During the three years I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, I found ready mechanisms to articulate my opinions about government management, the challenges of being a CIO, the impact of social networking and the internet, and how to deal with technology decisions.
As a Departmental CIO, I was invited to far more events and meetings than I had the time or inclination to speak to. There were frequent requests for interviews and when I wrote a column it was eagerly accepted for publication. Whether the reasons for this happening were the title of the provider or the value of the contents I will leave to those who listened or read.
Over time I became active on Facebook and Linked In, and over the last six months in the Government experimented with the challenge of saying something that at least potentially would be of interest 140 characters at a time on Twitter.
After leaving the Department, I found that at least for now to the extent I can find the time to do so, there still is a demand for my writing and speaking; though I have noticed that I now have to suggest the possibility a bit more than I did previously. I plan to continue to do so as long as there is an interest.
At the same time, I have desired to write a bit more on my own schedule about topics I wanted to explore, even when the exploration might only include asking a question or in ways that I might experiment with a bit.
Thus the muttering and now finally doing something about it.
That was about all I was prepared to write about but I felt I should at least put something that at least potentially entertain someone other than myself in the first entry.
So I decided to repeat two stories I told recently to someone who worked on proposals at CSC about past proposals I worked on.
Story 1. Years ago I worked for a small company which had as one of its focus areas, implementing police dispatch systems in small to medium sized towns. We submitted a proposal to Chesapeake VA to implement their system. The last thing we wrote was the cover letter which was to summarize why we should be the winning bidder. Unfortunately we wrote the letter at about 4am in the morning before we had to submit the proposal which is not such an unusual situation.
In the middle of the letter, in a moment of normally mistaken honesty we decided to let our potential customer know that while we had some experience it was limited: “We wanted you to know that even thought we cannot honestly say that we have a vast knowledge of police systems, we can say with conviction that we have a half-vast knowledge.”
We won.
And we never had the nerve to ask them how carefully they had read that sentence.
Story 2. A wonderful person who I worked with many years ago, who sadly I have lost track of, used to be a skeptic of red teams.
For those readers who are lucky enough NOT to know what a red team is, it is supposed to be a final review of a proposal before it is submitted which is intended to change an ordinary, boring, non-winning proposal into a work of art guaranteed to amaze and impress any and all proposal reviewers at the customer.
In reality of course, by the time a red team review is held, the proposed solution is so hard to change that at most red team changes tend to be clerical and not particularly critical one way or another. I recognize that some people with disagree with this last statement.
In this case, my friend, to prove a point, inserted a chili recipe in the proposal which was to undergo the red team review.
This review at least proved her point as no-one even picked up the fact that there was a chili recipe in the middle of the proposal and commented on it during the red-team feedback session.
Unfortunately, she also forgot to pull it, so we ended up submitting the proposal recipe and all. I am less sure but believe we won that competition also.