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GCN Home > 04/19/04 issue

Mary Dixon - Defense: Uncommon success

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Dixon’s vision drives DOD’s program to issue smart cards to 4 million users

As the daughter of an Air Force officer, Mary Dixon was born to high expectations.

“I am a driven person, so I am always trying to make things better,” said the program manager of the Defense Department’s Common Access Card program.

When Dixon was assigned the project of developing the system in 1999, she barely knew what a smart card was. Five years later, she’s leading the charge on federal smart-card use.

“Dixon doesn’t oversee the program, she drives the program with personal dedication and unquestioned integrity,” said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance industry association.

“My word for her is ‘visionary,’ ” said Tim Dwyer, vice president of government solutions for EDS Corp. of Plano, Texas, an integrator supporting the Common Access Card program. “When something goes wrong, she is not looking to try to make a bad process better, she is looking to reinvent process so that it is done right.”

ID smart cards

The CAC program, overseen by the Defense Manpower Data Center, has been a huge success. The program has issued more than 4 million ID smart cards to active and reserve military personnel and contractors, and all DOD personnel will have a card by the end of the year.

The cards, which contain public-key infrastructure certificates, provide authentication to a growing number of Defense applications, helping the military toward its goal of network-centric operations.

The program wasn’t automatically a success. Dwyer recalled the early days of the CAC program, when the success rate in issuing the cards varied widely from base to base. Setting up the equipment was a complex process, one that few personnel were trained for.

Rather than settle for partial success, Dixon traveled to bases with high success rates, including those in far-flung locales such as South Korea, to gather information about what did work.

“Here she is, a two-star general equivalent, spending 30 minutes with an enlisted personnel getting his or her perspective,” Dwyer said. The lessons she and her team learned—some as detailed as cleaning the printer or properly bolting down equipment—were then passed on to other facilities, whose success rates subsequently improved.

The program involved bringing a lot of emerging technologies up to a production standard. DOD also did not want to rely on one source, so it encouraged vendors to adopt open standards wherever possible. Neither was an easy task, but both were challenges Dixon seemed suited to meeting.

Dixon has “been especially effective at working with industry to communicate the DOD vision for the program and to identify new technical requirements that will need to be met,” Vanderhoof said. “She’s demonstrated an uncanny ability to get consensus in the support of new standards and ways of doing business.”

Toward open standards

The smart-card and biometrics industries are moving toward open standards, in part because of Dixon’s persistence.

Dixon, now a member of the Senior Executive Service, started her career in the Navy in 1966. She came up through the ranks before landing a position as a senior analyst for program analysis and evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

In 1977 she was appointed deputy assistant secretary of the Navy, where she oversaw military manpower, personnel and training policy, and issues within the department. After taking time off to raise a child, she returned to government work in 1998, at the Defense Manpower Data Center. She has a master’s degree in business administration and operations research from George Washington University.

Despite the success of the CAC program, Dixon isn’t about to slow down. Many challenges await her, as the second-generation cards, possibly with additional biometric capabilities, are about to be issued.

“This is a start. Getting the cards out there is important, but the use of the cards is even more important,” Dixon said.
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