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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 05/01/06 issue

Hallowed ground gets wired

Higginbotham brings Arlington National Cemetery into the 21st century

By Richard W. Walker , GCN Staff

Thurman Higginbotham, deputy director of operations at Arlington National Cemetery, never misses an opportunity to pitch his vision for a fully automated information management system at ANC. Sometimes, it really pays off.

Two years ago, Higginbotham struck up a conversation with Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who was attending a funeral at the cemetery. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, happened to mention that he had received an e-mail from a constituent who expressed surprise at the lack of an automated records system when he went to the cemetery to find a relative’s grave site. The constituent had witnessed firsthand the cumbersome and time-consuming search through multiple sources to find the grave location.

“I said, ‘Oh boy, you’ve just opened the door for me.’ I gave [Warner] this whole spiel about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it,” Higginbotham said. “He said, ‘This place deserves just what you’re talking about.’ ”

Warner went back to Capitol Hill and got to work, sending staffers to Arlington to learn more about Higginbotham’s modernization plans. “He marked our budget up $5 million,” Higginbotham said. “When it got to conference it was reduced to $1.5 million. But that got us started.”

Today, Arlington National Cemetery is on the way to realizing Higginbotham’s vision. But getting there is a surprisingly complex and demanding undertaking.

For starters, managing ANC’s daily operations is enormously complicated. The cemetery conducts about 27 funerals a day. In addition to scheduling funerals and cemetery personnel to support each one, ANC must coordinate with the service branches to schedule the honors teams, chaplains and chapels.

Then there’s the task of managing ANC’s records. “ANC dates back to 1864, so the number of records that must be maintained is vast,” said ANC director John Metzler.

More news on related topics: Management, IT Management



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