Defense IT achievements honored
Three teams and three individuals won Chief Information Officer Awards.
The Defense Department named its top information technology performers late last week by awarding its annual Chief Information Officer Awards.
The awards, for teams and individuals, recognize achievement in technology fields as defined in the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996. Members of the DOD CIO Executive Board look for work that improves service, saves money or otherwise significantly affects the department's IT mission.
From more than 75 nominees, the DOD CIO Executive board picked out three teams and three individual winners.
| Team winners, 2003 | ||
| Award | Recipient | Description |
| First place | Marine OnLine Team | Achieved a return to date of more than $1.8 million and a projected eventual return of almost $58.7 million on the U.S. Marine Corps Total Force Administration System, which allows more than 1,000 administrative manpower positions to be eliminated or converted to combat arms positions. |
| Second place | DOD Enterprise Software Initiative Team | Consolidated requirements and established agreements with vendors to take advantage of the military's vast buying power to save money on commercial software. |
| Third place | The Air Force's Air Education and Training Command | Replaced the saturated telephone switch at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, reducing costs to $3.6 million from $7 million without reducing capability. Other Air Force major commands now use AETC's implementation plan, which is expected to produce a 90 percent reduction in equipment and people. |
| Individual winners, 2003 | ||
| First place | Air Force Capt. Leonard Boothe, commander of the 39th Communication Squadron's Information Systems Flight, Incirlik Air Base, Turkey. | Led a 90-person team that supported U.S. and coalition units and maintained $40 million in assets for Operations Northern Watch, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. Also led installation of command and control system improvements used during combat operations in Iraq. |
| Second place | Hari Bezwada, information management and telecommunications product manager for efforts to rebuild the Pentagon after Sept. 11, 2001 | Devised the criteria for recovering and rebuilding the IT infrastructure and for restructuring the renovation contract that had been in effect before the attack. |
| Third place | Douglas Voelker, lead data network engineer, strategic planner and architect for the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Communications Support Element | Was on the data engineering team that developed concepts, integrated technologies and tested Central Command's $54 million deployable headquarters. Voelker's recommendations have become part of Joint Vision 2020, the Global Information Grid architecture and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructions. |
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