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GCN Home > 04/19/04 issue

Robert Otto - Postal Service: Early to rise

By Matt McLaughlin, GCN Staff

Otto applies a farm-bred work ethic to his post as USPS chief technology officer

Robert L. Otto got his first management training milking dairy cows.

Growing up on his family’s farm in Fishertown, Pa., Otto rose at 3:30 every morning to help his father milk 200 cows.

The workdays lasted at least as long as the sunshine, and rain didn’t cancel the work, it merely moved things indoors for tasks such as machine maintenance and repair.

Otto has applied the lessons he learned on the farm throughout his 35-year federal career. As chief technology officer of the Postal Service, Otto arrives for work each morning around 4 a.m. and generally stays until 7 p.m.

“I’m a Type A person,” Otto said. “I can’t sit still. I like to have 30 or 40 things going on.”

Even when he’s away from the office, he keeps in touch wirelessly. Otto sings the praises of the BlackBerry handheld devices from Research in Motion Ltd. of Waterloo, Ontario, that USPS has issued to more than 3,000 managers. The agency uses them for communications and other management applications including continuity of operations.

Fast forward

That need for activity moved Otto’s federal career forward quickly. He recalls graduating from high school on a Thursday and beginning work as a clerk with the Agriculture Department the following Monday.

But the workdays were far shorter than he was used to, so he checked out books on computers from the local library and read them voraciously. After taking a computer class, Otto received a promotion to USDA’s computer operations center. Over the next 11 years, he earned more promotions into the higher ranks of USDA’s IT operations and then took charge of computer security for the Postal Service.

Otto is a “hands-on manager who is very passionate about his job, makes every attempt to lead by example, and effectively communicates his management philosophy and goals to IT staff members,” said Deborah Judy, the Postal Service’s manager of IT value.

His simple life on the farm has influenced Otto’s philosophy as the head of the Postal Service’s IT operations. His mantra is “standardize, centralize and simplify.”

Since he became the CIO of the Postal Service in 2001—followed by the move to his current post as CTO last year—Otto has overseen a massive consolidation designed to standardize the agency’s systems and simplify their management.

The agency needs to consolidate, Otto said, because its IT operation—with 129,000 users and 550,000 devices—is too massive to manage effectively otherwise.

“Every time we get a product, we break it because we’re so big,” he said.

Server centralization

The most basic element of the consolidation has been the centralization of the Postal Service’s servers. From an IT infrastructure that included 15,000 servers at hundreds of locations across the country, the agency has whittled the number down to 3,000 servers at two IT centers, in Eagan, Minn., and San Mateo, Calif. The move has saved the agency $30 million a year, Otto estimated.

Likewise, he has reduced the number of staff members’ software tools from 1,500 to 380, the number of vendor partners from 200 to a dozen, and the number of help desks from 119 to four. He said he plans eventually to have only one help desk for the entire operation.

Each move has saved the Postal Service millions of dollars, yielding an IT budget that has shrunk every year since 2000.

A key to the success of the Postal Service’s IT operations is establishing metrics, Otto said.

In an IT meeting room at USPS headquarters in Washington, for example, a large chart tracks the performance of all 34 agency IT managers. The chart lists the top four priorities for each manager and displays a success score—color coded in green, yellow or red—for each quarter of the fiscal year.

“I have this belief that if you measure things, people will make them efficient,” Otto said.
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