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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/07/02 issue

Where are they now...

Robert J. Woods

By Nancy Ferris, Special to GCN

Bob Woods joined the government as a Navy engineering intern in 1968. He first gained a reputation for bold innovation as the IT chief of the Federal Aviation Administration from 1972 to 1987. There he launched two of the government’s first major outsourcing programs, CORN for mainframe processing and OATS for desktop computing.

Moving up to the Transportation Department, he ran its IT shop as a business operation that more than broke even.

His next stop was the Veterans Affairs Department, where as deputy assistant secretary he worked on integrating stovepiped systems of veterans’ records.

While serving as the commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Federal Technology Service from 1994 to 1997, he expanded federal telephone services while bringing down the cost to agencies, among other achievements.

Today, Woods is president of the education services unit of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., a Dallas company specializing in business process outsourcing. He also is chairman of the Industry Advisory Council, an influential organization of companies that provide IT services and products to the government.

Woods’ thoughts: “In many ways, our community has gotten a black eye from the recent collapses of telecom and dot-com companies. But I think, overall, we’re doing a good job for our customers and for their mission-critical systems. When we started in this industry, we were trying to get more proficient in the technology. That was how we got ahead of the competition. Now we’re beginning to ask, What good is this technology? What does it do for our business?

“More and more, our customers are demanding business solutions, not just IT solutions. They don’t want you to build them a system and then go away, leaving them holding the bag.

“Parts of our industry haven’t figured it out yet. We still have a lot of organizations that are building technology hobbyhorses whose value to their missions is uncertain. There’s no excuse for building another payroll system or bill processing system, for example.

“It’s important to recognize that we’re going through another evolution in the use of IT, one where the outcome is not technology but the end service or transaction. I believe business process innovations over the next few years will be a lot more important than the technological innovations.”
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