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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/07/02 issue

Where are they now...

Belkis Leong-Hong

By Nancy Ferris, Special to GCN

When Belkis Leong-Hong retired from DOD in 1999, she was its highest-ranking Asian-American career employee. A mathematician and computer scientist, she spent almost 30 years in government, and retired as deputy assistant secretary of Defense for command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) planning and resources.

She is best known for her effort to standardize data across the department, but she also worked on business process re-engineering, corporate information management, software quality improvement and many other initiatives. Besides the Office of the Secretary of Defense, she worked at DISA and the Defense Security Service.

Today she is president of Knowledge Advantage Inc., a small, woman-owned company in Gaithersburg, Md. The company specializes in strategic business planning, knowledge management solutions, IT work force issues and Defense program requirements and analysis.

Leong-Hong’s thoughts: “Two things are having an sizable impact on the way we’re doing business today. First is the advent of handheld and wireless computing. You can’t go anywhere without a Palm or comparable device. These computers have expanded our access to critical information, no matter where you are.

“Years ago, I used to say that I could take a real vacation only if I took a cruise because the ships had limited communications with the United States. Today even cruise ships have Internet cafes! No matter where we are, we’re connected. It’s good, but it doesn’t give workaholics any rest.

“The second important development is less expensive and more powerful systems. Inexpensive servers are replacing mainframes, and both software and communications are readily available and able to handle major workloads. These developments make computing power available much more widely. That’s good, although information security remains a huge challenge.

“With the increasing availability and accessibility to computing power, we have a tremendous capacity for getting a lot of information—in fact, we are inundated with useful and not-so-useful information. The challenge is to be able to navigate through and access the right information as easily as possible. That is critical. Another challenge is the potential loss of critical knowledge to an organization as the work force shrinks.

“Knowledge management has emerged as a discipline to address these challenges. Many software tools have emerged (or retooled themselves) to support this knowledge management discipline, including portals, powerful search engines, data mining, data warehousing, document management, customer relationship management, business activity monitoring, data fusion and e-everything.

“Our industry is constantly poised to adopt, and adapt to, innovations that make our lives easier and better. The outlook for our industry is incredibly bright.”
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