Body

The President of the United States Roy E. Roebuck

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue CMR 1651

Washington, DC 20202 APO NY 09175

Mr. President; 18 Feb 92

I have discovered something over the past nine years from which the country can benefit after a relatively short period of development. I am writing directly to you because the scope and implications of this discovery can best be addressed at the national level. I will freely give what I have discovered to anyone.

I have developed a concept for organizing information by applying relatively simple and inexpensive information technology and information resource management concepts. I believe this technique can decrease the cost of operating Federal government agencies by more that 20% annually, as well as increasing their effectiveness by at least 50%, without decreasing their performance levels, all within a period of a couple of years. I call the concept Total Architecture, Plans and Execution System (TAPES).

TAPES allows any thing that an agency controls or manages to be viewed in terms of its composition and distribution throughout the agency. TAPES employs simple organizing principles. The power of TAPES comes from the integration of these principles into a single system. TAPES organizes information, displays the patterns within that information, and provides accountability for that information.

TAPES could serve as a corporate directory, registry, Table of Contents, Management Repository, Encyclopedia, etc., etc. of every thing the corporate body uses, produces, or disposes-of, displayed in terms of locations, organizations, production units, staff functions, business activities, product configurations, and specific accountable resources, organized by life cycle phase.

I believe that because of our current national and international needs, I could not wait for the wheels of progress within my employing organization to raise TAPES to visibility and its possible contribution. Bureaucracies are marvels of strength and stability, or like swimming in molasses, depending on your perspective. TAPES is needed now! This correspondence is caused by my conviction that some serious national needs could be effectively addressed by TAPES, once it is available. I am ready to make TAPES happen, rather than wait and hope for it to happen.

Please do not dismiss these claims as frivolous. My credentials are valid and my intentions are worthy. I have been a Federal government employee for the last 18 years. I made a commitment to public service 26 years ago and the concepts and techniques I am presenting are the work of over nine years of focused effort.

I work for the U.S. Army Europe as a Computer Specialist, with previous experience as a Management Analyst focusing on Organizational Development, Enterprise Modeling, and productivity improvement. I was an Army officer for 9 years and resigned my commission to develop TAPES. I have a Bachelor's degree in physics and a Masters of Science in Systems Management. TAPES has been well received by the U.S. Army and has been recommended for development as a standard Army system, and has also been recommended as a DoD standard system.

The Executive Branch, like most large organizations, is often viewed in a generally negative light. Despite its good intentions, it is too big, too convoluted, too compartmented and segmented to control as a single entity. However, if you and your deputies and managers, down to the lowest operational level, could have awareness and control over all aspects of their activities' operation and performance, you would gain much better control, causing the Executive Branch to respond to your direction with the smoothness of the body of a trained athlete, rather than resisting change due to bureaucratic inertia and sluggishness, the principle maladies of large hierarchical organizations.

It would be like a person who suddenly gains insight into controlling the mechanisms of his cells and organs. The cells and organs would no longer be accessible only from the autonomous system, but would rather be under conscious control. If a person achieved this, they need not fear illness or age. They could recognize and correct destructive or wasteful behavior as it occurred, and take immediate corrective action, consciously. It would be no more difficult to rid all of the body's cells of toxins and disease, than it would to run a marathon. Not easy, but possible. If an organization achieved the equivalent of this, it would mean the organization could be directed, resourced, controlled, and evaluated as a single entity. It would be much more effective, efficient, productive, responsive, and unified in purpose and values.

Obviously you, as President, would not choose to seek awareness of every detail of what goes on within your area of responsibility. That would overload any person. Managing the details is what delegation of authority is for, all the way down to the squad leader in an Infantry Platoon or an office manager in a government agency.

TAPES would require that responsibility and authority be taken seriously within the government, because by its nature, TAPES would serve the purpose of giving detailed accountability, visibility, and control of information about assets, resources, and decisions. Although you would not normally seek the details of government operations, you and your executives could see the patterns of organizational behavior, and seek details where you feel it is necessary. TAPES would enable this.

Obviously there are security, privacy, technology, management, and maintenance issues involved in developing and implementing TAPES. However, consider that all of the information and data currently used by the Executive Branch is already created, processed, displayed, transported, stored, and archived by someone. TAPES would not add to that workload, it would only integrate it into a single management system. It would organize the babel of information within the Executive Branch into a single language. The technology is available and proven.

If this seems like a huge endeavor, think of it as a transition to a state of managing one entity consisting of millions of integrated pieces, from the current situation of managing millions of separate pieces which are intended to work as one entity. The reduction in overhead, with the corresponding increase in productivity, is significant. You would be working with an integrated organization, rather than a dis-integrated one.

TAPES would require an engineer's discipline and consistency to build and maintain, and would inhibit thousands of suboptimal individual and group behaviors, but would create a dynamic organization that has the potential of achieving its optimal behavior.

Do not construe this to mean a mechanical, non-humanistic organization will result. TAPES enables a shared sense of identity and responsibility within the members of the organization. As an analogy, it would be like the difference between Marine basic trainees upon entering and leaving boot camp. When they enter the camp, they are separate individuals, thinking in individual terms. When they leave the camp, they are members of a team, a unit, a society. They have not lost their creativity or their individuality, they have gained a broadened sense of identity and of kinship, and new and powerful skills in producing results. Nothing worthwhile was ever produced by a single individual.

TAPES need not be implemented as one huge "grand-design" initiative from the top downward. See Annex 1. It can be implemented in useful stages by any organization, large or small, dispersed or consolidated, government or private sector. And as long as implementing organizations use the same starting structure (Enterprise Model) for the TAPES base, they can be integrated when necessary, to the degree necessary, within days or even hours.

A minimum recommended requirement for TAPES is an enterprise-wide computer network, with dispersed processing and storage capacity. Implementing TAPES on centralized computer systems can be done, however it would probably be prohibitively expensive for a dispersed organization. With networks and internetworks, TAPES is not only possible, but logically indicated.

TAPES would provide tremendous adaptability to an organization or group of organizations. Reorganizations, realignments, task or ad-hoc organization, distributions, consolidations, resource leveling, etc., could be done in a fraction of the time currently required.

Other uses of TAPES could be:

a public information kiosk containing city/county/state/national directories of organization job vacancies within a location with matching inventory of available labor, all organized by standard industry code (SIC) and standard occupational code (SOC), directory of occupational title (DOT) code, and/or Office of Personnel Management (OPM) personnel codes, allowing people to go where the jobs are or business to go to the qualified labor, as appropriate;

matching of business/government job requirements to educational and vocational institution curriculum preparation;

registry for human genome project, showing genome structure with associated characteristics;

anatomical/physiological/pharmaceutical/psychological effect matrix;

cause and effect backtracking for investigative work;

knowledge-domain/academic-discipline/scientific-research correlation;

geneology;

parts listings;

botany/zoology classification;

organization chains;

structural or procedural decomposition/analysis;

activity costing;

structured documents;

mapping of any structured domain;

matching of industrial and agricultural production to market demands and distribution;

planning the distribution of essential goods and services to match local population;

etc.

TAPES could be used for any purpose that required something to be analyzed or decomposed into simpler element, and then associated with other entities. TAPES is a general purpose entity/relationship tool for building or finding patterns of things, and then building or finding the relationships between them.

TAPES could be provided as a complete management technique to the businesses and countries around the world that are facing such massive and complex challenges in getting organized and productive. I would advice caution here. Effective implementation of TAPES by any country or organization would give them a significant competitive advantage. The positive side of this is that for TAPES to be effectively applied and implemented, the countries/organizations must remove most internal and some external barriers to communication and mobility of information, goods and people, and then work in a more collaborative manner.

By developing and implementing TAPES, the Federal government gives a tool to its executives, managers, and operatives that provides them visibility and control over their operation, decreases fragmentation, and displays interdependence. The development of the software to implement TAPES could be done within a few weeks by a competent programmer, in any computer language that allows standard relational data manipulation. The top level data of the TAPES Enterprise Model, Catalog and Cross-Index, and the Life Cycle Management System could be done in less that 1000 manhours.

This top level of TAPES model could then be used by any organization and supplemented with information specific to that organization, in a time frame of weeks for smaller organizations to months for larger organizations. The hard work will be to populate the data structures below the top level of TAPES with detailed data and to post information to the Life Cycle Management system. The detailed data is already there in the organizations, as alluded to earlier, but it is probably not integrated.

When each organization's TAPES is completed, the integration of organizations can be achieved by combining their TAPES data structure and removing the duplications. Smaller TAPES could be used as building blocks to build a larger, more complete TAPES. TAPES Army would be a building block to TAPES DoD, then TAPES Executive Branch, TAPES Federal Government, TAPES United States, TAPES United Nations, etc.

I hope TAPES can be useful to you and the nation. I am available to provide TAPES documentation, a prototype version of TAPES, and documented source code of the prototype as directed.

Thank You.

Roy E. Roebuck

SSN 431-98-4178

DDN Address = roebuckr@heidelberg-emh2.army.mil

Phone: Work - DSN 370-6868 or 8815

Home - 01149-6257-1341 (Germany)

Annex 1. TAPES Technical Information

TAPES consists of four components: the Enterprise Model, the Catalog, the Cross-Index, and the Resource Life Cycle System.

1. The Enterprise Model looks at things an enterprise must control to achieve its goals. Seven classes of objects/entities that any enterprise must manage have been identified. They are: locations, organizations, production units, functions, business activities, product/resource configurations, and specific resources and their life-cycles, and the relationships between them.

The objects are aligned in the above sequence to show object "composition" from the macro (location) to the micro (specific resource) level of detail, and object "distribution" from the micro to the macro level. In object distribution for example:

every specific resource is associated with a product configuration (category/type/classification) (e.g., a part within an automobile);

every product configuration is applied to some business activity (e.g., the automobile within the business activity "deliver products");

every business activity is performed by a larger business activity in a line operation, or by a staff to achieve its functional responsibility;

all business activities and staff functions are performed within some production unit;

all production units belong to some organization; and

all organizations occupy location(s).

The seven object classes are related together by the Enterprise Model in one to one, or one to many relationships, always going from macro to micro level. The internal structure of each object class, and its association with other object classes, forms the Enterprise Model of the enterprise.

2. These object classes are managed by a relational database application called the Catalog. See Figure 1. Each object class has its own internal structure. As an example, for the location object class, our planet has its continents and oceans, each continent has its nations, each nation has its states, each state has its counties or equivalents, each county has its towns and/or autonomous cities, each city has its subdivisions, each subdivision has its buildings, each building has its rooms and engineering plant, each room has its electrical and communication outlets, each outlet has its connectors, etc. Each location object is a fixed place or thing having geographic or geologic coordinates. This parent/child type of structure would apply to all object classes.

As each object class's internal structure is decomposed down to the lowest managed level, each subelement is individually tagged with a non-random unique code. This code relates the subelement to its parent object, any descendant objects, and all sibling objects. This type of code when used by editors is called a "numerical attached outline number". When used by project managers it is called a "work breakdown structure" (WBS) code. They are simple to construct, use, and maintain. This outline or WBS code individuates each and every element of all object classes.

The table D1 and access to various resource management information systems (MIS) are additional capabilities.

3. I have covered the Enterprise Model with its seven object classes and the individuation of each object within the object classes, and the relational hierarchy of objects displayed in the Catalog. The next area to cover is the Cross-index. See Figure 2. The Cross-index is also a relational database application.

The cross-index is formed from the relation between two data tables. The first table (H1) contains only records showing the internal structure of each object class. The second table (H2) contains the associations between a base object in one column that repeats for every occurrence of another associated object in the second column.

A matrix results when a list is printed out from H2 showing a descending list (i.e., the composition) of locations to organizations to units to functions to activities to product configurations to resources. This list could be used as a directory, like a phone book or organization chart, among other uses.

4. One of the MIS that is accessed through the Catalog would be a comprehensive Life Cycle Management system for any requirement, with the requirement citing specific objects selected from the Catalog. This would facilitate standardization as well as resource management.

FIGURE 1. TAPES CATALOG

H1 H1 IMAGE

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*.01. *LOCATIONS * *.01.1. *CONTINENT A *

*.01.1. *CONTINENT A 4444444444>*.01.1.1. *NATION A *

*.01.1.1. *NATION A * *.01.1.1.1. *STATE A *

*.01.1.1.1.*STATE A * *.01.1.1.1.1. *COUNTY A *

*.02. *ORGANIZATIONS * *.01.1.1.1.1.1. *TOWN A *

*.03. *UNITS * *.01.1.1.1.1.1.1. *SUBDIVISION A *

*.04. *FUNCTIONS * *.01.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. *BUILDING A *

*.05. *ACTIVITIES * *.01.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. *ROOM A *

*.06. *PRODUCT TYPES * *.01.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.2. *ROOM B *

*.06.01. *FUND CATEGORIES * *.01.1.1.1.1.1.1.2. *BUILDING B *

*.06.02. *INFORMATION CONFIG* *.01.1.1.1.1.1.1.3. *BUILDING C *

*.06.03. *PERSONNEL CONFIG * *.01.1.1.1.1.1.2. *SUBDIVISION B *

*.06.04. *MATERIEL CONFIG * .)))))))))))))))))))))2))))))))))))))))))-

*.06.05. *FACILITY CONFIG * D1 MIS

*.06.06. *CAPABILITY CONFIG * +)))))))))))), +)))))))))))))),

*.06.07. *SERVICE CONFIG * *DETAIL * *ACCESS TO *

*.06.08. *TIME CONFIG G>44444>DATA G4444>INFORMATION *

*.06.09 *ENERGY CONFIG * *ATTRIBUTES * *SYSTEMS *

*.06.10. *PERSONS * *FOR EACH * *CONTROLLING *

*.07. *RESOURCES * *OBJECT * *OBJECT CLASSES*

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FIGURE 2. TAPES CROSS-INDEX (COMPOSITION VIEW)

H1 (Catalog) H2 (ASSOCIATIONS) H1 IMAGE (TITLES)

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*.01. *LOCATIONS * *.01.1. * .02.1. 4P444>.02.1. *ORGANIZATION X*

*.01.1. *CONTINENT A 4444444444>.01.1. * .02.2. 4P444>.02.2. *ORGANIZATION Y*

*.01.1.1. *NATION A * *.01.1. * .02.3. 4P444>.02.3. *ORGANIZATION Z*

*.01.1.1.1.*STATE A * *.01.1. * .03.1. 4P444>.03.1. *UNIT A *

*.02. *ORGANIZATIONS * *.01.1. * .03.2. 4P444>.03.2. *UNIT B *

*.03. *UNITS * *.01.1 * .04.3. 4P444>.04.3. *FUNCTION C *

*.04. *FUNCTIONS * *.01.1. * .05.2. 4P444>.05.2. *ACTIVITY B *

*.05. *ACTIVITIES * *.01.1. * .06.1.1.G444>.06.01.1. *FUND TYPE A *

*.06. *CONFIGURATIONS * *.01.1. * .06.2.1.G444>.06.02.1. *INFORMATION A *

*.06.01. *FUND TYPE * *.01.1. * .07.1. 4P444>.07.1. *RESOURCE A *

*.06.02. *INFORMATION CONFIG* .)))))))2)))))))))- .))))))))))2))))))))))))))-

*.06.03. *PERSONNEL CONFIG *

*.06.04. *MATERIEL CONFIG *