DLA's chief info officer heads for industry

The chief information officer of the Defense Logistics Agency is resigning to take an executive position at Electronic Data Systems Corp.

Carla von Bernewitz said Thursday she plans to leave her job as technology chief at DLA Feb. 1 to become a client delivery executive for information solutions at EDS. She said her work managing EDS contracts, such as the operation of data centers, will take her to New York, Boston, Hartford, Conn., and as far south as Rockville, Md.

A specialist in private-sector business re-engineering, von Bernewitz's marching orders at DLA were to modernize the agency's aged computer systems. "Replacing them does not begin to describe" the task, she said. Rather, she was hired "to kill" the old systems.

Von Bernewitz joined the federal government in 1994 after working at Vector Research Inc., a Michigan company that was doing work for the military. Initially, she intended to stay only five years. But after becoming CIO, she decided to stay an extra year to shepherd DLA through the Year 2000 computer compliance ordeal.

Among other things, von Bernewitz discovered during her tenure at DLA that, "Sometimes it is easier to change something...from the outside." One of the toughest problems to overcome is the slow pace at which government works, she said. "If we're going to compete with industry, we've got to do better."