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GCN Home > 04/19/04 issue

Mary Ann Rockey - Navy: Steady ship

By Dawn S. Onley, GCN Staff

Rockey’s IT work keeps Navy logistics, and other areas, on course

In the summer of 2001, the Navy was considering a Web portal through which widely dispersed senior Navy leaders could collaborate and chat. On Sept. 11 that year, the need became urgent, and the job was handed to Mary Ann Rockey.

Rockey, deputy chief of Naval Operations and the technology and innovation cell leader for logistics, and a small support staff used a set of Web tools she had developed for another initiative, Navy HQWeb.

HQWeb is a knowledge management and action-tracking system originally developed for Navy headquarters, Rockey said. The application suite is approved by the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet program.

A senior Navy leader had seen the success of HQWeb and the benefits of expanding the portal for use in other areas across the Navy. Rockey’s team rolled out the Task Force Web-compliant Executive Portal on Sept. 19, adding more modules weekly until the system was fully deployed.

It’s personal

The mission and the work were personal for Rockey and her staff, in part because two of the people working on the HQWeb team were killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.

“The rest of the team really wanted to do something to help,” she said.

So they took the modular design used in HQWeb and quickly created a capability for three- and four-star leaders, Rockey said.

The Navy used reservists to teach senior executives and their front offices how to use the Executive Portal, Rockey said.

Now senior Navy leaders can go on the Executive Portal over a secure Defense network to conduct instant messaging, post information normally saved for morning meetings, get status reports and link to other Defense and intelligence agencies, Rockey said.

Rockey and her team’s work with HQWeb and the Executive Portal won the Navy’s coveted E-Government Award in both 2000 and 2001.

Those accomplishments are typical of what her boss, Mark Honecker, described as Rockey’s “serious and lasting contributions to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of operations throughout her 20 years of government service.”

Honecker, the director of logistics planning and innovation, said Rockey “has done so much in the IT world for us, not just the logistics community but the Navy and the broader DOD community.”

Honecker also cited the effort Rockey made to reduce the number of legacy applications to make way for the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. In May 2002, the logistics and readiness area had 15,000 apps—more than any other single division within the Navy. Today that number is 2,700, and the work is far from over.

Teamwork matters

“It’s the ability to pull a team together to get something done. I think that is a skill that has helped in almost everything that she’s done,” Honecker said. “In a lot of these cases, there’s an idea that comes up and there’s not a team waiting in the wings to do this.”

There are 24 functional area managers within the Navy, each governing a different area such as logistics, personnel, administration and finance.

“She took the effort to get her arms around what our portfolio was,” Honecker said.

Rockey said the Navy is moving toward more centralized enterprise purchases, and she’s establishing requirements to do acquisitions centrally.

Honecker said Rockey showed her leadership abilities by handling the application reduction from a cultural and change management point of view.

“When Mary Ann takes on these projects, they’re not just IT projects to her,” Honecker said. “They’re change management projects and she manages it like that. She understands this is a change management issue as much as it is an IT issue. I think that’s a big reason for her success.”

That, and an ability to persevere. “True change is often characterized by a few false starts,” she said. “You can’t let those stop you.”
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