<DOC>
[107th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:84332.wais]
ACQUIRING PRIVATE SECTOR SOLUTIONS TO PUBLIC SECTOR PROBLEMS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY AND PROCUREMENT POLICY
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 26, 2002
__________
Serial No. 107-147
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
84-332 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 2003
____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
STEPHEN HORN, California PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
JOHN L. MICA, Florida CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana DC
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
BOB BARR, Georgia DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
DAN MILLER, Florida ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
DOUG OSE, California DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JIM TURNER, Texas
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
DAVE WELDON, Florida JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida DIANE E. WATSON, California
C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, Idaho STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia ------
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
------ ------ (Independent)
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
James C. Wilson, Chief Counsel
Robert A. Briggs, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on Technology and Procurement Policy
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JIM TURNER, Texas
STEPHEN HORN, California PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
DOUG OSE, California PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Melissa Wojciak, Staff Director
Victoria Proctor, Professional Staff Member
Teddy Kidd, Clerk
Mark Stephenson, Minority Professional Staff Member
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on February 26, 2002................................ 1
Statement of:
Schambach, Patrick R., Chief Information Officer,
Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Department of
Transportation; Fernando Burbano, Chief Information
Officer, U.S. Department of State, accompanied by Mary
Ryan, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs;
S.W. Hall, Jr., Chief Information Officer, U.S. Customs
Department; and Ronald Miller, Chief Information Officer,
Federal Emergency Management Agency........................ 6
Siebel, Tom, chief executive officer, Siebel Systems; Alfred
Mockett, chief executive officer, AMS, Inc.; Steve
Rohleder, managing partner, Accenture; Anne Altman,
managing director, U.S. Federal, IBM, Public Sector; Al
Edmonds, president, Federal information systems division,
EDS; David Ferm, chief executive officer, Business-to-
Business, Primedia, Inc.................................... 50
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Altman, Anne, managing director, U.S. Federal, IBM, Public
Sector, prepared statement of.............................. 90
Burbano, Fernando, Chief Information Officer, U.S. Department
of State, prepared statement of............................ 18
Davis, Hon. Thomas M., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Virginia, prepared statement of................... 3
Edmonds, Al, president, Federal information systems division,
EDS, prepared statement of................................. 101
Ferm, David, chief executive officer, Business-to-Business,
Primedia, Inc., prepared statement of...................... 108
Hall, S.W., Jr., Chief Information Officer, U.S. Customs
Department, prepared statement of.......................... 28
Miller, Ronald, Chief Information Officer, Federal Emergency
Management Agency, prepared statement of................... 37
Mockett, Alfred, chief executive officer, AMS, Inc., prepared
statement of............................................... 65
Rohleder, Steve, managing partner, Accenture, prepared
statement of............................................... 77
Schambach, Patrick R., Chief Information Officer,
Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Department of
Transportation, prepared statement of...................... 9
Siebel, Tom, chief executive officer, Siebel Systems,
prepared statement of...................................... 54
ACQUIRING PRIVATE SECTOR SOLUTIONS TO PUBLIC SECTOR PROBLEMS
----------
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Technology and Procurement Policy,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:03 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Thomas M. Davis
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Tom Davis of Virginia, Jo Ann
Davis of Virginia and Turner.
Staff present: Melissa Wojciak, staff director; Amy
Heerink, chief counsel; George Rogers, counsel; Howard Denis
and Victoria Proctor, professional staff members; Teddy Kidd,
clerk; Mark Stephenson, minority professional staff member; and
Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Good morning. I just want to
welcome everybody to today's oversight hearing on what barriers
may exist in facilitating homeland security initiatives both in
terms of change of management and technology acquisition. The
subcommittee will also hear from some of the leading technology
companies in the world about solutions they see to these
barriers.
After September 11th there has been a sea change in the
mission of government. The first priority of the Nation has
become homeland security. To win this fight, the government
must be able to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against,
and respond to terrorist activity. We must also be ready to
manage the crises and consequences of future attacks, to treat
casualties and to repair damaged infrastructures, and to move
the Nation forward. Thus, defending America in the new war
against terrorism will require every level of government to
work together with citizens and the private sector.
More than ever we are engaged in an information war. In
this war our enemies are hiding in open and available
information across a spectrum of data bases and through
stovepipes of knowledge. As we have seen, since the terrorist
attacks of September 11th generated transactions and data
points across numerous systems, including visas, border
crossings, traffic stops, cash deposits and withdrawals,
airline tickets and others, one of the most important lessons
we've learned is the need to build trust and coordination
between different agencies and stakeholders in the fight
against terrorism so that important pieces of information can
be shared in a timely manner.
To achieve better homeland security, the government needs
the ability to connect different government infrastructures and
knowledge bases through a variety of access points for
coordinating information-sharing. Unfortunately the
administration has devoted a significant percentage of
increased spending for homeland security to facilitate change,
or fortunately. In this hearing the subcommittee looks forward
to hearing about the status of the programmatic and management
challenges faced by agencies in the fight against terrorism.
Additionally we look forward to hearing from agencies on their
short-term and long-term technology acquisition strategies for
meeting homeland security mission goals.
As the private sector's experience with business
intelligence investment has shown, technology acquisitions
alone will not achieve a better coordination of information.
There are stovepipes of knowledge to overcome, and we should
not allow turf and resistance to change to hurt the homeland
security mission. Relevant information needs to be shared from
both an inter and intragovernmental view as well as from
agencies to employees, agencies to businesses, and agencies to
citizens.
Despite longstanding efforts to improve cross-agency
relationships, there has been relatively little success in
developing systems and addressing the cultural barriers within
agencies to enable different departments and agencies to share
information with other entities in a predictable and rapid
manner.
These difficulties in cross-agency communication, when
combined with technology differences, form barriers that
prevent Federal agencies from meeting their homeland security
missions. The challenge is to integrate the key data across
diverse systems in both the public and private sectors to allow
for the detection of patterns, the identification of threats
and allocation of responses to those with a need to know. To
meet this challenge, the government should adopt a two-step
strategy. First, it should make a complete assessment of its
antiterrorism knowledge needs and information-sharing
requirements throughout government. Then after a thorough
consideration of the proper information technology tools and
human capital management practices, agencies should focus on
managing changes to achieve the President's mandate: We direct
every resource at our command to the disruption and the defeat
of the global terror network.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Thomas M. Davis of Virginia
follows:]
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Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. I will now yield to my
colleague, the ranking minority member from Texas, Mr. Turner
for any statement he may wish to make.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to commend you
on hosting a hearing on this very timely subject. We all, I
think, are still reeling from the shocks of September 11th, and
I think we all understand that we face the greatest challenge
of our Nation since World War II. There is no question that the
destructive capability and the sophistication of terrorist
networks like the al Qaeda network create for us a challenge
unlike any we faced before. The tactics they use are
unconventional. They work undercover, hidden from public view.
Truly we have a challenge here that information technology can
address.
The power of technology is perhaps our strategic advantage
in the war against terrorism. As we'll hear today from some of
our witnesses, information technology and new management
techniques offer hope for improving the safety and security of
the American people. Getting all of the agencies of the Federal
Government to work together to apply this technology may be an
even greater challenge, but I have no doubt that those of you
here who will testify today will share with us many innovative
ideas that will allow the Federal Government to apply
information technology to the war against terrorism. And so we
look forward to hearing from you, and we look forward to the
challenge of trying to make our Federal agencies responsive to
the ideas that you will bring to us today.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to hearing from all
of our witnesses.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much, Mr. Turner.
Mrs. Davis, any opening statement?
The subcommittee is going to hear testimony from Pat
Schambach, the Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Department
of Transportation; Fernando Burbano, the Chief Information
Officer for the State Department; S.W. Hall, the Chief
Information Officer at the U.S. Customs Service; and Ronald
Miller, the Chief Information Officer of FEMA. On our second
panel, we're going to hear from distinguished private sector
leaders, including Tom Siebel, the CEO of Siebel Systems;
Alfred Mockett; the CEO of AMS; Steve Rohleder, the managing
partner of Accenture; and Anne Altman, the managing director of
IBM, Public Sector; Al Edmonds, president of the Federal
Information Systems Division at EDS; and David Ferm, the
president and CEO of Primedia Business-to-Business, Primedia,
Inc.
I would like to call our first panel to testify: Pat
Schambach, Fernando Burbano, S.W. Hall, Ronald Miller. As you
know, it's the policy of this committee that all witnesses be
sworn before you testify. So if you'd rise with me and raise
your right hand.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. You can be seated.
And to afford sufficient times for questions, if you'd just
limit your comments to 5 minutes for any statement. Your total
statements are going to be put in the record. We have read the
total statements. So you have a light in front of you. When it
turns orange, you have a minute to sum up, and when it turns
red, that means your time's up. And if you can adhere to that,
we can move the hearing along. Thank you very much.
We'll begin with Mr. Schambach and then move to Mr.
Burbano, Mr. Hall, and Mr. Miller.
STATEMENTS OF PATRICK R. SCHAMBACH, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER,
TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
TRANSPORTATION; FERNANDO BURBANO, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER,
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, ACCOMPANIED BY MARY RYAN, ASSISTANT
SECRETARY OF STATE FOR CONSULAR AFFAIRS; S.W. HALL, JR., CHIEF
INFORMATION OFFICER, U.S. CUSTOMS DEPARTMENT; AND RONALD
MILLER, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
AGENCY
Mr. Schambach. Good morning Mr. Chairman, members of the
subcommittee. I am Pat Schambach from the Transportation
Security Administration. I'm pleased to be here today to
testify about interagency information-sharing and knowledge
management, particularly as they relate to our newly created
agency.
Secretary Mineta wanted me to acknowledge your interest in
the Government's newest administration and to tell you that
your support is greatly appreciated. While I'm only in my third
week on board with TSA, the hard work and dedication of the
folks who arrived before me have allowed us to meet 100 percent
of the aggressive schedule that was mandated by your
legislation. We're batting 1,000 in meeting our deadline so
far. We're working hard to deliver the highest levels of
security while providing conscientious and attentive customer
service across all modes of the Nation's transportation system.
To accomplish this mission in the most efficient and
effective fashion, we will rely heavily on information-sharing
and a solid technological platform on which to operate. It's
through these totals that we'll be able to retain the
confidence of the American public in our Nation's
transportation system.
In the worlds of security and customer service, the
overarching values are responsiveness, communications, and
continuous improvement. We must always look for methods that
will provide greater security and deliver higher levels of
satisfaction to all of our constituent groups. The backbone of
this strategy is technology, and the fuel to drive our
operation will be our ability to share knowledge with a
multitude of agencies and stakeholders. Thank you for the
opportunity to report on our efforts to date.
Part of our vision is to be recognized as a model of
public/private partnership. As you may be aware, we're
receiving wonderful advice and inspiration from our Senior
Advisor Program. This program has brought us seasoned
executives from organizations like Cisco, Walt Disney World,
Federal Express, Intel, Marriott, Solectron, to name a few who
have shared their companies' best practices to help us
establish TSA on a fast track. The approaches we're developing
will have a long-lasting impact and provide direction as we
implement explosive detection systems, passenger screening
mechanisms and employee and cargo authorization systems to name
just a few. You may be aware that Baltimore-Washington
International Airport has graciously offered to be a pilot
airport for development and testing of new security approaches.
In addition, we've established a number of work-stream teams
that are addressing things such as the security work force,
technology infrastructure, performance management systems, and
baggage and perimeter security processes.
With the assistance of the Office of Homeland Security, the
Department and TSA are working in collaboration with agencies
such as the FBI, Customs, INS, and local and State law
enforcement officials to identify information-sharing needs,
sources and delivery methods to support immediate and long-term
transportation security responsibilities. As a first step in
addressing stovepipes of information, TSA is drafting memoranda
of understanding with these partners to promote data-sharing
opportunities as required by the Aviation and Transportation
Security Act.
Our objective is to ensure that our screener personnel and
law enforcement officers have immediate access to necessary
information. Technology can provide that today, and we're
looking to identify ways to best integrate technology
initiatives into our daily operations. In addition to working
with our partners, we have also spent time planning our
internal data-sharing strategy to ensure we have smooth
command, control, communications and intelligence operations
within our agency. The short-term congressional deadlines are
driving the need to find interim and short-term solutions to
communicate with our TSA staff, but as we create long-lasting
solutions, data-sharing will connect many of our constituents.
Mr. Chairman, the American people have expressed that we
need to reduce barriers to information-sharing when it comes to
ensuring security and will no longer accept excuses from any of
us. What we have are processes or policies that need to be
modified: For instance, solving overlapping and redundant
organizational responsibilities and allowing us to work more
smoothly across agencies and departments; managing the tension
between security and the free exchange of information; becoming
more comfortable with sharing information between government
and industry, and seeing that as an opportunity rather than as
a problem; managing the organizational coordination issues,
connecting the dots so that we can clearly define areas of
opportunity and get started on solutions; communicating among
the significant numbers of players--government, industry,
interest groups and, most importantly, the consumer--in all
modes of transportation; melding immediate information needs
and capabilities with longer-term strategies that are still
being developed, thereby ensuring future compatibility; and
what may prove to be the most difficult barrier of all,
overcoming attitudes that information is power, and it needs to
be hoarded rather than shared. We need to motivate people to
see the value in sharing information.
Every week we read about some new and different data-
sharing initiative by some organization or another. Even where
there is recognized value in sharing, the simple fact is many
of our systems don't talk to one another.
The major focus of TSA is to establish a blueprint of our
technology requirements and put in place a disciplined process
for making investment decisions. The blueprint will identify
our operational, telecommunications, customer relationship and
administrative needs. We anticipate we would make no
expenditure unless an investment is included in our blueprint
and vetted through a capital investment approval process.
And I will yield the rest of my time and be glad to answer
questions at the end.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Schambach follows:]
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Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Mr. Burbano, thanks for being
here.
Mr. Burbano. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the
subcommittee. I am pleased to appear before you to testify--OK.
I will start over.
Thank you Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee. I'm
pleased to appear before you to testify on knowledge management
and interagency technology cooperation. I'm accompanied by Mary
Ryan, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, who
will be able to answer any questions related to the sharing of
consular information.
The Department of State is at a critical crossroads in
terms of its position in international affairs and 21st century
diplomacy. In addition to tremendous geopolitical changes,
there has been a revolution in information technology
symbolized by the Internet. We are embracing these changes to
maintain our leadership role in the pursuit of U.S. foreign
policy. We must and are putting in place the information
technology that our people need.
The Department is helping to facilitate the creation of
common technology platforms to connect U.S. Government
personnel overseas with one another, with their local and
international counterparts, and with Washington. We need to
build our international telecommunications network and work
force to support modern business tools while guarding
aggressively against cyberthreats.
The Department of State coordinates and supports U.S.
Government agencies' international activities by providing more
than 30 agencies at 260 diplomatic and consular posts services
such as sensitive but unclassified and classified e-mail
support, telephone program management, emergency and evacuation
radio support, mail service for both official and personal
mail, and telegraphic traffic services.
One of the pillars of the President's Management Agenda is
``e-government.'' ``E-government'' means effective, efficient,
and easy-to-use tools on people's desktops; robust, secure
networks that are reliable and available whenever and wherever
needed; and ready and rapid access to the wealth of information
sources now available.
Over the last 2 years, State will spend more than half a
billion dollars procuring new information technology. We
realize that procurement alone is not the answer. We must meet
our business needs using existing technology as well as
acquiring new. We are now looking at options to implement a
replacement to the existing cable system by midyear fiscal year
2004. It would unify how all State communications are
generated, processed, used, distributed, achieved and
retrieved.
By May 2003, OpenNet Plus will provide practically all
State employees worldwide with Internet Web access, using the
existing OpenNet infrastructure. The deployment is under way
and on schedule.
By the end of 2003, the Classified Connectivity Program
will give all our eligible posts access to classified e-mail
and telegraph services as well as to Intelink and SIPRNet. This
project is on schedule.
The State Department has recently completed a prototype of
the Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration and Knowledge
Management system at our embassies and consulates in India and
Mexico. In fact, several of these vendors and bidders are
testifying in your next panel.
The deployment of ``information age'' information
technology tools throughout the U.S. Government and the use of
the Internet and SIPRNet as described above have raised the
availability of agencies to share information and collaborate
effectively to its highest level ever.
The primary barriers to the Homeland Security Initiative
and other initiatives to improve information-sharing among U.S.
Government agencies are organizational, cultural and policy
obstacles. There are security concerns as well, associated with
multi-level access and informationsharing among unclassified--
Sensitive but Unclassified and Secret and Top Secret systems.
One of State's most important functions related to Homeland
Security is the provision of consular services. State has a
very strong record of sharing data with other agencies to
enhance border security. We provide information to such
agencies as the FBI, DEA, INS and U.S. Customs.
We also receive information from the INS, Customs, DEA and
the national security agencies that help us keep terrorists,
criminals and other undesirables out of the United States.
Since September 11th, we have worked with the law enforcement
community to obtain greater sharing of information on
terrorists and other undesirables with our consular officers.
In conclusion, the Department of State has two primary
resources for the conduct of diplomacy: people and information.
There is no element of the Federal Government whose employees
are better qualified. On information exchange and knowledge
management, however, I cannot yet make a comparable claim.
Within 2 years the State Department will migrate to systems
that are both simple and smart. Diplomacy conducted by
worldclass diplomats requires no less than worldclass
information technology. You have my assurance that we are doing
all we can to reach that goal.
Mr. Chairman, I'm happy to answer any questions you and
other members of the subcommittees have. Thank you.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Burbano follows:]
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Mr. Hall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
subcommittee, for this opportunity to testify on behalf of
Commissioner Bonner and the U.S. Customs Service. Since
September 11th, the highest priority at the U.S. Customs
Service has been keeping terrorists and terrorists' weapons
from entering the United States, and protecting and securing
our land borders, seaports, and airports.
We do not expect this change in priority to have a negative
impact on our traditional law enforcement mission. To the
contrary, we have seen evidence that our heightened
counterterrorist measures have strengthened our overall
interdiction efforts. We are pleased that our efforts in
response to the terrorism threat have resulted in significant
increases in drug seizures.
Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September
11th, Customs began operating under a Level 1 alert, our
highest state of alert and readiness. We are still at Level 1
today and will remain at this level as long as deemed necessary
to ensure the security of our Nation.
We have taken a number of specific steps to improve
security along our Nation's borders and have a number of
initiatives both within and outside the agency that focus on
protecting the borders through collaboration and information-
sharing. We increased staff at every border crossing. Even
those in our most remote locations are staffed with a minimum
of 2 armed officers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To ensure
that this minimum is in place at every port of entry, we
detailed more than 100 inspectors from other ports to fill
understaffed northern border posts.
Customs established a new Office of Antiterrorism to ensure
that the various disciplines at Customs work together
effectively in the fight against terrorism. This office also
coordinates antiterrorism efforts with other government
agencies responsible for various aspects of homeland security.
Customs established the Office of Border Security whose
mission is to develop more sophisticated antiterrorism
targeting techniques for passengers and cargo in each border
environment.
Customs is also leading Operation Green Quest, a
multiagency initiative to stamp out terrorist funding by
identifying, disrupting, and dismantling the financial systems
and infrastructures that terrorist organizations use to fund
their work.
To further combat the terrorist threat, Customs instituted
Project Shield America, an industry outreach initiative
dedicated to enlisting the cooperation of U.S. manufacturers
and distributors in the identification, prevention, and
apprehension of international terrorist organizations seeking
to obtain weapons, equipment and sensitive technologies that
could be used to carry out terrorist attacks against the United
States.
Along with the Department of Transportation, Customs is
cochairing a multiagency container working group tasked with
exploring issues related to the security of marine containers
and cross-border trucks. The Office of Homeland Security has
identified this working group as the primary group responsible
for coordinating the Federal Government's response to container
security.
We have taken many positive steps toward protecting our
Nation's borders, but believe that Customs must also do
everything possible to push the border outwards. The perimeter
of security must be expanded away from our national boundaries
and toward foreign ports of departure. The ultimate aim of
pushing the border outward is to allow U.S. Customs more time
to anticipate and stop threats before they reach us and to
expedite the flow of low-risk commerce across our borders.
Any effort to push the border outward must include the
direct involvement of our partners in the trade community. In
November, Customs proposed a new Customs-Trade Partnership
Against Terrorism. This partnership is dedicated to vastly
improving security along the entire supply chain from the
loading docks of foreign vendors to our land borders, seaports,
and airports. And last month Customs proposed a container
security initiative to address the vulnerability of cargo
containers to the smuggling of terrorists and terrorist
weapons.
Technology and information-sharing are essential to our
counterterrorist mission. Timely, accurate and complete
information is vital to homeland security. Therefore, we must
mandate that the appropriate parties in the transportation
chain provide information in advance to enable Customs to
determine whether a particular shipment warrants closer
scrutiny. In fact, access to advanced information for
passengers and cargo would expand on our successful efforts to
require our airlines to submit passenger manifests to our
Advanced Passenger Information System.
The Automated Commercial Environment, or ACE, Customs'
first modernization project, will offer major advances to
expedite trade and greatly enhance our targeting abilities. ACE
will help overcome information stovepipes and enhance border
security by allowing shipment information to be analyzed prior
to arrival and enabling real-time advanced interagency
assessment of risks and threats to determine if a shipment is
to be examined or cleared for release. To comply with the
approximately 400 laws from 100 government agencies, the trade
community currently files their data with various agencies. The
International Trade Data System, the single interface for the
submission of import and export data to the U.S. Government,
will be a fully integrated part of ACE. We continue to work
closely with other government agencies and the trade community
to define information requirements and integrate these into
ACE.
Mr. Chairman, I firmly believe that Customs has the
expertise, the experience, the tools and the personnel
necessary to protect our Nation's borders and to serve as a
critical deterrent to terrorists who would target America.
Thank you again, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee,
for this opportunity to testify. I look forward to answering
any questions you may have.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hall follows:]
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Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Mr. Miller. Thanks for being
with us.
Mr. Miller. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I
appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to
discuss this critical and compelling topic.
This is an extraordinary time to be the Chief Information
Officer at FEMA. Homeland security is dominating the policy
agenda, and this is occurring against the backdrop of the
information age, which has transformed the way we deliver
government services as well as transforming our culture and our
economy. FEMA's IT enterprise sits at the convergence of these
two prevailing trends, and as the information providers for the
Nation's emergency management community, we have a charge to
deliver the best possible information as quickly as possible so
that we can provide for the protection of our people, our
property, and their way of life.
During the course of our recent review of regional and
State capabilities to combat terrorism, one of the most
critical and most frequently stated requirements is for the
Federal Government to speak with a single authoritative voice
on homeland security matters. There are several communities of
interests that are encompassed under the banner of homeland
security, emergency medical services, firefighters and law
enforcement just to name a few, and each of them has a sponsor
within the Federal Government that they turn to. Problems arise
when these sponsors send information that varies in content and
level of detail to their constituents, who often interact at
the State and local level and are left to determine which
Federal information is reliable enough to act on.
The State and local emergency managers with whom FEMA
interacts on a regular bases are particularly susceptible to
these multiple Federal information stovepipes since their
duties require that they coordinate information-sharing and
preparedness, readiness and response activities among all
entities responsible for homeland security.
The Federal Government needs to develop a new service
delivery model that better supports State and local officials
and individual citizens, particularly where the protection of
lives and property are concerned. If the defense of American
lives and livelihoods cannot engender within us a motivation to
break down the barriers to cooperation and information-sharing
within the Federal Government, then we have failed as stewards
of the resources with which the American people have entrusted
us.
In an effort to address this deficiency, FEMA's been
actively involved with the Office of Homeland Security in
identifying information-sharing opportunities. Because FEMA is
a successful model of interagency and State and local
cooperation, we bring a much-needed perspective to the
policymakers under Governor Ridge's direction.
Working in conjunction with the Office of Homeland
Security, I have assisted in advancing the administration's
agenda of integrating a Federal information management strategy
to support homeland security based on a structured approach
that addresses the following factors: The first of these is
discovery. We've been working with the State and local
governments to determine what business processes need to change
and what technology needs to be employed to improve our
information support to homeland security. The administration
recognizes that this requires a detailed understanding of how
we currently do business and what IT tools we use to get the
job done. Acknowledging the need to avoid a rush to judgment,
the administration is assuring that we clearly define the
problem before we push the solution.
The second, operational authority. The Office of Homeland
Security is responsible for policy and coordination, but not
for operations, so they are ensuring that each homeland
security IT initiative has a lead agency assigned to manage the
effort and coordinate among participating agencies, each of
which will acknowledge that lead agency's authority. If
organizational leadership is not established from the
beginning, these initiatives will become mired in agency
politics, and they can't succeed, which is an unacceptable
outcome given the gravity of the situation.
Process improvement is the third factor. We need to apply
the concept of simplify and unify to reengineer the delivery of
IT services in support of homeland security. This means
standardization across the Federal Government. It also means
simplification and relief from rules and regulations wherever
possible. This requires changing the culture of Federal
Government, which is the most significant challenge before us.
The last factor is technology, because it's probably the
easiest to resolve. Once we know how we do business, and once
we have eliminated the things that are barriers to efficiency
and effectiveness, overlaying technology will help us
accomplish those objectives in a straightforward fashion.
Industry can assist us by bringing to bear the things that they
have learned through best practices and process improvements
gathered from years of satisfying customers through effective
products or service delivery and doing so with efficiency to
sustain and enhance their operations. There is much we can
learn from private industry in terms of how they do business,
and I look forward to their expertise enabling us to learn and
develop new models from them.
I thank you for this opportunity to appear before you, and
I would be happy to take any questions at this time.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Miller follows:]
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Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. We will start with the
questioning with Mrs. Davis, but let me make one announcement
first. We do have an overflow room, 2247, because not everybody
could get in the hearing room today. I want to announce that's
there. For the people who are manning the door, you can send
people to 2247 who couldn't get in. They can see the hearing
there on closed-circuit television.
Second, just note that the administration is going to be
spending a lot of money, and Congress put a lot of money out
the door very quickly out here. And we're counting on you all
to make sure this money is spent well, that it's coordinated,
because you know the administration has instituted its own
grading system, and there are going to be ramifications for
agencies that can't do the job. There will also be
ramifications from here.
All of you are here because you have done a very competent
job of what you're doing. We want to hear what you're doing.
They can be a model for other agencies as well. But I just
finished a series of town meetings this weekend in my district,
and a lot of people said, you're spending money quickly, just
make sure we don't waste it in a procurement process. A lot of
my constituents work for contractors and for the Federal
Government, and it's really going to be up to you to make sure
this money is spent in a coordinated fashion and that we get
what we're paying for. The taxpayers are counting on you, and
the country's counting on you.
Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. Jo Ann Davis of Virginia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you, gentlemen, for coming to testify on a very important
issue this morning.
Mr. Miller, you sort of hit on my question when you said we
should request relief from rules and regulations wherever
possible to simplify our delivery models, and my question to
all of you is that within your agencies what are the major
regulatory and statutory obstacles that you believe is in your
way in integrating and sharing data, and how are you addressing
these, and is there something that Congress should do to
address these problems? And second, what reassurances could you
provide the citizens who are concerned about compromising
privacy as we integrate our data across the agencies?
And I'll start with whichever one of you wants to start
first.
Mr. Schambach. Actually I don't have a whole lot to offer,
being a brand new agency, but what we're trying to do is avoid
establishing those rigid lines that--that will keep us from
being able to share information with other agencies. I'm sure
that we're inheriting some regulatory red tape from the FAA
structure and others that we were recreated from, but I know
our executive staff is committed to keep from establishing such
a rigid structure that would prohibit us from doing the right
thing.
Mrs. Jo Ann Davis of Virginia. Thank you.
Mr. Burbano. One of the things that I think that definitely
needs to be done is the law enforcement and intel sharing
between those two entities that traditionally have been
separate. Homeland Security and Department of Justice are
working on that.
In terms of privacy what we're doing there is making sure
that our systems are totally secure with ``confidential'' and
``secret'' information.
Mr. Hall. While I would like to observe that we believe
there's a lot of sharing going on already, I think the primary
obstacles are more cultural than regulatory. There could be
some progress made in the area of relaxing some of the
statutory limitations that authorize particular agencies to
collect certain kinds of information which tends to turn that
into an ownership issue, but I find it has more to do with
willingness to share that information than any statutory
obstacles. So I think those are things we all need to work on
in terms of change management and changing attitudes, but we
might want to take a fresh look at what the statutory framework
is for the collection of some of this information, primarily in
the area of protection of privacy.
Mrs. Jo Ann Davis of Virginia. Thank you.
Mr. Miller. One of the interesting things we've discovered
at FEMA through the course of our reviews of the policies
within the agency that govern our activities is that a lot of
these policies tend to be more restrictive than the laws from
which they were generated. So one of things we're definitely
trying to do is to make sure that we're not tying our own hands
in terms of executing these laws, and trying to be as efficient
and effective as possible with the job that we have before us.
As you know, the Stafford Act governs a great many of our
activities, and as we move toward an interagency disaster Web
portal under the e-government initiative, one of the things
that we would hope to look for is some review of that act to
ensure that there are no barriers within it for cross-agency
sharing of disaster preparedness, readiness, response and
recovery information, as well as the integration of disaster
benefits processing under a single portal.
And in terms of protecting information, one of the steps
we've taken is to consolidate all of our information technology
security functions into a single office that reports directly
to me, and also establishing IT security as our No. 1 priority.
I'm not so far removed from the private sector that I remember
what it's like to be evaluated, and when we got our D in the
report card for security, that certainly was a motivation for
us to take some immediate action to try and at least put in
some structural improvements. And we're going to make sure that
whatever we need for security that it's funded, that we put
that at the top of our priority list.
Mrs. Jo Ann Davis of Virginia. Thank you, gentlemen. I
would urge that if there's anything we need to do here in
Congress to make this information-sharing an easier task for
you, because I think we all agree that it's something very
important and we need to do it now, so if you would just make
sure you just keep us informed as soon as possible.
And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much, Mrs. Davis.
Mr. Turner.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Hall, when we talk about sharing information between
agencies, there are so many different examples of where that
needs to work. One that you mentioned in your testimony where
there has been multiagency activity is in Operation Green
Quest, the effort to try to disrupt the financial system,
financial infrastructure that terrorists use. Could you
describe for us how that has worked, what agencies have been
involved? I notice you mentioned briefly in your testimony some
of the results of that work, but I'd like for you to be a
little more specific about how successful we've been in
disrupting the financial network of terrorists.
Mr. Hall. We essentially operate a joint what we call
command center today, which has approximately 70 agents from
various law enforcement organizations involved in this work.
Ones that come to mind in addition to Customs are
representation from Secret Service, the FinCEN group, and FBI.
This has been a very collaborative effort, and I would be happy
to provide statistics for the record. I don't have those on the
tip of my tongue, but I know there have been a number of
successful operations where they have identified financial
organizations that were contributing to the movement of
resources for terrorist organizations, and warrants have been
served, charges are being brought. But I would offer to provide
that to you in the record.
Mr. Turner. How have we applied technology to this effort,
and is it some new initiative, or was it simply preexisting
technology that's been utilized and to a greater degree?
Mr. Hall. To date this has largely been based on existing
information sources and systems. We have a fair amount of
financial information going into the problem. This, I think,
really reflects more of a collaborative approach to the
investigation and the prosecution of subjects once they've been
identified.
Mr. Turner. One other area that you mentioned is the Office
of Border Security. The mission of that office is to develop
more sophisticated antiterrorism targeting techniques for
passengers and cargo in each border environment. It seems to me
much of the technology that you might try to use there would
also be the type technology that our new Office On
Transportation Security would utilize. Has there been any work
between the two agencies with regard to that effort?
Mr. Hall. Yes, sir. That effort primarily is focusing on
improving the sophistication of our analytical capabilities to
identify relationships and patterns in the data that we have.
Customs has been working in this area for 6 or 7 years. We have
a number of applications that do various kinds of targeting.
Since September 11th we've been very actively engaged not only
with the Homeland Security Office and other law enforcement
agencies, but, as the Transportation Security Administration
stands up, to make our experience and lessons learned available
as well as to take advantage of the fresh thinking that's
coming from their organization.
Mr. Turner. Mr. Schambach, obviously you haven't been on
the job too long, but have you had contact with Customs, with
Mr. Hall, regarding their efforts? Is this already ongoing?
Mr. Schambach. It is ongoing. We've had teams visiting not
only other law enforcement agencies like Customs--and I've
known Mr. Hall quite a long time myself, and we have a good
working relationship--but we have visited his organization. The
airlines themselves have done a lot in this area. The airport
authorities have done a lot in this area. And as a new
organization, we're doing our best to learn the best practices
of what's been applied before and what has worked for them to
avoid duplication and overlap. That's the correct observation.
Mr. Turner. All right. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
In the testimony of the next panel, Mr. Mockett of AMS is
going to cite a project that his company's done with the
Commonwealth of Virginia in which AMS and Virginia share the
risks and rewards of the project. We often call these share and
savings contracts approaches, and in IT that, of course, limits
the government's downside if the program doesn't work. There's
a huge upside for contractors, and that sometimes will raise
eyebrows, and the public looking and are you overpaying, but it
limits the downside, and my experience in looking at IT
contracts over the last decade is there's been a lot of
downside to some of the contracts that we've gone out and let.
What are your feelings, each of you, on the possibility of
utilizing something like share and savings contracts as we move
out to make sure we can at least get what we're paying for, and
that we get the projects that work, that accomplish our
mission? It seems to me so often we end up letting projects,
and the result is whatever the result is, but it doesn't
accomplish the mission. We kind of let the regulations and the
procurement language drive the final product instead of the
actual mission we're trying to accomplish. I'd appreciate each
of your thoughts on that. I'll start here with Mr. Schambach.
Mr. Schambach. Yes, sir. Actually historically I--I have
become an outsourcing bigot when it comes to IT and reliance on
the private sector. At the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms you may recall I began an outsourcing of our Seek
management desktop computer environment, and we were the first
agency to do an enterprisewide outsourcing of the desktop. We
were just pursuing share and savings, share and revenue
initiatives at ATF when I left there to come to TSA, working
with AMS and several other vendors.
So I think there are definitely opportunities in a number
of agencies. Being so new at TSA, I haven't really identified
yet what those opportunities are in TSA. But obviously we can't
stand up an agency of tens of thousands of people in a year and
do it with government resources without relying on private
industry. There's going a to be a lot of outsourcing going on
in our agency.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Mr. Burbano.
Mr. Burbano. I think it's a good concept. It's one we
definitely need to look at and we will look at it, I think
you're also right in terms of where the public has also looked
at it and thought whether the vendors were making too much
money on it specifically. The parking one in D.C. I think is a
good example of the big public outcry. That's not to say that
it's not a bad concept, but it does need to be looked at, and
we will look at it. I think it works more on----
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Have you had some experience
with that? Have you ever worked in your own experience with
that kind of vehicle before?
Mr. Burbano. No, I haven't. But we are going to be looking
at it. I think based on what I've read, it is very good for
transactional base-type systems like the parking where you get
parking tickets and so forth. That's transactional. It becomes
a little bit harder to implement when its nontransactional, and
a lot of these applications are not----
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. It's hard to measure. I mean,
it's----
Mr. Burbano. Exactly.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Obviously it doesn't work in
areas that are hard to measure what you're trying to get.
Mr. Burbano. So you can measure tickets. In transactional
bases it works well, but you're right, in areas that you can't
measure, it's very tough.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. OK.
Mr. Hall. We've been taking a close look at share and
savings as we implement our modernization contract. Let me
generalize first and then address your specific question.
I think the Federal Government has made a lot of progress
over the last 10 years as we have streamlined and modernized
our procurement rules and regulations, and I think a good
example of that is our ability to successfully award a $1
billion plus contract in 4 months, from RP release to contract
reward. That would have been unheard of 10 or 15 years ago.
I think we're in the midst still of a lot of cultural
change though. There's still a lot of resistance to new ways of
thinking about procurement, but having said that, one of the
things that we're trying to do to implement share and savings
within our modernization effort is relook at how we can
incentivize the contractor to come in below cost and with--and
early, and we think there's a lot of promise there.
The resistance is the motivation really. You have to do
something about the balance between how much profit or fee
you're willing to pay to encourage that kind of behavior, and
you need to make sure that you've got a very credible baseline
established, that you've got very credible understanding of
what the costs would have been, how long it should have taken
so that you don't get into gaming. But we're hopeful that we're
going to be able to implement those kinds of methodologies in
the near term within our modernization effort.
Mr. Miller. This is a topic that is near and dear to my
heart. I was in the private industry for 9 years before I took
this job, and so I've been on both sides of the fence, and I
know from a private industry perspective what I would expect
from a customer to be able to deliver to them the services that
they need.
I think that there needs to be a mature procurement culture
within the Federal Government that really puts an emphasis on
definition and on measurement, on the kinds of precise things
that will allow them to properly define the work and make sure
as the work is progressing to have certain checkpoints
throughout to make sure that the project is not straying off
course.
We're taking a very hard look in our ITS directorate at the
entire set of contracts that we have right now. We've
identified 11 categories of work that we believe are critical
to what we're trying to do, and we're trying to push for
improvements in each of those areas. We're trying to eliminate
duplicative efforts where we find them, and once we identify
the type of work that needs to be done, we want to put more
performance-based documents--language into the contracts that
we go out for.
I'm not familiar with this particular type of reform, but
I'm certainly interested in it because we're trying to
basically throw open the process and really look for any
innovative ways to do business, and we really need it because
we're not in a position to, given the kinds of issues we're
dealing with in homeland security, to wait for the Federal
Government work force to become educated in all of the
processes and techniques that we need to learn.
I think we can work as a team. We know what we need to do,
we know what we need to execute, but somebody needs to help us
get there quickly, and I think that's where private industry
offers an invaluable service.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
Mr. Turner.
Mr. Turner. Mr. Schambach, I had a question that I wanted
to address to you that was brought to my attention by one of my
colleagues the other day at the airport when he showed me a
little card that had been demonstrated to him recently allowing
him to be identified as he boarded or could be used to identify
him as he boards. Is it your thinking that there needs to be
some way of advanced screening of at least frequent fliers so
that those individuals could have a little easier process of
boarding and going through security? Is that kind of the
direction you're trying to go? And I know there's technology
out there to do that, such as the card that one of my
colleagues showed me. Is that a direction that you're trying to
head?
Mr. Schambach. Well, that's probably, as you know, a very
thorny issue that I'm--I'm probably going to avoid a direct
response to. However, we do have one of our work-stream teams
looking at biometric and card technology.
As you--as you say, there's technology existing today that
will do what needs to be done. Our primary focus is going to be
on the tens of thousands of employees and others who need
access in and around airport perimeter and interior space. If
we could free up security resources from having to check and
double-check those employees, then we can free up a lot of
resources to do more with the traveling public.
The issue of a frequent flyer, frequent identification
card, there's a lot of policy impacts around that issue and not
something that I'm intimately familiar with and can give you a
direct answer to. I have a personal opinion. I don't know that
trusted today means trusted tomorrow from a security
perspective. I have questions about the validity of that
assumption. However, from a technological standpoint there are
certainly plenty of answers out there today.
Mr. Turner. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you.
I just have a few more questions to sum up with this panel
before we move to the next. Let me ask Mr. Burbano, in this
statement in the next panel, Mr. Rohleder of Accenture is going
to note that the State Department prototype system, the
Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration system which uses
Web-based collaboration tools to provide knowledge management
and collaboration tools over an Intranet of 40 Federal
agencies, I wonder if you've evaluated that at State and the
effectiveness of this prototype.
Mr. Burbano. We've just finished the prototype evaluation
in India-Mexico. We're getting ready to announce the award. As
a matter of fact, today from the three finalist vendors. The
winner will then integrate the package and start the pilot in
May with a wrap-up in September.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. So--OK. So we'll know today at
least who you're selecting on this, and you think the prototype
then has a lot of utility?
Mr. Burbano. Absolutely. In fact, I just got back from
India last week where I visited the embassy and two consulates.
I had a chance to talk to the various folks, business types and
IT, from the State Department, and the various agencies out
there, and there was unanimous, strong support for these
systems. In fact, many of these people participated in the
evaluation and are just really geared up to get the award and
get it rolling!
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. And you're comfortable with the
level of bids and services that came in on that?
Mr. Burbano. Absolutely. We did a two-stage procurement.
Normally you award to just one. When we made the award in July,
we awarded it to three because we did not want to make the
decision based on a paper submission. We had these contractors
develop a prototype so we could actually see the demonstrated
proposals as opposed to paper proposals. Then we picked the
winner, and so it's a two-stage process.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Great.
Let me ask Mr. Hall, obviously ensuring the effective
movement of cargo and people across the Nation's borders
requires Customs to work with a lot of Federal agencies, like
the FDA, AFIS, and INS. To what extent does Customs share
information electronically with these agencies today? Do you
see opportunities for additional sharing, and what barriers do
you see that exist that would preclude additional d-a-t-a
sharing?
Mr. Hall. Chairman, there is--for some time there's been
considerable automated sharing of information between Federal
law enforcement agencies and other government agencies. We
operate a system called TECS, Treasury Enforcement
Communications System, which actually serves as a gateway for
many agencies to some of the larger data bases. Some of them
are ours; some of them belong to the FBI. It also facilitates
access to State and local information as well as providing
access to Federal resources to some of those, and--and I think
that has been a very effective use of technology to improve
communications.
There's always room to do better. I think a number of these
joint investigations that I mentioned that are under way and
many of these collaborative efforts that have been undertaken
since September 11th are identifying new and important ways we
can improve the way we use and share this information. I think
the best thing we can do to move those efforts forward is to
ensure that the resources are there. There have been a number
of requests made, and when you get to that point in the budget
process, I think support in that area would be very helpful.
Mr. Davis. Thank you.
Mr. Miller, let me ask you a question. FEMA interacts with
a lot of other entities including State, local governments and
a lot of private sector groups as well as when you respond to a
disaster, and I know you use a lot of technology to coordinate
all of this information moving back and forth. Any lesson that
we can draw from FEMA's use of technology as the administration
moves into its coordination of a much broader homeland security
area?
Mr. Miller. Well, one of the things I think we've learned
from the recent years in technology is that we need to bring
the State and local governments into the development process
from the very beginning. I think it's important that we not
build something that we then try to impose on State and local
governments in terms of providing disaster assistance.
As we move forward with this e-gov initiative on disaster
assistance, it's our intention to have nongovernmental
organizations like the National Emergency Managers Association,
some of the interagency organizations that work with the State
and local governments and have them included in defining the
requirements for this kind of a system.
I think it's important, too, to realize that we've got a
rather comprehensive effort ahead of us in trying to build a
disaster Web portal that supports all of the disaster programs
and information in the Federal Government. It's amazing how
many days can go by and we discover new things every day that
the Federal Government's doing either to provide new
information, to help people be better prepared, to provide
alerts in case of an imminent event or to provide assistance
after the fact. So the challenge and information gathering is
probably key to us being successful in the future, and that
means not just across the Federal Government, but down to the
State and local levels, too, and we're trying to get as many of
those in as possible.
Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
I thank everyone on the panel for your participation today.
We may have some additional questions that we'll send you in a
written fashion.
I want to move to the next panel. I'm going to declare a 2-
minute recess while we allow to you leave and allow the next
panel to step forward, but you have the committee's thanks for
your participation today. This is very helpful.
[Recess.]
Mr. Davis of Virginia. I think we are ready to start our
second panel. I welcome our second panel, Mr. Tom Siebel of
Siebel Systems, Mr. Alfred Mockett of AMS, Mr. Steve Rohleder
of Accenture, Anne Altman of IBM, Mr. Al Edmonds of EDS and
David Ferm of Primedia, Inc.
If you would stand with me and raise your right hand.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Davis of Virginia. We have your testimony. If you
could, try to hold it to 5 minutes. You have a timer in front
of you; when it turns orange, that means you have a minute to
sum up and when it turns red, try to move to sum up as quick as
you can.
Tom, we will start with you. We appreciate your being here.
STATEMENTS OF TOM SIEBEL, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SIEBEL
SYSTEMS; ALFRED MOCKETT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, AMS, INC.;
STEVE ROHLEDER, MANAGING PARTNER, ACCENTURE; ANNE ALTMAN,
MANAGING DIRECTOR, U.S. FEDERAL, IBM, PUBLIC SECTOR; AL
EDMONDS, PRESIDENT, FEDERAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS DIVISION, EDS;
DAVID FERM, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS,
PRIMEDIA, INC.
Mr. Siebel. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a great honor to
address this committee this morning. Let me just give you a
brief--as you know, I am the chairman and CEO of Siebel
Systems. It is an enterprise application software company.
We're generally in the business of allowing organizations
in the private sector and in the public sector to apply
information technology and communication technology to the
problem of establishing and maintaining relationships with
customers and with consumers--now--with customers and with
citizens, actually, as in the case of the public sector.
Now, in the course of meeting the needs of this market, we
have come up--actually, the fastest growing software company in
history. We're the second largest enterprise application
software company in the world, according to Fortune Magazine
this year. We're the second fastest growing company in the
United States. We employ 8,000 professionals in 40 countries.
We deliver today 300 products in 25 languages.
Generally, what we do for some of the world's largest
multinational organizations--like a Daimler, like a General
Motors, like an IBM, a Deutsche Telekom, a Deutsche Bank, a
Singapore Telecom--is, we enable them to deploy these
multichannel communication strategies with their market so
these retail systems and e-sales, e-marketing, e-services
systems over the Web, call center systems, point-of-purchase
systems, Web TV and kiosk systems enable a customer, for
example, at General Motors to randomly transnavigate a
multiplicity of communication and distribution channels and
carry on a dialog with a product or service provider.
In the case of a Charles Schwab or in the case of a General
Motors, we can see the customer moving from the dealership to
the call center to the auto PC, to the kiosk on Market Street
to the Internet at 2 in the morning to the auto PC, to the
kiosk, to the dealership and carry on a dialog with their
product and service provider about product use, product
selection, product enhancement, service, whatever it may be.
The net of it is, no matter how--this general area is
called contact management, and no matter how this individual
approaches us through the Web, through the call center through
one of our resellers, through an associated company, we know
who they are, where they came from, what their associations
are, what their history of associations is, what their history
of product use is, what their buying intentions may be. And the
net of that is, we can offer them very, very high levels of
customer service.
Now, we've invested in the past 8 years $1 billion building
this technology foundation, and since September 11th, in
response to the call from the President, we set as our No. 1
priority to see how this technology might be--this area that we
call contact management, might be applied to track our
relationship with a different type of individual who is not a
customer. And so basically, for the past 5 months, our No. 1
corporate priority--and I have had hundreds of people working
on this--is basically applying this technology foundation to
the homeland security problem.
Specifically, just like we've adapted our technology--and
we work with IBM, we work with Accenture, we work with AMS and
we built systems for the automotive market at General Motors,
financial services market at Chase. We have vertical market
manifestations. We said, Gee, let's build a vertical market
manifestation of this technology foundation to meet the
homeland security opportunity.
And so we have built a system that enables a multiplicity
of government agencies and private sector organizations to
coordinate information in such a manner to detect, to prevent
and to remediate threats associated with biohazard, border
incursion and various physical threats.
Now let's take a look at the sequence of events that led up
to the disaster, the catastrophe of September 11th, to see how
such an information technology foundation might have been
applied. And this time line--this is all available from
basically published information. In January 2000, Mohammed
Atta, who is the ring leader of the September 11th attacks,
obtained a visa in Hamburg, Germany, to enter the United
States. The Department of State knew about it that day and it
was in their information systems.
In June 2000, Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence
agency in Prague. This was reported to the CIA and so noted
that month by Czech intelligence.
In June 2000, Mohammed Atta traveled to the United States
and passed through immigration at Newark Airport. INS knew
about that immediately, and it was a recorded event in their
information systems.
In July 2000, approximately $100,000 is wired to Mohammed
Atta from Mustafa Ahmad. This guy is a known Osama bin Laden
operative in the United Arab Emirates. The Treasury Department
knew about it the day the transaction occurred. By the way, the
largest transaction in this guy's checking account up to that
date had been a $300 withdrawal from an ATM machine, same
month.
Another $100,000 is wired to a guy named Marwan al-Shehhi.
This is Atta's roommate. This is the guy who piloted United
Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The
Department of Treasury knew about it that day and it was
recorded in their information system.
December 2000, Mohammed Atta and his co-pilot, Marwan al-
Shehhi leave an airplane running on the runway in Miami,
abandoned the plane, run off the airport, rented a vehicle and
escaped. Pretty unusual event--first time it happened in 18
months. The FAA knew about it and recorded it as an event.
April 2001, Mohammed Atta flies from Florida to Prague to
meet Ahmed al-Ani. CIA knew about it that week and they have a
record of it from Czech intelligence.
April 2001, Atta is arrested by the Florida police for
driving without a license. A subsequent warrant was issued for
his arrest when he failed to appear for trial. Florida State
police knew about it and it was recorded in the system. NCIC
knew about it.
August 17, 2001, the story gets better. We have a guy
learning to fly up in Minneapolis, Zacarias Moussaoui. His
flight instructor is a little concerned. He calls the FBI and
says, Gee, he doesn't know how to land this plane, he doesn't
know how to take off. I think maybe he wants to figure out how
use the 747 as a bomb. This is recorded by the local FBI agent
and is in their system--I wish I had an example; I didn't bring
one with me--and this guy is arrested for a visa violation. FBI
knew about it that day.
August 2001, CIA asked INS to watch out for a guy named
Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. And these are the two
hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the
Pentagon. INS reports that they are already in the country. CIA
and INS knew it that day.
This goes on with these guys getting picked up by the
Maryland police on September 9.
The information was there, the associations were known,
French intelligence told us about the associations; and had
these organizations been able to coordinate the information--I
mean, there is sufficient information to be able to--one thing,
you didn't want these guys getting on an airplane. And the
multiple agencies had the relevant information; they were all
doing the right thing and there was no way to associate the
information.
Had the right technology been in place, the State and
Federal agencies involved could have identified and prevented
this threat.
Now, the technology is available today in the private
sector to address many, many of these important problems. We
are the second largest enterprise application software company
in the world. I set this as my No. 1 priority going back to
last September to focus on this area. And we've communicated
with many agencies of the Federal Government. We've
communicated with the CIA. We've communicated with the FBI.
We've communicated with the Office of Homeland Security.
We are aware--all this testimony is that we are unaware of
any concerted, cohesive, professional effort by the Federal
Government to evaluate solutions that are available in the
private sector that might be applied to address this
opportunity.
I would suggest to you that there is a wealth of such
solutions available. So I basically have two recommendations.
No. 1, this is not an intra-agency problem. You can't solve
this within the CIA or within the FBI or within INS. This is an
interagency problem. As such, we need to really think about an
office of a CIO. It is inconceivable that we can operate a
General Motors, an IBM, a Daimler without an office of a CIO
coordinating this information across organizations, and I would
suggest to you it is going to be very difficult in this sector
also.
And my final recommendation, that I would ask the committee
to consider, is to formalize a professional and comprehensive
means of the Federal Government to immediately evaluate the
technologies that are already available in the marketplace that
can be applied to solve this homeland security opportunity,
because I would suggest to you that there is no such activity
in place at this time.
Gentlemen, thank you very much.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Thank you, Mr. Siebel.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Siebel follows:]
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Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Mockett.
Mr. Mockett. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the
opportunity to appear here today. I am British by birth, but
American by choice, and I have been an American for 20 years.
The British and the Americans learned the lessons of homeland
security the hard way some 60 years ago. My parents saw
firsthand how the public's resolve in the mobilization of the
private sector could be translated into victory.
Mr. Chairman, I commend you and your committee with your
thoughtful approach to this challenging task. On September 10,
America seemed free, open and secure. Within 24 hours, we felt
far less secure, and many were questioning whether we were too
free and too open.
But to help make the American people more secure without
damaging the free and open society we love, that's a challenge.
It demands a delicate balance. Ensuring a free and more secure
America is our job; the power and the genius of information
technology may be the only way to get where we need to go.
We are here today to offer our technology, our solutions,
our experience to help respond to the threats in an uncertain
world. And that has been the purpose at AMS for the past 30
years as we work with Federal, State and local agencies. We
know this territory.
Since September 11th, we have learned that, sad to say,
crucial information about the terrorists was available weeks
before the attack, perhaps even months had we been prepared to
extract it. There is encouraging news. There is a lesson we can
learn quickly: To live and operate in the United States, even
terrorists have to use credit cards, drivers' licenses, ATMs,
cell phones. It is virtually impossible today to leave no
electronic fingerprints on what they do.
With the technology that exists today, suspicious activity
could well have been detected. It is a potent weapon that
exists today and can be swiftly applied.
The IT industry uses sophisticated technology and
management know-how to open doors to better efficiency,
productivity and prosperity. We must. And we'll gladly work
with government--Federal, State and local--to close doors, too,
doors that keep those out that would kill or destroy. Homeland
security will demand creative solutions.
Now, this is familiar ground to us and let me give you a
few brief examples of creativity. First, rapid evolution. By
that I mean adapting and expanding existing technology
relatively quickly and capitalizing on existing investments and
existing infrastructure. We don't need to reinvent the wheel
here.
For example, recent research conducted by the Yankee Group
argues that identity theft and fraud is a major problem that
should be prioritized relative to homeland security. In fact, 6
of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were using stolen
identities.
AMS works extensively with several State departments of
motor vehicles. For instance, we are working with the
Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to fight identity
crime by very refined personal identification, making sure that
every person receiving a driver's license is precisely who they
say they are. Our work could be enhanced by creating new
national standards for document verification by the States and
by linking the data bases for specific limited authentication
purposes.
Second, we are constantly looking for new relationships in
our government customers to help make them more flexible and
better able to use and share information.
We found that both risks and rewards can be shared in these
public-private partnerships in a way that leads to creative
solutions and better services. In several States, including the
Commonwealth of Virginia, we have pioneered ways to improve tax
collection and enhance compliance. Our compensation comes from
and is tied directly to the increased collection of revenue.
Homeland security likewise calls for new thinking about how
government helps us to help it.
My third example also involves existing technology that can
be adapted to the war on terrorism. There is tremendous power
and sophistication in software already in use that allows a
rigorous approach to risk management and decisionmaking. This
technology underlies millions of everyday transactions in the
marketplace. It is how a car dealership determines within
minutes whether you are a good bet to make your car payments on
time, or how credit card companies know to a remarkable degree
of accuracy whether you are going to pay your monthly bill in a
timely fashion.
The same variety of software can be used as a sentinel to
guide this country. It can help identify targets most likely to
cause trouble by screening cargo or passengers at borders ports
and airports. For example, the U.S. Customs Service processes
more than 58,000 shipments daily, yet they can only inspect 1
or 2 percent. Imagine the power of inspecting the right 2
percent. We have the technology to do that.
Mr. Chairman, we at AMS believe the subcommittee is on
exactly the right track by holding this hearing today. We
believe that technology can advance security while preserving
commerce and personal freedoms. The events of September 11th
are made all the more tragic by the knowledge they could
perhaps have been prevented. As President Bush has said, we
have a solemn duty not to let that lesson go unlearned.
We at AMS will be honored to serve the course. Thank you,
and I look forward to your questions.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mockett follows:]
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Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Rohleder, thanks for being here.
Mr. Rohleder. Chairman Davis and members of the
subcommittee, I am Steve Rohleder, Managing Partner of the U.S.
Government Market Unit of Accenture. I appreciate the
opportunity to testify today on how commercial technologies and
business practices can be applied to help fortify the Nation's
homeland security.
Accenture is the world's leading management and technology
consulting organization. We employ more than 75,000 people in
46 countries with reported revenues of $11.4 billion for the
fiscal year ended August 31, 2001. Since September 11th we have
been working with a number of State and Federal homeland
security initiatives. For example, following the tragic events
of September 11th, Accenture was able within 3 days to launch
and bring to full operation the New York City Family Assistance
Center to provide support and services to families and victims
of workers at the World Trade Centers.
We applaud the subcommittee for evaluating how commercial
technologies and business practices can be applied to homeland
security. Today I would like to highlight the following themes
regarding the cross-agency collaboration challenges.
First, connecting government is more difficult yet more
powerful than creating government; second, government needs to
develop a virtual agency policy to coordinate information
across disparate government entities; third, new technologies
exist that can enable and enhance knowledge management
capabilities; fourth, many of the toughest challenges to
achieving a cohesive homeland defense will require us to tackle
bureaucratic institutional barriers such as turf wars,
infrastructure inadequacies, communication protocol, cultural
differences and budget silos; finally, Congress will need to
address privacy issues and legal impediments to cross agency
information sharing.
First, let me discuss the challenges in connecting
government. Post September 11th provided a snapshot of what is
wrong with scores of systems working in isolation. Agencies
were not able to communicate with one another interagency much
less were not able to communicate with one another and
certainly between governments and citizens. We saw that while
dozens of Federal, State and local law enforcement agencies
gathered information, little was shared or aggregated into a
coherent picture about terrorist activity within the United
States despite the knowledge that integrating these fragmented
systems can provide dramatic political, historical and
bureaucratic forces which have made physical integration almost
impossible.
To be successful in the war against terrorism, government,
industry and nonprofits will all need to work together. This
will be challenging, but there is an approach that we believe
can work--virtual agency integration. Clearly government needs
to establish a virtual agency policy to coordinate information
across disparate government agencies.
Toward this end, we recommend that the Office of Homeland
Security establish a program management office responsible for
overseeing the development and implementation of the necessary
organizational components. The PMO would be responsible for six
major activities, strategy formulation, orchestrating policy
development and coordinating disparate agencies into a cohesive
body, developing and implementing the key business process and
technology architecture to support the office's mission and
objectives, defining the communications infrastructure to link
all of the primary constituents, defining the organizational
design and human performance metrics and assessing whether
there are legal and regulatory barriers to accomplishing the
mission.
While summary organization of government may be called for,
we believe the goal of homeland security must be to connect
government and not create it. This mission might have seemed
impossible even a decade ago. Technologies exist that can
enable and enhance knowledge management and collaboration
capabilities.
Coordination between State, Federal and local law
enforcement agencies--Coast Guard, Border Patrol and INS--will
neither be easy to initiate nor to sustain. Many agencies have
different computing platforms, operating systems, data bases
and software tools. However, there are commercial technologies
that can facilitate better collaboration. Let me highlight four
of these solutions.
Customer relationship management software: As you just
heard Tom Siebel testify, CRM can be implemented in
organizations to create a unified system for capturing,
managing and coordinating information across divisions,
geography and communication channels.
No. 2, Web-based collaboration tools: The State
Department's Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration
System, now in the prototype stage, is designed to provide
leading-edge knowledge management and collaboration tools over
an intranet to 40 Federal agencies with overseas operations.
The system will provide both classified and nonclassified
levels of communication. This system should be an important
model for other agency uses.
Interactive messaging service: One of the major challenges
of Office of Homeland Security is to alert multiple agencies
and entities and governments about immediate threats. One
solution we are currently using for emergency notification is
the interactive messaging service which is based on a
hierarchical multichannel alerting architecture. INS would
allow government to alert key people via phone, PDAs,
interactive pagers and instant messages across other services.
Supercomputing technology, like so many technologies, has
advanced dramatically over the past decade. Many of the
challenges government faces will require institutional, not
just technological changes. According to the preliminary
findings from a worldwide report we have commissioned, politics
and turf battles are a major impediment to information sharing
among law enforcement agencies and emergency preparedness
teams. This finding should come as no surprise.
Other major challenges to cross-agency, cross-governmental
collaboration include infrastructure, communications, culture
and budget. We believe Congress will need to address privacy
and legal barriers to cross-agency collaboration.
In conclusion, the U.S. information technology industry can
be a valuable and important ally to the Federal Government in
the war against terrorism. The business practices and
technologies that helped revolutionize our commercial sector's
productivity over the past decade can be applied to this
pressing national challenge.
I look forward to responding to your questions.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Rohleder follows:]
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Mr. Davis of Virginia. Ms. Altman, thank you for being
here.
Ms. Altman. Good morning, Chairman Davis, Congressman
Turner. My name is Anne Altman, and I am the executive
responsible for IBM's relationship with the U.S. Federal
Government. I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this
forum.
I would like to base my statement on two principal points.
First, agencies today can integrate their processes around
information. They can improve their efficiency and
effectiveness. They can have greater flexibility. They can
change rapidly through collaboration and knowledge sharing,
rather than through reorganization.
And, second, the IT industry has solutions. We have
solutions in abundance to help government today.
We all know that the security of our homeland depends on
our ability to move information across and among government
agencies, whether that is Federal, State or local agencies. And
we need connected, extended enterprises, not stand-alones,
whether that is an e-business or an e-government.
But there are very big issues here--leadership, culture
change, cooperation--and post-September 11th, agencies see
this, and I think they have a new sense of urgency. My role
here is not to minimize the scope of work required, but I am
here to say that there's no reason for lack of data
interchange.
Technology solutions exist today, and they can be
implemented quickly. New technologies like middleware
solutions, advanced query systems and open communication
protocols can overcome the toughest challenges of intra- and
interagency sharing, even across all of government's disparate
computer systems.
At IBM we have been transforming our company for a number
of years. We've consolidated 150 data centers into 28. We've
replaced 31 separate networks with a single integrated global
network. We've reduced our IT costs by 25 percent. We've
improved our security of our systems and we've saved billions
of dollars.
The point is that IBM's transformation required us to
develop a framework and infrastructure for the future, and
likewise, government needs to look and consider the big picture
and define its framework with the focus on connectivity and
integration.
The foundation for e-government, open standards and
interoperable architecture is no less the foundation for
homeland security. So I would like to turn your attention now
to three questions that I have been asked since September 11th
that I think are of particular relevance to this hearing.
First, how can I access and share information located in
agencies, but which is in different forms, different places and
on different systems? Our answer lies in the middleware
technology which we developed called DiscoveryLink.
DiscoveryLink is a highly sophisticated search software. It
provides a capability which can be used to create a single
searchable ``virtual'' data base. It provides for the linking
and search of data from disparate sources on various hardware
and software platforms owned by different agencies without
actually having to combine that data into one big data
warehouse.
What does that mean? It means that data can be integrated
or shared without having to change the structure of the data or
having to change the government agencies themselves.
The second question is, how do I find information which may
exist somewhere, but I haven't collected it and I don't know
how to find it. Information may be out there, but nobody knows
it exists or where it is; today's traditional structured
searches and search engines can't find it.
IBM has been developing an innovative information discovery
system which can integrate structured and unstructured data.
This information can be analyzed using new indexing and data
mining algorithms. The blending of known information with the
Internet would allow protection of subtle trends of patterns
and relationships and could be used to discover potential
threats.
The new technology is truly significant because today there
is 100 times more unstructured data in the world than
structured data.
The third question that often comes up is, how can agencies
shield the raw data or the source of the information while
enabling the data to be queried or mined for patterns or
trends. Again, we have developed a technology that enables
learners of separate data bases to cross-check or data mine
information securely and without directly disclosing their own
information to others. This allows agencies to collaborate, but
also addresses the needs for secrecy and privacy.
Let me give you a practical example, and that would be
airlines. Airlines could cross-check passenger and employee
data against data had by government agencies like the FBI.
Neither the FBI nor the airlines would have to fully open their
data bases, only enough to accomplish the task essentially
giving a ``go'' or ``no-go'' response or a referral for further
action before boarding a flight.
If I take that example a step further and integrate the
three technologies I just spoke about, this could allow for a
dramatically improved air security system. We could link the
existing interagency border identification system, IBIS, which
is run by Customs and linked with INS and the Department of
State with airline and FAA data bases. Each travel service
provider, law enforcement agency or other participant would
retain ownership and control of their data base. There would be
no need to consolidate data bases or transfer ownership.
An air traveler's reservation information could be pushed
into a check across these data bases, and the agency's raw data
would not be disclosed to the airlines. Appropriate agencies
could be proactive with the information all along the way and
Internet mining could find other patterns, leaving the airport
security gate as the last of many steps to create a safety net
for air travelers.
And I would like to talk 1 minute about bioterrorism and
give you an example of the large-scale integration project we
are doing to strengthen our national public health
infrastructure. IBM is leading a nonprofit consortium of more
than 60 organizations to improve health care through
information technology. Specifically, we are collaborating with
the CDC and State and local public health departments to update
their current information systems. The idea here is to collect
and use this information and use it to monitor potential
bioterrorist threats.
Now, this dovetails well with large Federal efforts to
speed up first-responder alerts and coordination. Projects like
this can be established in just a few months once data
specifications are agreed upon.
Finally, I would like to add a few comments about
leadership and cultural change. I believe that senior
government officials are more focused than ever on driving
cultural change, on building contemporary enterprises and
supporting secure collaboration. They recognize that e-
government is no longer a question of if and why, but how and
when.
I applaud OMB's approach to e-government and homeland
security. It's comprehensive and focused on communication and
collaboration. The 24 initiatives being proposed by the e-
government task force are a good beginning and they demonstrate
great leadership.
The Federal Government is making progress on e-government
and information sharing, but it needs to do more. September
11th exposed very significant gaps in how our government uses
information. Technology solutions are available today. They can
be implemented quickly. Longer term, the government must focus
on enterprise transformation, on business process changes and
integration based on open standards and strong security.
Chairman Davis, Congressman Turner, I thank you for the
opportunity to present our views.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Altman follows:]
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Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Edmonds thank you for being
here.
Mr. Edmonds. It is a pleasure to be with you and members of
the committee today to discuss how Federal agencies can meet
their homeland security missions.
I am Al Edmonds, President of EDS U.S. Government Solutions
organization. In that position, I am responsible for all EDS
business relationships with the U.S. Federal, State and local
governments. Prior to joining EDS, I was Director of the
Defense Information Systems Agency and also directed the
President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory
Committee responsible for communications around the world for
the Department of Defense.
EDS strongly believes that private sector involvement in
the homeland security initiative is essential for success. We
are committed to doing our part in partnership with the
government to preserve our economy and way of life. We need to
work alongside our military, who has historically had the role
of defending our Nation, as well as our courageous new
warfighters--our local police, fire fighters and paramedical
personnel.
Commercial and government data bases must be harnessed in
new ways so that data can be aggregated to create not just
disjointed information, but real-time knowledge about potential
security threats. When I say ``knowledge,'' I mean the ability
to discover something new, something useful from various
sources and then to be able to communicate that knowledge to
those who need to make the decision, when it is to be made and
in a form that it can be useful. Being able to harness this
power of data sources to create real-time knowledge is an
essential weapon in our war against terrorism.
I would like to offer a few specific suggestions on issues
that need to be resolved to speed information sharing between
Federal, State and local agencies and commercial data sources
to meet today's challenges.
First, the Federal Government needs to define a Federal
homeland security enterprise in order to develop a coordinated
interagency plans with clear mission statements. In the current
climate, there is a risk that agencies will jump to technical
solutions before mission objectives are known. With clear
enterprise objectives, we in industry can offer technology
products, services and solutions to solve the highest priority
homeland security challenges.
Second, establish a managing partner of the Federal
enterprise with adequate authority to manage the enterprise.
This could be the role of the Homeland Security Office. At a
minimum, the Federal enterprise manager must be able to
influence the budgets of those departments and agencies
involved in the struggle. The enterprise effort should be
centrally managed at the top, but executed in a decentralized
fashion among the Federal Government and with our State and
local partners. If the current agency stovepipe approach
continues, information sharing will be the Nation's Achilles
heel in our growing war against terrorism.
Third, the homeland security enterprise model must include
collaboration with State and local governments. States maintain
valuable data bases such as drivers' licenses, criminal records
and other public records of high value, and they, as the most
likely points of contact of suspected terrorists, must be privy
to intelligence gathering at the Federal level.
Fourth, we believe the integrity and autonomy of agency
data must be and can be maintained. Trusted individuals and
companies need to be involved in such work. Data mining must
and can be done while still preserving our cherished individual
liberties.
The next suggestion is one of the most important steps to
be taken. The critical information requirements must be
defined. In other words, tell us what decisionmakers want to
know and need to know, and we can deliver the solutions that
increase the quality of decisionmaking.
Next, the government needs consistent information
technology architecture, along with industry best practices,
technical standards and standard operating procedures for all
IT systems and equipment deployed in this war against
terrorism.
Another area that is essential is homeland security
information in the international arena. Refinement of
intergovernment alliances is necessary, especially to improve
intelligence, ensure interoperability and harmonize laws
associated with international terrorism, particularly cyber
crime.
Governmental needs and individual freedoms must be met and
balanced. We are sensitive to these issues and will apply our
integrity and ingenuity to create better information sharing
while protecting individual freedoms and privacy expectations
of citizens according to law.
Finally, EDS stands ready to help. I believe we can move
quickly and effectively on many of these suggestions. The key
to success is a strong public-private partnership that solves
the government's business case of homeland security. This
morning we released, along with the Council on Excellent
Government, a recent poll on what Americans think about
homeland security and e-government; and we were not surprised
to find after September 11th that homeland security, as well as
accountability, is at the top of the list of what Americans
think is most important in this day and time; and we stand
ready to help.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. When you say ``poll,'' my ears
perked up. I just want to make sure we get a copy of that so we
can then share it with our colleagues.
Mr. Edmonds. Absolutely. All Members will receive copies,
as well as governments around the world.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Edmonds follows:]
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Mr. Ferm. Good morning, I am Dave Ferm, President and CEO
of Primedia's Business to Business Group of targeted media and
information based companies. I want to thank you, Chairman
Davis and Ranking Member Turner, and the Subcommittee on
Technology and Procurement Policy for the opportunity to speak
today.
Mr. Chairman, today's hearing demonstrates this
subcommittee's understanding that the private sector has a
major role to play in protecting the security of our homeland.
We are grateful for this opportunity to share with you some of
the actions we have taken since September 11th, and also to
share a proposal for greater cooperation with and within the
government that will enable us to improve upon these efforts.
The events of September 11th were a clear reminder to all
Americans that our first-responder community--local police,
fire and emergency professionals and emergency room personnel--
are and will continue to be America's front line in dealing
with threats to our homeland.
We at Primedia know that very well. For over 15 years we
have served this front line of national defense by delivering
the training, information and education needed to protect our
communities.
Our Primedia workplace learning headquartered in Dallas is
an innovative distance-learning provider that reaches more than
2 million professionals in the fire, law enforcement and health
care areas. We take pride in the things you don't hear about in
the news: accidents prevented, communities protected, lives
saved because of the training we provide and because of the
courage of those we serve.
Having served the first-responder community for many years,
we moved quickly following September 11th to create new
emergency response and preparedness training for these
professionals and Federal Government agencies. The new material
developed with subject matter experts augments the company's
existing core training networks--the fire and emergency
television network, the law enforcement television network and
health and sciences television network. Through our real-time
satellite networks we are able to deliver breaking news and
situational assessments in a manner that is usable by those on
the front lines.
Just minutes after the first World Trade Center attack we
were on live with our satellite networks, we were live at the
Pentagon and we were allowed behind FBI lines to videotape
rescue and emergency response. This footage was turned very
quickly into training content for emergency professionals.
Our training content can be delivered via the Web, CD-ROM,
print, and can be customized to meet partnered needs. Since
September 11th we have created 65 new courses and have been
delivering content related to bioterrorism, emergency
preparedness, chemical weapons and critical infrastructure just
to name a few.
While we have been busy with these initiatives, we have
been approached by a number of Federal agencies interested to
begin to expand partnerships to address training and
communication needs. Three current valued partner--U.S. Customs
Service, FBI and INS--are in discussions with us to train
thousands more of their agents and to allow for immediate
emergency communications.
We are proud of all of our existing partnerships. However,
we are working toward a much larger goal. Our goal is to create
a public safety communications network that reaches every one
of America's 13 million first responders at all levels by
connecting all of our first responders to a single training
network. Federal, State and local officials will have a secure
system for information sharing in order to respond to any
domestic emergency.
So exactly what does that mean? It means the government
will be able to communicate directly to first responders
providing briefings and investigation updates, emergency
deployment plans, personnel and equipment mobilization and
evacuation notices and other timely information. Moreover, this
information is disseminated behind the security of an encrypted
satellite network.
In order to create the public safety communications
network, Primedia and Primedia Workplace Learning are offering
the use of the existing satellite broadcast and production
infrastructure as well as those downlinked sites already in
place through a law enforcement television network, fire and
emergency television network and health and sciences television
network. We seek the government's investment to connect the
Nation's first responders to this vital training and
communications network.
Thank you for the opportunity to present, and I'd be happy
to answer any questions that the chairman or committee may
have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ferm follows:]
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Mr. Davis of Virginia. I want to thank all the panel. We
got some great information. And as I said before, your total
testimony is included in the public record for this hearing.
And I'm going to start the questioning with Mr. Turner.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank all of
our witnesses for sharing your thoughts and your testimony with
us today.
Mr. Siebel, your remarks were in many ways very sobering,
because I think those of us in government have always been very
sensitive to the fact that had we had better intelligence and
that intelligence been shared, it is very likely that September
11th could have been prevented. And I know when I visited
Ground Zero about 12 days after September 11th, the first
thought that came to my mind was that we can never, never,
never let this happen again. And I know you and other panelists
have shared that same conviction, and you're dedicated to
trying to apply technology to make sure that it never does
happen again.
You know, in many ways, perhaps the American people have
been more understanding than we should expect them to be,
because if government had been more aggressive with regard to
information technology, perhaps September 11th could have been
prevented.
But it does seem that in fighting the war on terrorism, we
definitely need to have a firm commitment to the aggressive
application of information technology. And I was very pleased
in your testimony, Mr. Siebel, that you stated your support for
the creation of a Federal chief information officer. Mr. Davis
and I both have legislation calling for that position to be
created, and it would seem to me that when we closely analyze
September 11th, we should be even more aggressive in our
efforts to call for the creation of such a position; and you
have certainly done that in your testimony.
I also feel very strongly that it is important to follow
the suggestions that many of you made, and that is to use the
private sector more aggressively to try to find these
solutions.
You know, when America was faced with the challenges--has
faced challenges in the past, we have always leaned upon
private industry and the private sector. World War II, we
mobilized this country by calling upon the private sector to
move very aggressively, and it resulted in our victory in that
war.
I have no doubt that we can be victorious over terrorism if
we make a similar commitment and we call upon the private
sector to move aggressively. I do--and I would, Mr. Siebel,
appreciate any further comments or suggestions that you might
have to help us along the road of pushing the idea of a Federal
chief information officer. Even though we obviously have chief
information officers in each of our agencies, there's no
oversight; and the point you made in the testimony regarding
budgetary authority is so essential for that position to be
really effective.
Have you seen any evidence in the Office of Homeland
Security of an effort to create and to put an individual in
place--at least there, that might have some information
technology background--that could at least move us down the
road toward the goal that we share?
Mr. Siebel. If we look at best practices in the private
sector--Congressman, if we look at our best practices in the
private sector over the last, say, decade, 2 decades, the way
that we used to run private companies where we had departmental
information officers and this resulted in largely
discoordinated information across these organizations. Had we
not adopted the role of a chief information officer in the
private sector, we would not have been able to realize the
productivity increases and economic benefits of information
technology over the last decade, which I think has been one of
the primary engines fueling this economy and one of the primary
engines fueling this Nation.
I believe, in my opinion, that unless the Federal
Government adopts a similar philosophy of a centralized office
of information with budgetary and operational authority for
these systems, that the Federal Government will also not be
able to realize the economic benefits and productivity benefits
of these information technologies that we have developed.
As it relates to homeland security, the coordination of
information across these organizations is simply essential to
address the opportunity. It is not a question of whether we
will coordinate; the only question is how many more disasters
will occur before we coordinate these forms of information. And
I believe, absent the presence of a central authority--and we
can see no evidence of an inkling of such authority--that we
will not be able to address the opportunity that's before us.
Mr. Turner. Thank you. I think your admonition to us should
certainly be heeded.
As I said a moment ago, perhaps the American people were
somewhat forgiving with regard to our lack of coordination and
our lack of sharing of information among agencies that could
perhaps have resulted in the avoiding of September 11th. But I
don't know that the American people will feel that way if it
happens again. And I feel they are going to hold us accountable
and they are going to expect us to move forward very
aggressively. If we have an incident in the future that can be
traced to the absence of information sharing, as you so
eloquently shared with us today when you recounted the many
events that were noted by various Federal agencies, if it
happens again, I have no doubt we will be held accountable by
the people.
Mr. Mockett, I had a thought that I wanted you to address
with us a little bit when you shared with us the efforts that
AMS has made in the area of risk assessment. I believe it is
your AMS Strata initiative. Mr. Schambach, who heads the new
Transportation Security Agency, when I asked him whether or not
we could maybe move forward and at least have some system in
place--whether it's the use of a card or the use of some other
optical technology, whatever--to at least allow the rapid
movement of some passengers through airports who may be lower-
risk passengers, he said that he wasn't convinced that you
could be sure that somebody who is a good risk, safe risk,
today would necessarily be a safe risk tomorrow.
But I kind of thought, when you apply risk assessment
technology that you sort of assume that you kind of keep up
with that, because that is really what risk assessment is all
about. And I wish you would explain a little bit of what AMS
has done and how it might apply to Customs, checking of cargo,
passengers or airports.
Mr. Mockett. Certainly. If we look at Customs, INS, Coast
Guard, they are all in the same business with the same sort of
problem, risk assessment. Today there are commercially
available decision engines that help you with that process, but
help turn a process that is perhaps random or subjective into a
much more objective view of the situation. These risk engines
have been used for many, many years in the financial services
industry.
Risk engines that AMS has installed take maybe as many as
2,000 different variables and input those to come up with a
scoring and an algorithm to give you an assessment of the risk
and a predicted outcome--14 million of those transactions
yesterday and another 14 million today. Imagine the power of
giving everyone concerned at the port of entry, at the airport
or at the border on-line access to a decision engine that
allows them to stop the right person or inspect the right
cargo. Just getting the hit rate up with a fair degree of
accuracy and turning it into a much more objective process
would reap untold dividends.
Mr. Turner. The concern that Mr. Schambach shared about
someone being a good risk today, but maybe they wouldn't be
tomorrow, I mean, isn't it the collection of the data that is
key to that so that if you're continuing to collect data, then
you begin to identify that individual and may make the
transition from being a safe risk, a good risk, to one who is a
poor one?
Mr. Mockett. In response to his concern, these decision
engines are not static. They have dynamic; they have learning
capability. So we constantly take the output, and then re-input
it, of additional learning, of another variable that goes into
the mix. To that extent, you can actually track variable
parameters over time and help flex the decisionmaking
algorithm.
So the technology is there to do it.
Mr. Turner. Ms. Altman, you mentioned IBM's initiative; you
called it DiscoveryLink. Is that capability to link together
different networks, different software, is that unique to IBM;
or is this an initiative that we can find available from other
sources?
Ms. Altman. I am not aware of another commercially
available technology. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This
was developed by IBM research, and it really has been applied
more on the pharmaceutical and health care side, to date.
We have brought it into the Federal Government since
September 11th because it is so aptly applied to the challenge
of our Federal customers who are looking to connect disparate
data bases on different hardware systems and software systems
that today aren't all based on open standards. And so in order
to make a shift, they would either have to migrate all of this
into some new form of data base or find something that allows
you to link them together to create this virtual data base that
could be searched and shared amongst a number of entities. And
this technology is relatively new.
So, again, I am not sure if there are others. But it is
certainly available today.
Mr. Turner. What kind of interaction have you had with the
Office of Homeland Security?
Ms. Altman. We have had a number of interactions working
with Governor Ridge and his office. In addition, we've worked
directly with the Department of Transportation, the CIA, FBI,
with FEMA. So we are working across the board, because we are
aligned in order to support each one of those customers with
the expertise in their business, and certainly with the U.S.
Customs and other law enforcement organizations.
Mr. Turner. What kind of response have you gotten from
these agencies? Are they interested? Are they pursuing it?
Ms. Altman. There is a great deal of interest. We made
recommendations through the response. As you're aware, for
example, the Department of Transportation requested responses
from industry, and in that, we detailed DiscoveryLink and the
other capabilities I described.
Mr. Turner. How do you assess the capability of the Federal
Government to analyze and to determine whether or not they
should choose to go down the path of using DiscoveryLink, or
whether they should try to adopt systems to be compatible in
other manners? What is your sense of that issue as you work
with these agencies?
Ms. Altman. Well, I'm a proponent of open systems and the
fact that we need to step back and look at the direction that
the Federal Government is going to--Mr. Siebel's point, having
someone who over--looks across the government to define a
framework for which agencies will interoperate is very
important. With that said, you won't move there overnight, and
so there are technologies that are necessary today to connect
these disparate systems, and the agencies, I think, are looking
at how do we do that, No. 1; and two, the cultural issue, which
is very important, do we really want to share this? And I think
that's the bigger issue here. If they recognize that there's
technology to connect themselves, but at the same time, they
feel vulnerable because they're sharing information that they
never before have shared.
Mr. Turner. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Davis. Mr. Turner, thank you very much. Let me pick up
and ask all the panel members how is the homeland security
office reaching out to the private sector? Do you feel that
they're having ample opportunity to find out the different
solutions that are out there? And the other question that goes
with that is something I'll never forget, one time taking my
car into a dealership and just saying well, fix whatever--
whatever you find wrong, fix it. That was a huge mistake and I
came back, I could have bought a new car for what it cost me to
do that. I mean, one of the problems we have here is that the
government needs to be specific in telling you what they want
instead of just saying we've got a problem, how do you fix it,
and to focus our energy and our resources the right way. But
let me ask, how is the administration's homeland security
office reaching out? Do you feel that we are engaging the
private sector in terms of looking at solutions at this point
in an adequate way so all of you have a chance to offer your
solutions? Are there enough vehicles out there?
Tom? We'll start with Mr. Siebel and move down.
Mr. Siebel. Well, Congressman, I would--I would comment
that if the Office of Homeland Security has authority to make
anything happen, it is--it's not immediately apparent.
Mr. Davis. They don't have a line item. I think that's the
problem----
Mr. Siebel. And if there--and so these are--and we have
interacted with them and they appear to be incredibly bright
people with great insight about a lot of issues, but there does
not appear to be any operational authority, and I think that
we're dealing with something here on the order of a national
crisis, and it seems to me, given the importance of what we're
dealing with here, that there needs to be an organization, the
office of homeland security or some other that is empowered to
take action.
It's all a matter of time whether we put the preventative
measures in place to prevent the next event, or whether we fail
to do so. So I think time is of the essence here and somebody
needs to be empowered to take--make decisions and take action,
and it does not appear that this organization is so empowered.
Mr. Davis. And that underscores what you were saying
earlier about the government not being able to talk to each
other, not having a Federal CIO and in terms of--who's
overseeing all of this at this point----
Mr. Siebel. No one. This has clearly been communicated as a
national priority. I know that many of the organizations at the
table and certain Siebel Systems, we've said this is our No. 1
corporate priority to address this important information
technology problem, and yet we're unable to find anybody who is
in charge of a coordinated effort within the Federal Government
to evaluate set solutions. It's just you're--you're basically--
invited the private sector to ring any arbitrary number of
hundred thousand doorbells in Washington, DC, and see what they
can find, and I think we can do--this is an important issue. We
are smart people. We can do better than this.
Mr. Mockett. Well, our contact with Governor Ridge and his
team has been frequent and substantive, and it's encouraging
that we can help frame the questions before we actually deliver
the answers, so top marks in that regard. I get the feeling,
though, that nothing's going to happen until Federal dollars
prime the pump.
As I meet with my customers out at the State and local
level with Governors and heads of State agencies, they're all
saying the same story. Our revenues are below expectations,
we're facing a budget deficit, we're facing layoffs for the
first time in history, we don't know how to bridge the gap. To
the extent they've been able to spend anything on homeland
security, it has been earmarked first for physical security and
then some limited approach to--to the biohazard exposure, but
not addressed IT security or the opportunities for application
and information technology at the State and local level.
It just has not happened so far, and so it certainly does
take the heavy hand of budgetary authority to make something
happen. My worry is that we have a shrinking window of
opportunity here. We have only defeated the terrorists of the
moment. Others will follow in their footsteps. We have an issue
with public resolve at the moment being substantive and
actually providing the heat to make Federal, State, and local
agencies at least consider collaborative cooperative behavior
in exchange of information, but heat won't be there for very
long, and we need that cultural change.
Mr. Davis. Thank you.
Mr. Rohleder. Congressman, on your question of how is OHS
reaching out, you know, my sense frankly is that industry is
reaching in rather than OHS reaching out, which isn't to be
interpreted negatively. I think that they're inundated, if you
will, with technology solutions, with potential fixes to the--
to this problem. In my testimony, I talked about the
establishment of a program management office. I think that's
absolutely critical to establish the national strategy that the
executive order called for. It's also absolutely critical to
discern what technology is applicable to solve this problem. I
would suspect that if you polled the staff at OHS, they
probably meet with no less than 25 vendors a day and that's
been ongoing for 6, 8, 8 weeks----
Mr. Davis. But what--to what end; right?
Mr. Rohleder. Right. I'm sorry?
Mr. Davis. But to what end? You're meeting with all these
vendors and----
Mr. Rohleder. Yeah, to what end? I mean, I think they're in
information gathering. I do not think that there is a direction
that's been set, and I think that there needs to be some
leadership established to drive that strategy and--and
discriminate between the technology that can be used from an
overall solution to those point solutions that can contribute
so----
Mr. Davis. Well, I'm just--my concern, I mean, you have
different procurement rules within different agencies, DOD for
example, some of the civilian agencies and this stuff has to
all be coordinated back and forth, and I'm not sure--and I
think several of you have mentioned this in your testimony, how
it's all being coordinated, how it all flows together. And the
money will be going out very quickly, and I don't know that
this stuff gets addressed or if we're addressing older
problems.
And so there is a concern, I think, as we go through this
next budgetary battle in the appropriations process this year.
We may have to put some kind of straightjackets on how this
stuff is spent and how it's coordinated and that's the concern.
It's been our concern, as Representative Turner said from day 1
in terms of how's all this being coordinated.
Mr. Rohleder. I think----
Mr. Davis. There's a lot of ideas out there. We just need
to--the solutions are there. It's a question of with the money
we're willing to spend, are we going to get our solutions or
are we going to get things we don't need sometimes which you're
happy to sell us as well.
Ms. Altman. Yeah. But to that point, Mr. Chairman, I think
there has been an awful lot of focus on point solutions, and so
the agencies, whether it's the Office of Homeland Defense or
independent departments, are inundated with point solutions
that may or may not fix the problem or a problem, and what
hasn't occurred is stepping back from that, defining a
framework, connecting communities of interest, for lack of a
better term, whether that's the law enforcement side or
intelligence collection and dissemination or disaster response.
So collecting these communities, mapping out end to end
processes, and then breaking them into manageable pieces and
saying how do we address those, how do we solve those, because
point solutions may not be the answer. In fact, if they're not
built on open and interoperable standards, they could create a
longer-term problem, and so I don't see that overall
coordination that comes back and addresses this in manageable
pieces and addresses it around the--the processes that our
government needs to operate in terms--in terms of addressing
crises and protecting ourselves.
Mr. Davis. Thank you.
Mr. Edmonds. Mr. Chairman, back in October/November, the
ITA hosted a roundtable with the Secret Service, State
Department, INS, Customs, DOD, several companies, Oracle, SCIC
and several others, and the whole idea of discussion was about
how to take the data bases that all this government activity
had and make the right information available, so to make the
right decisions at the right time, and we spent about the month
exchanging notes and comments on that white paper, which we all
agreed need to be done, and it wasn't a technology problem. It
was a cultural problem, and a who-was-in-charge problem, and
someone who said let's make it happen.
We're about 3 months later, and we still have the draft
copy of the white paper that ITA gets an e-mail once a week
from someone, when are we are going to send it someplace, and
we didn't find anybody to take it.
We know where we're going to send it but Harris Miller
can't find someone to take it. The point is----
Mr. Davis. Let me just add if you'll send it here, at least
we'll put it in the record.
Mr. Edmonds. OK. We'll do that.
Mr. Davis. It will get on the record.
Mr. Edmonds. That's perfect. But industry--industry knows
how to solve these problems of sharing information. We did it
about 12 years ago for the intelligence community and we
thought people wouldn't do it, but once we put some good
information on this site called Intelink, all the agencies put
the information there because they wanted you to have it, and
so the culture's broken down in the intelligence community, and
we need to do the same thing in law enforcement/intelligence
community, but we've--we've all given white papers and
unsolicited proposals all over town, but as a solution every
day.
So in defense of the Office of Homeland Security, they must
be seen by everybody who ever created anything with a widget on
it trying to sell them the solution, and they really are having
a tough time sorting it out.
Mr. Davis. It's not their problem. I mean, their problem is
they don't have the operational authority at this point to be
able to coordinate anything.
Mr. Edmonds. Exactly.
Mr. Davis. And maybe over time that evolved, so we also
have the problem as raised by Mr. Siebel in his opening remarks
by Federal CIO, we have all these agencies' CIOs. We heard from
four of them this morning, but who's in charge? At the end of
the day, who can make the call? Who can put the procurement on
the street and who can oversee it and make sure it's going? And
it sounds like we're not there yet.
Mr. Ferm. Congressman, I'm a little bit different than my
copanelists in that I'm not a technology person. I'm a content
person riding on the back of technology. But I could just make
one comment from the--my last role as president of Business
Week for 10 years where I was chronicling not many events that
the productivity games around the world rode on the back of
information technology for the last decade, and a great
cultural shift that had to take place over a decade ago was the
breaking down of silos within organizations, and I think that
has been echoed very clearly here today.
So if you're looking for an interdepartmental solution, I
think it's going to be extraordinarily difficult, unless the
departments themselves are willing to take on and very
aggressively address the cultural shift that's going to have to
take place. So as we try to engage a centralized role, we, in
terms of our communication networks for emergency responder
training, are still having to go step by step, door by door,
doorbell by doorbell to--to individual departments.
So I would just leave it more with a question than an
answer and rather than generating instant communication and
having to look at CNN, who's going to connect our 6,000
hospitals, our 18,000 Federal, State, and local law enforcement
facilities and our 22,000 fire departments for instant
messaging?
Mr. Davis. OK. I hear you. I mean, our concern is, and I
think all of you have articulated it very well in different
ways, that the Federal Government has a history of failed
development efforts. I mean, failed systems, we can go up and
down Republican administrations, Democratic administrations,
it's replete with a lot of money down the drain, and our
problem isn't just money in this case. It's getting solutions
quickly because we have 100,000 terrorists that were trained in
the al Qaeda camps and 2,000 are in captivity.
Senator Graham said over the weekend, we think 1,000 are
loose running around the United States somewhere and who knows
who else. It's almost an invitation. You almost hate to hold a
hearing on this and air it that we're still as vulnerable as we
are, but something's got to happen very quickly and my guess is
it's a lot of things.
Certainly, you don't have a Federal CIO or anyone with that
authority--I think Mark Foreman is doing a great job at OMB
with what he's going to work with, but it's the line of
authority that you have to be able to make the decision and
it's not clear yet that he's got what he needs. It's better
management of procurement officers and the people out there
buying. It's better for somebody on top to coordinate
everything between the different agencies, and you know I was
hoping to hear something different from the first panel, but I
think they're all doing their jobs but there's somebody who has
to kind of coordinate everything together, and we're still a
little ways from doing that.
We also have a cultural problem of even if the government
gets its act together, our culture of buying is probably not
appropriate to the new age and the kind of solutions that can
be made available today. I asked earlier about the share and
savings contracts, the kind of thing, Mr. Mockett, you're doing
in Richmond, I think some of the other companies are doing
share and savings contracts around the country within the
private sector, and maybe with State and local governments. A
tremendous opportunity for us. There is a concern that
somebody's going to make a big profit and then you have to
explain it. I mean, what's holding it up is that obviously
there's a huge upside if you do it right. But the downside for
government in not doing this kind of thing is tremendous, and
we can point to billions of dollars that have just been wasted
through the years because we end up with products we don't
need. Share and savings guards against that. You set a floor in
terms of what you're going to lose in a situation like that.
So GAO's analysis of information security audits at Federal
agencies just continue to reveal pervasive weaknesses, serious
risks for fraud, misuse of information, and disruption of
government functions. All these are very solvable if we can
just get it out there to you who have the information in a
package that makes sense and is coordinated, and that's what--I
mean, I think that's what I'm hearing today, and continue to
hear. The talent out here in our private sector is tremendous.
We've got tremendous talent in government, but we need to train
it and focus it in the right way and working together we can do
it, but we're still not there. I don't know if I have any
additional questions on top of that.
I think your statements have been very, very complete.
You've come at it from different directions which is good, and
I think what we wanted. Mr. Turner asked some of the questions
I wanted to ask. And let's see if I have any additional
questions before we close. Is there anything anybody wants to
add at this point that maybe you didn't get in or you want to
react to something we said?
This is a great panel. I appreciate it. We've got some--
your companies are leaders in these. We have obviously a number
of other companies that aren't here that offer the same kind of
things, but you provide a variety of solutions that we
desperately need at the governmental level right now that the
events of September 11th illustrate and continues to
illustrate.
So let me just say to all of you thank you very much. I
want to enter into the record the briefing memo that was
distributed to the subcommittee members. We'll give you 10
days.
If there's a thought or something you'd like to enter in,
I'd be happy to have that. If you want to enter your poll in
the record, we'd be happy to have that. The report that you
can't seem to get anybody to take, we'd be happy to have that
in the record and then we'll digest it and maybe we'll
introduce something or maybe it will find its way into one of
the appropriations down the way in terms of putting appropriate
safeguards, so that when we're taking money from hard-working
Americans here, we want that money to
go for its intended use, and procurement can solve--an
effective procurement system can save us billions and can solve
some problems. Again, it's an outstanding panel. I appreciate
everyone's participation. These proceedings are closed.
[Whereupon, at 12:16 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]