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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/07/02 issue

Where are they now...

Philip J. Kiviat

By Nancy Ferris, Special to GCN

Philip Kiviat was a leader of government IT back in the days when computing was known as ADP, for automated data processing, and agencies’ computing know-how surpassed much of the private sector’s. Kiviat’s specialty was systems planning, capacity management and performance monitoring.

He was the first technical director of the Federal Computer Performance Evaluation and Simulation Center, or FEDSIM. During 1978, Kiviat was a task group leader for President Carter’s data processing reorganization project.

His “Kiviat Graphs” are still widely used in the computer hardware and software performance field, as well as in other disciplines, to portray patterns and distinguish modes of behavior. Kiviat also wrote two books on simulation programming languages—SIMSCRIPT II and GASP—and numerous technical papers.

He has been a consultant to the General Accounting Office and a member of the National Research Council panel for the assessment of the programs of the Computer Systems Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as a leader of industry organizations such as the Industry Advisory Council and the Association for Computing Machinery.

After leaving government, he worked for several IT companies including Sterling Software, KnowledgeWare Inc., and ICF Information Technology Inc. Today he remains active as president of the Kiviat Group, a Potomac, Md., firm that advises IT companies and the government.

Kiviat’s thoughts: “The legislative and regulatory changes of the 1990s that are known as procurement reform made a qualitative difference in the way federal IT business is conducted. These reforms materially improved the government’s ability to acquire the goods and services it needs, when it needs them, at fair and reasonable prices. And they changed the way companies do business with one another and how they present themselves to the government.

“The approach has evolved from, ‘buy specified items at the lowest cost’ to ‘buy specified items that provide the best value’ to ‘sell me your choice of products and services that will solve my stated problem at a fair price’ to ‘this is my objective; tell me and sell me an affordable way to get there.’

“We have seen a complete shift in the way the government thinks about its role as a user of IT and the way in which it uses industry to make it an efficient and effective IT user in the most holistic sense.

“As for current trends that will make a difference in years to come, two trends have overarching significance. First, the Office of Management and Budget is finally stepping up to its management role and taking a leadership position in getting departments and agencies to think of and deal with themselves as enterprises, especially with respect to infrastructure and security.

“Second, managed-services contracting is emerging as a way of constructively drawing on industry strengths—talent and resources—and focusing government attention on mission issues and accomplishments, rather than on the prescriptive management of how IT work is done.”
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