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home > March/April 2007 issue > article
A chat with Kevin Carroll, Army program executive officer for Enterprise Information Systems
By Dawn Onley
Editor
KEVIN CARROLL manages 88 programs
that support logistics, medical, finance,
personnel, training and procurement
operations across the Army and
Defense Department. Carroll oversees
620 civilian and military employees, and
his office’s budget averages about $2 billion
a year. This year, that amount will
be closer to $2.5 billion.
Despite everything on his plate, the
Army’s program executive officer for enterprise
information systems takes it all
in stride. His demeanor is pleasant and
accommodating. He has gained a reputation
as a thought leader in the field of
acquisition and information technology
contracting.
To Carroll, serving as PEO in the
senior acquisition job is his way of giving
back. It’s his way of helping warfighters
do their jobs better, domestically and
abroad.
Carroll is no stranger to contracting
positions. Before
working for the Army,
he helped the
Coast Guard
acquire information systems. He started
his federal government career 32
years ago in contracting for the Transportation
Department’s Federal Highway
Administration.
Defense Systems Editor Dawn Onley
talked to Carroll about the ups and
downs of bulk contracting, lessons he
has learned on the job and his goals for
this year.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What do you find
most rewarding about your job? What’s
most challenging?
CARROLL: What I find most rewarding
is being able to actually effect results for
the soldier. Right now, we can do things
that can make the soldier’s life better.
It’s unusual in a lot of jobs to be able to
see, within six months to a year, a result
going out and getting feedback from the
soldier saying this is really helping them.
In some cases, it saves lives. The other
thing I find rewarding is working
with all the other PEO-EIS employees,
the 620 people. It’s a really fun
organization that’s very dedicated. For
me, it’s rewarding to come in and work
with the same group.
The challenge is being able to deliver
those results, with all those good people,
and doing that with a process that’s
messed up or long. How do we deliver
things in eight months or a 12-month cycle
when we have so many people reviewing,
overseeing and criticizing? The
challenge is to keep the momentum going.
A lot of people have their own agendas
that are different from ours. In order
to make that happen, we have to
really maneuver our way around the process.
The process is very cumbersome.
We’re always pushing the edge to get
things out the door. We’re always looking
for loopholes to keep things moving,
to get people to approve things. That’s
a little frustrating.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What’s the upside
to multiaward, multiyear contract vehicles
for IT products and services?
And are there any disadvantages to
these vehicles?
CARROLL: The upside to them is really,
in a way, you can certainly speed up the
contract ordering process by doing task
orders versus a regular contract. It’s a lot
faster and easier. You can still get good
competition by doing that. You can be
faster and quicker and still get good competition.
The other upside is you get a
better deal on the pricing, so that’s an attractive
part. It forces people to come
use those contracts. It promotes consolidation
for pricing, and basically because
we write the requirements, a lot of things
we do for information assurance are dictated
by Army and computer security.
We need to be worldwide supported.
We need people who can go to Iraq and
Afghanistan and who can meet the security
requirements that we have. We can
put those requirements in the RFP.
That’s an upside. Another upside: Right
now, Lt. Gen. Steve Boutelle, [the
Army’s chief information officer] is pushing
thin-client [computing] because he
believes — and he’s right — that that can
save us a lot of money and give us more
security. The newer technologies make
it easier for somebody to order.
Those are all the upsides. You’ve got
the requirements taken care of, got the bundled
prices, [they’re]
easy to use [and] promote
competition.
The downside of
them is they get a lot
of attention and more
protests. We spend a
lot of time on the
scope of the contracts
to reflect what the
Army really needs. If
they were smaller, if
everybody was doing
their own thing, they
probably could scale
by. In DOD right now, we’re kind of
closing that down right now. The size
and bulk — and therefore the attention
they get — are the disadvantanges.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What are your biggest lessons learned in deploying these vehicles?
CARROLL: What we learned is we’ve got
to make sure the scope of the [indefinitedelivery,
indefinite-quantity contract] is
right. First, we awarded these things for
the Army only, and then all of a sudden,
we were doing joint operations, and the
other services couldn’t order off of them.
A second big lesson learned is we have
to make sure we reflect the newer technology
and we have a process for bringing
in new technology. In the older days,
it took forever to get new technologies
on the contract. But now, pretty
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| I think the vendors don’t mind the bulk buy. I think from the vendor’s viewpoint, it opens the door. It allows them to access a market with a limited number of competitors without spending a lot of business development and marketing money. |
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quickly
after a vendor proposes a technology, we
get them on there. Getting through the
contract process has also been a lesson
learned. [The Information Technology
Enterprise Solutions contract] was a big
lesson learned for us. Making sure we
got the right customers.
The downside for us — why we wanted
to stay with eight [vendors], we are
now at 16 — is we are not GSA. We are
not trying to be GSA. We don’t have that
many people to manage that many contracts.
Of course, every contract you
have, it becomes a real administrative
nightmare to manage the contract. That’s
our biggest disadvantage.
The more players,
more trouble. I
think it’s just the
question of our contracts
not competing
with GSA.
[Another lesson]
learned that we’re really
struggling with is
getting the word out
to everybody. You’d
be surprised at the
number of people
who still don’t know
about the Army Small Computer Program.
Getting the word out to everybody
is still a big challenge.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: You are considered
the person who pushed the concept of
bulk contracting vehicles to a new level:
across DOD. Now, all of the services are
deploying them. How did you decide
these vehicles offered a lot of return on
investment?
CARROLL: A long, long time ago, it wasn’t
just me — Dave Borland, a lot of people
involved — we started to consolidate
buys of PCs and laptops because we
knew that corporations did it and made
a lot of money by doing it and got a lot
of standardization across the corporation
by doing it. So we kind of stole what industry
was doing. Over time, we started
thinking about servers and services. Are
services becoming more commoditized?
It was the idea of bringing together a vehicle
where you can get bulk pricing. Unfortunately,
unlike a corporation, we don’t have the money. It’s not centrally controlled. So we try to do all of this to
make it attractive for people to come and
use it.
What we do different from the other
services is try to work in a decentralized
mode. We’ve learned a little bit from
the Air Force. We lived with them as
they went through a bulk buy. We’re not
the experts. We’re learning, too. It came
out of the ideas from large corporations
to promote standardization and save us
money. Those were the reasons we did
it.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What can we expect this year in terms of new requests for proposals and contract awards?
CARROLL: The ITES-Hardware [contract]
will be out at the end of January
timeframe [EDITOR’S NOTE: The
Army awarded six contracts Feb. 12].
With the Program Management Support
Services-2 [contract vehicle], the final
RFP is due out in February and
award is expected by the spring. That’s
a pretty big one and getting a lot of attention
from the vendors. Those are our
two big commodity contracts.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What are your top goals for 2007?
CARROLL: The big thing for me right
now is the contract stuff. One thing is
we’d like to try to improve the way we
do our software [Enterprise Software Initiative]
buys. I’d like to make that a lot
better than we’re doing. We do them
now, but I believe that we can do them
a lot smarter.
The other big area is how do I integrate
together different business systems?
How do I get finance and logistics closer
together to make sure we’re not duplicating
stuff? Enterprise integration is
one of my big goals for this year.
The other big goal is security. We’re
experiencing a lot of attacks. In our area,
it used to not be a big deal because
we’re on the unclassified system. But
we’re experiencing an increase, so we
want to improve our [information assurance]
posture.
The other thing is probably [enterprise
resource planning]. This is very
complex, so it continues to be my goal
to make sure we’re doing those better as
well.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What do vendors think of the bulk contract vehicle approach?
CARROLL: I think they like them because
they provide an easier way for
them to market to the services because
they are on a contract. They have to
compete, of course. I think the vendors
don’t mind the bulk buy. I think from
the vendor’s viewpoint, it opens the
door. It allows them to access a market
with a limited number of competitors
without spending a lot of business development
and marketing money. It
also lets them play together as a partner
and more than just a commodity
contractor.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What are your plans after you retire later this year?
CARROLL: I’ll retire in September. What I will do I haven’t figured out. I’ll probably go to industry, most likely. I’ve been
in government for 32 years. For me, I’m still working through, “Do I join a company that does this? Or do I do my own stuff?”
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