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Government Leader home > news stories
06/13/06
Meyerrose's formula for mission accomplishment
By Trudy Walsh
Government Leader Staff
It seems almost everyone has a proposal for a bestseller these days, but that didn’t dissuade retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose from sharing his idea for a book with a room full of government executives.
Meyerrose, associate director of national intelligence and CIO, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, outlined his potential book idea at the GCN IT Leadership conference in Washington last month.
The working title of Meyerrose’s book is “The Formula for Making IT Matter.” Meyerrose’s formula contains five elements, all of which embrace management principles that transcend IT issues.
1. Identify IT with the larger organization. Too often, the IT department sets itself up as different and apart from the rest of the organization. “I think that hurts IT,” Meyerrose said. “The things that drive and control our business are no different than what drives and controls other organizations. Technology is the least of it, in my view.”
As an example, Meyerrose described a tour he took of the robotics area of a car company. His guide was a software engineer with “Coke-bottle glasses and hair like Einstein’s,” he said.
“He was wearing a hat that said, ‘I build trucks.’ I asked him what he did and he said, ‘I build trucks.’ I said, ‘I got that, but what do you really do?’ He said, ‘I build trucks.’ All the geeks in the plant were wearing hats or smocks that said ‘I build trucks.’”
Although they were software engineers, they identified strongly with the organization’s mission.
2. Stand for something. Too often government gets bogged down in the details. Nobody remembers who wrote the requirement for touch-tone phones, he said. Nobody remembers who wrote the requirement for so many of the things that touch our lives.
“The ‘I’ in CIO stands for information, not infrastructure,” he said. A CIO’s job is more about information sharing. But just posting things on the Web is not effective information sharing. “Putting more hay on the haystack doesn’t make the needle any easier to find,” he said.
For example, 89 percent of all browser searches precipitate another browser search. “Think of all the arthritic joints we’re developing out there.”
3. Have passion, no matter what you do, no matter how mundane. Meyerrose asks his staff every day before he leaves the office, “What did we accomplish today?” When they answer, he asks, “Does it matter?”
4. Measure things you can control and do something about. People ask Meyerrose all the time about his metrics. An organization can have all the metrics in the world, but if nobody believes them, what good are they?
He referred to a time when his crew had some B-52s that were landing during a thunderstorm, loaded with classified material. His instrument landing system went out for five minutes. All of a sudden, none of his tidy metrics about system availability or network intrusion mattered much.
5. Understand the organizational dynamics within your role. Recruiting, retaining and retraining the right people “is not [a human resources] duty—it’s ours,” Meyerrose said.
“Getting the right people in the right seats—I honestly believe that’s the difference between an organization on an upward slant and a downward slant.”
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