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Jack Jones - NIH: IT systems pilot

Jack Jones - NIH: IT systems pilot

By Mary Mosquera, GCN Staff

Jones draws on his Navy training in developing a flight plan for NIH

Most everything Jack Jones learned about leadership he learned on the fly, so to speak, in the Navy.

As a flight navigator, he participated in a number of simulated emergencies, in which instructors increased the stress level by distracting their students to teach them to focus on the job at hand. The lessons from that training became second nature.

“Always remember when you’re flying or working,” Jones said, “you can only do what you can do, and figure out what that is and get on with it.”

Jones, acting deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s Center for IT and NIH’s systems architect, is known for assessing a situation and making a decision quickly. He also knows how to reach out across groups to move a project forward.

He has spent most of his 18 years in federal IT at the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratory research facility in Albuquerque, N.M. He came to NIH, an agency of the Health and Human Services Department, in 2001.

At NIH, he has led development of the enterprise architecture. Jones’ approach has been to implement an EA that is practical and can be used daily and not become shelfware, said Gene Cartier, vice president of SRA International of Fairfax, Va., which provides support to NIH’s CIO office.

“Jones is a hands-on manager who leads by example,” Cartier said.

At Energy, Jones early on embraced Web browser technology and spearheaded the effort to create an Internet presence at Sandia, using evangelism, technical leadership and training, and providing hosting services to Sandia organizations, Cartier said.

In the early days of browser technology, this involved making quick adjustments. He signed up to buy a $70,000 site license for an early browser. Shortly after, the browser company went under, taking the Sandia funds with it. Jones signed the labs on with Netscape Communications Corp.

Jones said he learned from the experience: If you’re going to be at the leading edge of a technology and you’re a central services organization, you have to be willing to make changes quickly because the market changes that fast. He said it’s only worthwhile being at the leading edge when it’s important to how your business develops, at places such as NIH or Sandia.

When security breaches were uncovered and controversy centered on Sandia researcher Wen Ho Lee in 2000, Jones was assigned the task of fixing Energy’s security problems, Cartier said.

Besides technical planning, Jones was able to garner both senior management and field-office support for his recommended changes in computer security procedures. Jones said he created a large task force of people from across Sandia’s three weapons labs, so they were all engaged in creating the solutions.

“We actually assembled them in one place for a period of a couple of months, at least a core of them, to be able to work together and have rapid communications,” he said. “It was getting all those people, all the points of view together and insisting on an outcome.”

Wide participation

Since coming to NIH, Jones, who holds a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from Stanford University, has involved CIOs of the agency’s institutes to advance projects and overcome the “not invented here” mindset.

When he taps individuals to participate, they’re not always receptive, at first. The point is offering an opportunity for all the interested parties to come in and participate in how a solution is going to be created, he said.

“This is part of what attracted me to NIH, that our CIO [Alan Graeff] had already done some good work in establishing a governance structure,” Jones said, citing the IT management council, composed of the CIOs of all of NIH’s institutes.

They plan for projects, definition of the scope and requirements, while assuring nothing will break because applications these days are rarely completely independent.

All the plans are available to everybody who’s interested before they are executed.

“Usually that involvement generates enough buy-in,” he said. “In that we get good support.”
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