| |
|
CEO / CTO Best Practices
Leadership Best Practices
An Interview with Donn Westerhoff
US
CENTCOM Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Donn Westerhoff - CENTCOM CTO
CEO Q interviewed Donn Westerhoff, the CTO of US CENTCOM about
his leadership role in the organization. The interview provided some
valuable insights into executive challenges, opportunities and CTO
best practices.
[CEOQ]: What are the key challenges
for the CTO in a critical, complex, and global IT environment?
[Donn]: The US Central Command Area of Responsibility (AOR)
stretches across more than 4.6 million square miles and 20
countries. While distance and time zone changes present difficulties
in attaining real time information, the most significant challenge
is that we incur continuous change. Our environment is dynamic;
however, we must still remain adaptable to all planned and unplanned
events. Change management is a very critical aspect in our IT
service. About 80% of everything that goes wrong within a network is
usually due to unscheduled or undocumented changes. In large
organizations, the change management process is difficult to define
and even more difficult to follow due to the continuous technology
and environment changes. Change management should enable, not
hinder, the organizational performance. Changes need to be handled
efficiently and cannot be so arduous that it inhibits our movement
forward. The key to success in change management is simplifying the
process, maintaining business rigor, and automation. The objective
is to establish a customer friendly process that has a positive
impact on response time.
[CEOQ]: Can you tell us more about your personal
challenges as a senior executive, when you first took over the CTO
role?
[Donn]: In my organization, my first personal challenge
has been establishing my role and responsibilities. My position is relatively new. It was put together in
November of 2007, and my immediate challenge was to carve out my
niche. My number one question was “what can I do to be an enabler to
the people that work with me?” My job is not only to enable my
workforce, but to enable the rest of the directorate to be
successful. I also have to enable operations to be successful by
finding the technologies, the processes, and the people to make it
happen. I have to find the tools that will make their job easier and
make our systems and network stable, reliable, and available.
[CEOQ]: Can you give us an example of how you used
technologies or tools to help the organization succeed?
[Donn]: We are currently utilizing a web-based
collaboration portal that helps to overcome distance and time zone
challenges which improves communication for better decision-making.
We also use a centralized network management tool to provide us with
a consolidated common operating picture of the entire network to
help our engineers and operators to monitor and troubleshoot the
network more effectively.
[CEOQ]: In your opinion, what is the best executive
leadership style for an organization like yours?
[Donn]: The servant-leadership style. As a leader, I have
the responsibility by definition to accomplish the tasks and execute
the will of my organization, as well as to ensure that my people are
taken care of. I have an inherent responsibility to enable my people
to be successful. It is my workforce that enables things to happen.
Sometimes I have to compromise, and subdue my own needs in order to
make others' goals my primary concern. I also have to keep my ego in
check; I am not the center of the universe. So, as a leader, the
more that I can do to enable my people to do their jobs, the more
successful our organization will be. My style of leadership is
pretty much: articulate a vision, enumerate the tasks, provide the
tools, and give my people the freedom to accomplish their tasks. My
role is to provide periodic guidance and knock down obstacles in
their way.
[CEOQ]: What are the critical success factors for the CTO
leadership in the government sector?
[Donn]: Leadership success is about vision and
interpersonal relationships. There’s not one person that makes the
organization successful. You need other people to work with them.
The success of the leadership in any organization is completely
predicated on your ability to build positive interpersonal
relationships. In my particular case, I have many stakeholders and a
lot of projects that I am engaged with. So I have to build consensus
and collaboration to the directions that they want to go. And I have
to show the benefits of each project and frame it in a win-win
proposition. The second piece of that is having a vision and a
direction. When asked the question, “Why do we do something?” There
is an old adage that people like to say: “Because we have always
done it that way!” This way of thinking is a recipe for disaster.
While tradition, predictability, and consistency are important, to
be competitive and a good leader in today’s IT environment you must
have a vision and you must be able to take risks. It is critical to
think outside the box and point to a direction that will give you an
orchestrated effort to success. It is always about doing the right
thing and making sure you include everybody. If I want to sum it up,
as a leader you have to conceptualize, socialize, re-conceptualize,
re-socialize, then implement or deploy.
[CEOQ]: What is the role of innovation in IT Management
and specifically in the government sector?
[Donn]: Innovation plays an important role in organizational
performance and it’s especially essential in the IT Management
sector. Effective managers always look for resourceful ideas and
innovative solutions to complex problems. In this economic crisis,
for example, one way to overcome budget limitations is to develop
the most efficient and highly skilled IT and support work force and
to seek resources outside the government, such as establishing
public-private partnerships. This enables expedited resolution of
issues, the development of creative solutions, and meets the need of
the government agencies who are asked to do more with less. Another
method of innovation is recapitalization of functional assets in
order to build on internal collaboration and utilize internal assets
within the government.
[CEOQ]: Can you give us a specific example of a problem
that you have solved in such manner?
[Donn]: We want to create a facility designed for the
evaluation, engineering, testing, analysis, training, demonstration,
and documentation of potential new technologies for introduction
into the USCENTCOM environment. Budget is a major challenge.
Thinking outside the box led us to the conclusion that we can obtain
low cost resources by leveraging relationships with other divisions
within our command and other military organizations that are
life-cycling equipment. This also is requiring us to lean on outside
resources and form partnerships to bring solutions to the problems
we are facing and create a win-win proposition that enables everyone
to be successful. The good news is when the facility is completed,
it will have the potential to become a Command, Control,
Communications, and Computer (C4) Center of Excellence which will
not only serve our directorate but serve the Command and all of our
coalition partners. The purpose for the C4 Center of Excellence is
to provide a state of the art information sharing environment while
growing into one of the premier locations for C4 collaboration,
research and design development, and education. Then, we can begin
tackling complex issues with our partners such as systems
integration and inter-operability. Going back to your earlier
question, I think one other key success factor for any CIO or CTO is
to have entrepreneurial skills. Most of what I do isn't documented
and charted but it is a form of building a business from within.
[CEOQ]: What are your criteria for selecting IT solutions?
[Donn]: Assured system availability, information assurance
or protection, and assured content delivery are critical to our
environment. We work in an environment where security will make or
break you. Since our network is a heterogeneous network that is
built by many organizations, our network operations are literally
analogous to several different companies trying to play all
together, each with different ideas and solutions which you can
imagine is very difficult. From an operational perspective, the
solution should be requirements driven and must validate a need for
a particular capability. From an investment perspective, we select
and evaluate IT products or solutions that are cost-effective,
intuitive, and useful. The product or solution must enhance workflow
and resolve a technical issue in order to satisfy the needs of the
end user. There are many vendors that provide potential solutions
and we employ a vendor agnostic process that allows us to select and
evaluate how each IT solution fits and integrates with other systems
in the network. The Chief Technology Office must look at each vendor
critically from a view of functionality, capability, long-term
sustainability, and total cost of ownership. In a non-profit
organization, the return is not necessarily monetary. For us, the
return on investment, or ROI, is the optimal accomplishment of the
mission in the least amount of time, with the least amount of
effort.
[CEOQ]: We hear a lot about the industry buzzword "Agile
IT”, what does the term Agile IT operations mean to you? And how
does your Network Management Architecture help you achieve that?
[Donn]: Agility is our ability to adapt rapidly and cost
efficiently in a proactive manner in response to environmental
changes. Due to the nature of our mission, our environment is
extremely dynamic and subject to constant change predicated on
situations and circumstances. For example, we might be responding to
a crisis or natural disaster such as an earthquake or a
non-combatant evacuation. We must be able to respond to these with
resources and communications very quickly. We need to make and
monitor network changes very quickly because as assets are moved, we
must understand how the change will impact our network. Our network
management architecture and network systems integration is a
pro-active network management process that enables us to identify
potential shortcomings, bottle necks, congestion points, traffic
engineering issues. Because of this, we can now engage in a
preventative fashion before they become serious and impact
communications support.
[CEO Q]: How do you select your vendors? What do you look
for in a vendor or in a partner?
[Donn]: We are a bit different than other IT shops,
because we support a very complex mission-critical environment with
real-time changes. IT for us is more than just about communication;
it is about the safety of our operations and our people. We don't
work 9-5. So we need vendors who can partner with us and understand
our environment very quickly, and can dedicate their resources to
help us meet our mission.
About Donn Westerhoff
Donn Westerhoff is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the
Directorate of Command, Control, Communications and Computers
Systems of United Stated Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base.
Mr. Westerhoff retired from the United States Army in 1997 and has
worked in industry for MCI, Intermedia Communications, and Verizon. Mr. Westerhoff is responsible for the directorate’s
research, development, new technology evaluations and insertions and
the strategic technology roadmap way ahead. He is a member of the DC
CTO roundtable.
|
|
CEO Q
Print Edition
Special Reports
Executive
Education Courses
Executive Search
Leif Klingborg
Author of K-concept
CEO Conference
Las Vegas, NV, USA
Free Trial Membership
CEO Awards
Authors/Consultants!
Annual
Paper Contest
Advertise in
Print & Online Editions
Subscribe
to CEO Q Magazine
|
