Those Who Get It

or the past year, technology executives have boasted of products that they claim will solve agencies' problems with sharing and analyzing information about terrorists. They've made big promises about how their wares could prevent a replay of the Sept. 11 attacks. But there are wide gaps in the private sector's understanding of the challenges the government faces in the homeland security arena and how it will use technology to address them.

At the E-Gov conference in Washington in late June, Michael Capellas, president of Hewlett-Packard and the former chief executive officer of Compaq, discussed his views on government technology. In the process, he demonstrated that those who know this market best understand its limitations.

Capellas has a better grasp of the government's particular needs than most corporate executives. As the head of Compaq, he was often directly involved in its federal sector business, whose sales were among the largest of computer manufacturers in the federal market. Capellas characterizes the government's main challenge today in simple terms. "The good guys need better stuff than the bad guys," he says. The government is less well prepared to combat its slippery terrorist adversaries because its thousands of information systems and applications aren't connected and thus can't be harnessed to analyze data, share information and, ultimately, predict when and where the country might be attacked.

Capellas also noted that the government's technology infrastructure is old, so it can't support the sophisticated software that firms are offering today to address the information sharing problem. Technology vendors that fail to recognize the shortcomings of federal infrastructure often urge agencies to adopt software tools they simply cannot use.

For example, Mark Tanner, the FBI's information resources manager, has said he receives "probably 10 to 15 calls or e-mails a day from [vendors] who have solutions to these problems. . . . [But] we're unable to really implement them . . . because we don't have the infrastructure." The FBI's systems, like those of so many agencies, are antiquated, built from leading edge technology of the 1980s. The bureau slowly is modernizing its systems under a three-year program known as Trilogy, but there's still much groundwork to be done.

Capellas said the biggest IT question facing the new Homeland Security Department is what to do with the enormous quantities of information its component agencies hold in their databases. The new department's officials shouldn't try to link all the existing databases. "If we try to do everything, we'll do nothing," Capellas says. Instead, they should extract just the information they need from each repository and store it in a secure place. That goal could be accomplished through a series of short-term projects, he says, such as integrating the many terrorist watch lists the agencies currently maintain. And such a project already is under way. It's the opposite tactic of that advocated by many firms that have rushed into the federal market since Sept. 11.

Some technology executives continue to boast that if only federal agencies would use their products, they could be certain to prevent future terrorist attacks. And they lambaste the government for not moving quickly enough to adopt these miracle cures. Tom Siebel, president and CEO of Siebel Systems, has mounted an aggressive Washington stump tour over the past year to tout his company's "homeland security solution" software, which would theoretically allow agencies to share data across jurisdictional boundaries. He's also amassed a $2.1 million political action committee, the second largest in the country, by leaning on his employees to pony up $5,000 contributions, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

Siebel appears to be on a mission to win over Washington one way or the other. In a speech at the E-Gov conference, Siebel told of an intelligence agency official who told him the government would never share information the way Siebel has envisioned. Siebel said he told the official, "The question isn't whether we're going to share this information. The question is how many people are going to die before we do."

Agencies are growing tired of hearing about "solutions" from companies that don't understand the problems agencies are facing. In the year since the Sept. 11 attacks, most of the revenue-starved technology firms that headed east from Silicon Valley seeking a quick boost from Uncle Sam have either packed up and gone home or recognized that doing business in the federal market requires Zen-like patience.

Those who stay around-and pay attention-will learn about the government's real problems, and build businesses on solving them.