent
Technologies. In the months following the handover of sovereignty to the
Iraqi government, Plockmeyer hopes to have about 150 Iraqi technologists
working side by side with Program Management Office staffers.
The technology behind the asset-management system would look familiar to
many U.S. IT managers, built around Oracle's database, project software,
and 11i business applications. That system is connected through IBM
WebSphere middleware to other engineering, construction, and
asset-management applications, such as MRO Software Inc.'s Maximo
program, and project-management software from Primavera Systems Inc.
It's housed on servers located in the Program Management Office in
Baghdad and is mirrored at a site in Virginia to permit remote
management and updates.

Connecting the various components that comprise the system was
relatively easy, Plockmeyer says. The tough part was adding additional
code that allows it to accommodate inputs and generate information in
three languages. "I've never seen anything like it in all my years of
computing," says Mike Gray, CIO at Total Resource Management, which the
coalition tapped to build and implement the system under a contract with
an initial value of $1.9 million. "It's totally unique," says Gray, a
computer-science Ph.D. and 25-year industry veteran.

Four Total Resource Management staffers have been in Baghdad since
shortly after the contract was awarded in January, and they have been
working with local Iraqi translators to create the system's trilingual
capabilities. Ray Brisbane, CEO of Total Resource Management, says
software with such sophisticated capabilities ordinarily could take
years to deploy. "Yet, we've had to deliver it in months. There's a lot
on the line to make something that is rock solid in a very short time
frame," he says. Mike McCormick, Total Resource Management's project
manager for the system, adds that his staff is working 90 to 100 hours
per week to enhance it. "It's in the interest of the Iraqi people for
all these things to move forward quickly so that conditions are restored
to what they were before the war and beyond that," says McCormick, who
spent 28 years as a Marine.

Total Resource Management's work is a small-but-central piece of the
effort throughout the country to rebuild--and, in some cases, create for
the first time--a solid IT infrastructure. For example, Lucent
Technologies has a two-year contract worth as much as $75 million to
design and build communications and IT infrastructure in 12 areas in
Iraq, including Wi-Fi networks, public-safety information networks, TV
and radio systems, and IT for the postal system. BearingPoint Inc. has a
$9 million contract to help design government policies and institutions,
including financial systems. Total Resource Management's system
automatically tells Program Management Office staffers when a new
contract has been approved and what work needs to be scheduled.
Plockmeyer hopes that within 30 to 60 days, some contractors in the
field will have the ability to input live data and progress reports into
the system using PCs that communicate with the main server via satellite
Internet links. Later, the system should let users track the status of
all construction projects within the country. A coalition or Iraqi
engineer working on, say, an oil refinery in the southern port city of
Basra could use a PC to input progress updates. Modules could be added
that would monitor the health of oil pipelines and alert authorities to
a drop in pressure caused by mechanical failure or sabotage, Plockmeyer
says.

The coalition's asset-management system also will be able to capture
data from remote diagnostic and management technologies being built into
some of the newer Iraqi buildings. Plockmeyer says some of the
construction blueprints he's seen call for utility plants to incorporate
advanced SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition)
technologies--a first in Iraq.

Coalition officials want to introduce the asset-management system to
Iraqi administrators in small doses. At present, Plockmeyer and staff
are discussing ways to apply the technology to the electricity sector
around Baghdad. Under a proposed plan, the system would be deployed at
one or two facilities within easy reach of the Green Zone, and Program
Management Office staffers would train Iraqi nationals to use it. "If we
can see success on a small scale, then I think we can see it on a big
scale," Plockmeyer says.

After months of work there, Plockmeyer believes the progress the
coalition has made in Iraq has been largely obscured by news that
focuses mostly on the day-to-day violence. The list of projects
completed or initiated under the coalition's watch--and managed through
the asset-management system--is lengthy. Each week, about $75 million in
new construction work begins, on projects ranging from water-treatment
and waste-management systems to new schools.

There are many technology-literate Iraqis anxious to apply their skills
to the rebuilding effort, Plockmeyer says. While few have worked with
advanced applications such as Maximo, many have basic technology skills
and are familiar with Oracle and other common IT environments.

"I'm getting a steady flow of resum&#233;s from young Iraqi men and
women who want to participate. They understand their skills may not be
the most current, but they're ready to learn," Plockmeyer says. If all
goes as planned, Total Resource Management would likely implement the
asset-management system at various Iraqi ministries, extending its work
in the country at least through this year. "Working shoulder to shoulder
on the same system gives you the basis for a successful turnover,"
Plockmeyer says.

Ever present in a war zone like Iraq is the threat of attacks, on
coalition personnel and any Iraqis working with them. From his living
quarters, Plockmeyer can hear and feel the mortar shells that Iraqi
insurgents occasionally fire into the Green Zone. It's a reminder that
while he's in a relatively safe haven, the streets and countryside
beyond coalition headquarters are rife with violence. Dozens of civilian
contractors have been killed or taken hostage in the months since the
initial U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The violence hasn't delayed the implementation of the core
asset-management system, Plockmeyer says. However, Internet access needs
to be widely available if it's to be fully utilized by some of the more
far-flung Iraqi ministry outposts. The violence has slowed efforts by
communications contractors, including Lucent, to deploy fiber beyond
Baghdad. For now, satellite links are needed to make most Internet
connections.
Still, Plockmeyer believes the project ultimately will be a success.
"I'm an optimist," he says. "I think this will exceed our wildest
expectations."

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/61FxlB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~-> 

-- 
    "NEXTEL-1 IT'S NOT JUST NEXTEL"
  Note The New address 
Subscribe to Nextel-1: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL-1

  "NEXTEL2 FOR iDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS"
Subscribe to Nextel2: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL2

  "WIRELESS FORUM HOMELAND SECURITY GROUP"
     The Complete Resource for Wireless Homeland Security.
Subscribe to WFHSG:  http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/WFHSG

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEXTEL-1/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     [email-masked]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/