Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

Meyerriecks helped put Defense systems on common ground

By Sami Lais, Special to GCN

Create a common operating environment for the military’s IT infrastructure, lead the team moving the Defense Department from legacy systems and mainframes to IP networks, commercial software and PCs, and act as chief architect of the Global Command and Control System used by all of DOD today.

That done, Dawn C. Meyerriecks, chief technology officer of the Defense Information Systems Agency, which provides command, control, communications, computer and intelligence support to the nation’s military forces, moved on to her next challenge: Dismantle it all and start over with the Net-Centric Enterprise Systems initiative.

The first component of the Web services-based NCES, designed under her leadership, is slated to go live in 2006.

Meyerriecks came to DISA after 11 years developing command and control systems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and—on loan from JPL—two years as chief architect of the Army Global Command and Control System in Arlington, Va.

New forays

She left DISA in July to become vice president of strategic development for AOL Inc. of Dulles, Va. But her impact on Defense systems will be significant for some time to come.

Her move to DISA came, she said, “because they were doing the next-generation command and control system.” From 1995 to 1997, she took charge of developing the common operating environment for the military’s command and control systems.

“What we did that was important was create a common computing infrastructure as a baseline,” Meyerriecks said, and we “made sure that anyone who introduced applications adhered to a rigorous set of rules for how to plug something in so it doesn’t mess up the runtime.”

The COE was a crucial part of developing the new Global Command and Control System. “We were replacing a legacy mainframe-based system that was 20 years old,” Meyerriecks said. “It was a planning system for deploying troops, but it was of very little value once you got into the theater of operations.”

The new GCCS was IP-based, client-server and tightly integrated. “That was a good thing at the time,” she said, “but the problem with GCCS today is that it doesn’t let you swap pieces out as fast as we need to. That’s what NCES is about.”

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Great Managers, IT Infrastructure, Knowledge Management, Management