BAE Systems CIO: Robert Fecteau

Dan Farber: Bob, thanks for joining me.

Bob Fecteau: Dan I'm glad to be here, thank you for having me.

Dan Farber: Now the majority of your customers are purely defense agencies?

Bob Fecteau: We are totally a defense contractor. Very little commercial operations. We do, inside of customer solutions, have some commercial operations. We do ship repair for the United States Navy. We completely do about 80 percent of the non-nuclear Navy vessel maintenance program.

Dan Farber: What is your mission at BAE systems?

Bob Fecteau: At BAE systems I am responsible for the delivery of IT services for the corporation and moving from an outsource solution to an in-source solution.

Dan Farber: Now that seems a bit unusual moving from outsource to in-source since we hear more about the trend of moving to outsourcing into offshore for many applications and services.

Bob Fecteau: Well, we're a government services corporation predominantly. We're 96 98% commercially oriented and we support the Department of Defense. In 2004 2005 time frame, a business case was developed to say let's in-source our IT and use that as a capability to further our business within the government.

Dan Farber: So in terms of dealing with the government and defense contracts, and BAE Systems is the number four defense contractor, having in-house staff is preferable at least from a security standpoint?

Bob Fecteau: Well security is one component but the other part is that it provides us the breadth and scope and the qualifications to actually take large government contracts on. Whereas before we didn't have mass, a critical mass of deployment where we actually supported over 50,000 seats in a single instance.

Dan Farber: Now in terms of staying competitive, I would guess innovation is really important to the organization. How are you establishing more of a culture of innovation to keep that competitive juice flowing?

Bob Fecteau: Well innovation is really kind of driven by the market. I kind of think that integration of new technologies is part of what we do every day. I hear people say you really have to be innovative. Well you are only as innovative as the product allows you to be, number one. But number two, I think that you have to innovate to maintain currency with the delivery of the market. A lot of people ask me, "Don't you want to be state of the art?" I said you can't afford that. So we focus on high quality delivery of already invested technologies by the government onto their mission set that they require. So our focus in determining how we are going to remain competitive and gain that advantage over the other people is to really provide the best customer service in the solutions group that we operate.

Dan Farber: What are some of the projects that you are working on right now in terms of overhauling your infrastructure?

Bob Fecteau: As you start to consolidate you have opportunities to move components together and become more efficient, specifically in the portal area. We are collapsing inside of this Customer Solutions Group, 13 separate Intranet sites into one master portal that will be group wide. Once we do that we are going to standardize on the share point product. We are going to xml tag our documents and we are going to tie that to the base rolls for which everyone has authority to write to. So we'll use the directory function in the Microsoft platform to drive permissions and accesses to information in the publishing capabilities and we'll use a consolidated portal to deliver intranet quality information in a single site for our customers, which are our internal employees.

Dan Farber: So how much of what you are doing is built around this notion that collaboration needs to get a lot better within companies?

Bob Fecteau: Well in our company that's really a challenge. Inside of BAEIT, a sub business unit of the Customers Solutions Group, 46 percent of our workforce is not working on a BAE Systems system. They actually use a government system to do their work everyday and they use in many cases those government systems to access the corporate information stores.

Dan Farber: Why are they using government systems? Is that just part of the contract?

Bob Fecteau: They work in government spaces in supporting the government effort. They don't work in BAE spaces. So I have to have a really complex infrastructure to support them. Collaboratively you have to have a very easy access point. You have to provide them consolidated web-based mail that allows them to get the communications from the company. So this project is part of our information integration initiative, which will provide collaborative information across the corporation.

Dan Farber: When you say that they are working at these other companies, they are working for the government or using government systems, how much is mobility part of your strategy so that you can unify the access and information sharing of your company's information?

Bob Fecteau: Well mobility is important certainly for the program management level folks. Those guys have to have access to the corporate network in a secure mobile configuration because they are working with their employees in government workspaces. So we provide them wireless cards, Blackberrys, those kinds of technologies. We deliver information to those systems as smoothly as possible. The key is that we have to be mobile so that we can support our business options like managing their employees on the corporate HR system. They can manage the time card program for the financial aspects. So giving them mobile connectivity is an initiative that we are working on.

Dan Farber: How do you measure your success given that you have a significant budget, you are doing some major overhauls to try to improve and automate systems and build in more collaboration. When you go to the CFO, how do you know you're doing well?

Bob Fecteau: Well, I report to the CEO so the CFO and I go together. We get money from him to fix some of the programs. But I would tell you that the key is that it's born on metric information. Specifically, is our retention rate good? What are our employee opinion survey results? Are the employees themselves happy with the content and delivery of a material? We regularly survey information from those folks. So we have a pretty good understanding of whether we're supporting them well. The other component of it is you measure your costs of course. As we do integration we're starting to measure savings in terms of the reduction of the number of FTEs to provide the full labor force necessary to support the corporation. And when we integrated our customer solutions group we were able to reduce 17 full labor years in manpower necessary to support the IT infrastructure. So if you take that across North America, we could save roughly 60 man-years.

Dan Farber: As you're thinking about technologies that you want to deploy to get those cost savings, are there certain technologies that you're looking for that you think can give you a big boost in that area?

Bob Fecteau: Well I think that if I had to snap it down to a nutshell, unified communications seems to have the promise that it will give us some of those efficiencies. Certainly integrating data centers and bringing in consolidated backup and storage server management; all the components that you can start to do multiple systems with singular people, where they can actually task organize across multiple numbers of systems. That's the number one component. The number two component really is consistency in operations. If you take a company as big as BAE Systems with over 140 locations across the country, if you don't have the same process in each place, people aren't interchangeable either. So by standardizing processes in systems, we can actually improve that mobility of the work force as well, which allows us to rehire when people have to move for some reason. It allows us to reemploy our people and keep them inside the company, which decreases costs to operate. You start to think how much it costs to recruit somebody to replace someone.

Dan Farber: Given that you are a government contractor, obviously security is a big deal and data protection. Is this an area where there are new technologies, new investments that you're making?

Bob Fecteau: We are looking at some. The security of data inside the infrastructure is a fairly complex environment. In our case, number one is we have a separate infrastructure. We have a separate infrastructure from our government customer. We have a separate infrastructure from the intranet. And we have a separate infrastructure from our U.K. ownership corporation. So we absolutely have to provide a U.S. whole structure with security boundaries in place that allow us to maintain our agreement with the U.S. government. So that's the first foremost goal. The second part is we have data sources that are protected inside of our environment, like our trade and restricted data; ITAR data, we call it. That information has to be approved at certain levels of the State Department prior to release to even our own ownership company. So we have to watch this kind of thing very closely. We have special security agreements with the U.S. government that allow us to operate. So that's exactly how we operate today.

Dan Farber: Often I hear from CIO’s that consumer technologies are starting to invade the enterprise and become somewhat of a problem. And I hear stories from people who are saying our employees are spending too much time in Second Life or World of Warcraft on the job or at My Space. Or that the technologies that they use in their personal life they want to use on the job. Does that present a problem or an opportunity for you?

Bob Fecteau: Well it is a problem. And it's an opportunity. The problem comes in how do you manage and sustain and provide that over the broad enterprise. So you have to provide the infrastructure that can sustain and support it if you're going to let that technology in. There are some components that are really nefarious in our mind. Peer-to-peer computing is just not allowed. It's just not a component we support. Instant messaging from the outside is very difficult to stop, but it's somewhat restricted. We do not have full clients on the desktop or on the mobile computing systems.

Dan Farber: Now does the workforce embrace things like blogs and wikis and are they allowed within the company?

Bob Fecteau: Sure. They all want the blogs and wikis. We've had some good experience with blogs, some not so good experience with blogs.

Dan Farber: What were some of the good ones and bad ones?

Bob Fecteau: Well the good ones is it lets the workforce express how they feel. And we're going to open up a blog probably for the CIO, probably more like a wiki as opposed to a blog.

Dan Farber: Now are you going to be writing it?

Bob Fecteau: Well I'll write and contribute to it but it will be an open space for them to communicate with me across the corporation.

Dan Farber: Well

Bob Fecteau: OK, I appreciate it, Dan. Thank you.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Bob Fecteau, who is the CIO of BAE Systems. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.