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GCN Home > 11/22/04 issue

Army PEO goes for the edge

By Richard W. Walker, GCN Staff

Office attempts to balance research with need to adapt quickly

Emerson Keslar has memory sticks on the mind. Keslar, CIO of the Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical at Fort Monmouth, N.J., is pondering ways the Army can use memory sticks on the battlefield.

“We try to do good market research on what’s successful on the commercial side and see how it can be leveraged in the federal government,” Keslar said. “A simple example is those little memory sticks. They’re pretty much everywhere on the commercial side of the house, but you don’t really see them on the federal side right now.”

He thinks memory sticks might be an effective way for the Army to distribute software patches in the field.

“We’ve just started looking at it and plan to do some pilots,” he said. “It’s mature technology, but what’s not mature is how to utilize it in an Army environment.”

Keslar’s slant on memory sticks illustrates the PEO’s approach to evaluating technology to meet the program’s mission: Look at technology creatively and stay on the cutting edge.

“Sometimes we bring in a technology that we may not see an immediate benefit for, but we believe that technology is going to have applicability at a later time,” he said. “We accept the fact that we’re going to have some failures as part of the game, but it’s important to stay on top of that cutting-edge technology, especially in our area.”

It’s part of the PEO’s job to evaluate and apply state-of-the-art IT to support tactical weapons systems on the modern, digitized battlefield.

“We really try to promote an environment here of bringing in new products and technologies and trying to adapt them very quickly,” Keslar said.

A comprehensive test environment is crucial to the CIO office’s methodology in evaluating technology.

“We use a test environment that’s very critical to making sure that tools we’re evaluating will integrate with existing tools,” said Kelly Lyman, senior program analyst for Robbins-Gioia LLC of Alexandria, Va., in the PEO’s chief information office. “We’re trying to pull things together from an integrated standpoint as opposed to having too many standalones.”

A case in point is the PEO’s recent rollout of Microsoft Project 2002, which lets PEO managers track the status of 35 different weapons programs across the organization. Previously, each program had its own system for managing data.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, Management, New Products / Technology, Storage Management