JOHN P. HERZOG ROY E. ROEBUCK

ASM INTERNATIONAL CMR 1651

24587 BAGLEY ROAD APO, NY 09175-2409

CLEVELAND, OH 44138

30 October, 1988

Mr. Herzog;

I wish to commend you on your article in the September 1988

Newsletter. I have been a subscriber to JSM and a member of ASM

since January 1985 and I received my CSP in August 1985. I

immediately adopted the "system perspective" from the first time

I heard of it because I find that it strongly reflects my concepts

of reality and the metaphysic by which I perceive the universe. I

strongly support the concept and the process of systems

certification. However, I would like to point out a situation

which the entire ASM organization seems to have overlooked.

I have never heard of an ASM chapter outside of the US and Canada.

If such is the actuality of your chapter locations, then your

organization is not fully international, but rather, North

American. Or perhaps the "International" reflects an objective.

The lack of a local chapter (within the nearest 4000

miles) tends to make me feel rather isolated as a systems

professional, ASM member and CSP. I work for the U.S. Army in

Germany as a financial administrator, management analyst, data

administrator, and information resource manager. I am aware of

several thousand persons within 200 miles of my location in

Darmstadt, Germany who would consider themselves professionals

within the systems fields. The persons would be:

US citizens who work for the US government (as is my case);

US citizens who work for US based companies within Germany and other European

countries;

US citizens who work for European firms;

US citizens who work for the American educational institutions with European

campuses;

US citizens who work for the European educational institutions;

And of course, the vast number of European and other Nationals who work in all

of the enterprises identified above.

Since their are no known chapters in this continent, I find it

hard to find opportunities for developing social and professional

contacts, and even harder to find professional development. If I

want to receive professional development, I have to pay about

$2000 for transportation and lodging, plus course tuition or

conference/seminar registration fees, or I attempt to convince my

supervisor that these courses are necessary for my professional

development and qualifications maintenance and that the Army

should pay for them (which is a difficult task to accomplish), or

I have to take various college courses at the bachelors and

masters level at the local military education center's colleges.

Several American colleges and universities are represented here

though the Department of Defense. These college courses are fine

up to a point, but they only offer entry level type courses as

would be typical of an undergraduate or graduate curriculum. I

seldom find an English speaking public offering of advanced system

related training. Exceptions to this would be the World Computer

Graphics Conference which was held in Berlin in 1984 and

conferences presented by various DOD agencies. I have never seen

a European location listed for ASM courses.

The DOD agencies would be a perfect environment in which to

establish European chapters, and it is sorely needed. I am sure I

do not have to inform you of the scope of DOD systems activities

and of the billions of dollars spent annually on its systems, both

manual and automated. The discouraging reality of the DOD

environment is that few of the personnel within DOD who analyze,

design, acquire, install, test, operate, audit, and maintain these

systems seem to have a systems perspective or see their activities

as they relate to the enterprise's success. Even more significant

is the fact that the decision makers and users for whom these

systems exist apparently do not know how to identify whether the

systems are productive and efficient, and even more distressing,

they do not know how to identify their resource requirements.

Much of this has to do with the fact that federal agencies have

such a difficult time in quantifying their product, and therefore

the standards by which to evaluate the system producing it.

I personally believe that this situation is because most of the

government functions, and the systems supporting them, have never

been analyzed from a federal and departmental perspective.

Federal systems have generally been developed to satisfy a single

agency requirement, with little or no consideration for the larger

enterprise of which every government activity and system is a

part. An analogy would be the comparison of the the differences

between the Information Engineering methodology of James Martin

and the Software Engineering methodogies of Yourdon, Gane and

Sarson, Warner/Orr and others. The perspective is the key. The

CASE technologies would be a means to start an analysis of the

government at the macro level and work down in detail. The same

CASE tool and methology would be required at all levels, but it is

feasible. What a systems project that would be! Just the

analysis, with even the best CASE tools, would take a decade! But

the results would be a government-wide data flow diagram, a

government-wide data dictionary, a government-wide system

specification. Any system that would be developed from these

specifications could be modularized to apply within multiple

agencies. Office administration is office administration is

office administration. A standardized government Planning,

Programing, Budgeting, Execution, Review, Analysis and Evaluation

cycle could be established. I am sure that you are aware that the

probability of this happening within our lifetime is small, but we

all need an ideal system to aim for, otherwise we'll follow

whichever path seems the brightest and most stimulating at the

time.

I have on numerous occasions asked questions in government

computer conferences as to membership in professional associations

or certification in their profession. My experience to date

indicates that only about 15% of the respondents in the US proper

had any professional affiliation. The amount in the European

forums were about 3%. My concern is that there are a lot of

people working in government, especially overseas, in the systems

fields who are out of touch with their profession and are growing

more and more obsolete in their skills and understanding and

therefore more and more limited in their efforts. And these same

persons who are becoming more dated in their knowledge and

experience are the individuals who are making decisions and/or

advising management on system decisions and personnel

recruitment/development. As an example, I asked a fellow

conference attendee recently as to what he thought of the CASE

technologies and which systems analysis and design methodology

should be utilized by our DOD activity. He responded that he did

no know what I was talking about. This response was doubly

discouraging in that this individual was a key decision maker and

advisor on information resource management to the entire 300,000

person organization. As another example, the Office of Personnel

Management and the Civilian Personnel Offices supporting the DOD

agencies appear to give no credit on qualification ratings for

having a CSP or any other certification. If public service is my

chosen career, and the federal departments give no credence to the

value of certification in my field of endeavor, and individuals

can be promoted or placed in critical technological positions

without having kept current in the technology, then why keep

current and why have a CSP.

The answer is that I personally refuse to accept the status quo as

a goal. There are many persons within the DOD who are taking

innovative and well considered actions towards improving and

updating the DOD systems. But unfortunately, there are even more

who are pursuing narrow perspective and ill considered

initiatives. And DOD management is finding it hard (I believe) to

discern the credibility and value of the initiatives. The

professional affiliations and certifications of these innovators

could help the managers in discriminating between the two

extremes. And more important, a systems association and

certification would help the well intentioned worker know which

paths lead to probable success and which lead to probable failure;

which efforts would optimize the enterprise and which would

suboptimize a component.

What the above monologue is leading to is this. If there are

European Chapters, list them in your publications and advertise

them in the various periodicals supporting government information

technologies. If there are no European Chapters, do a market

survey of the audience identified in the earlier paragraph, and if

the survey supports it, move aggressively into this area, through

multiple media, targeting not only the systems professional, but

their supervisors and personnel managers as well. A system

professional's initiative to seek development and certification

would be greater if his supervisor valued it and sought it in

promotions and job selections.

If you consider it appropriate, conduct a similar survey for the

US and other foreign areas. You would probably have good cause to

pursue having certification made a viable weighting factor within

government personnel systems. This could be pursued through

direct contact with OPM or through the US Congressional committees

dealing with government productivity. My personal belief is that

professional certification of US government systems professionals

would do a great deal to increase the productivity of our

government agencies, giving us "More Bang for the Buck", the Bang

being acceptable products and efficiency from government systems,

and the Buck being our tax dollars. Perhaps your surveys might

ascertain a direct correlation between the antiquated and

fragmented state of government systems and the lack of critical

evaluation of its systems personnel. The obvious detractors from

this effort would be those who have the greatest potential loss,

the persons who are comfortable with the status quo. I believe

that the government worker is doing his job in a basically

selfless manner, but if any individual feels threatened, self-

serving behavior is to be expected. For this reason, any

transition into a government systems professional standard must be

established early, with a long transition phase in which the

standard is to be implemented. The timing of this would be a

strategic and policy decision at the highest level of the affected

agency.

At his time I would like to address a complex point dealing with

the audience to which the JSM seems to address itself. I believe

that the target of the JSM is increasingly moving towards the

computer systems professional and away from the other areas of

systems endeavor. I personally am not qualified as a computer

science systems professional, since I have never had a course in

computers or a computer language. However, I fully believe that I

am a systems professional and have every right to use the CSP

designation. For example, I would not use CASE technology to

develop software, but would rather use it as a means to analyze,

design, document and maintain a manual system. Only if my

organization considered it worthwhile from a strategic perspective

would I carry the CASE output to the next stage of code

generation. Nevertheless, I am a systems professional because I

work with the entire organization to improve its productivity.

The Records Managers, Archivists, Organizational

Analysts/Developers, Forms Analyst/Designers, Training Managers,

Data Administrators, Librarians, Policy and Procedure

Analysts/Developers, Logisticians, Financial Analysts

/Administrators /Managers, Accountants and others who work with

complex systems may not even consider computers as part of a

system solution. If these persons are not systems professionals,

then I am obviously in the wrong association.

I work for a 12,000 person Army activity which has a total of 150

PC, 1 minicomputer, and 13 Army unique-mainframes (handling its

combat supply system). None of these systems can communicate with

each other except though tape or floppy disk transfer and limited

unidirectional data transfer, and the organization as a whole is

just beginning to recognize that communication between computer

systems is not only a desirable goal, but an achievable objective

as well. I have had approval from higher authority since 1984 to

network my entire organization covering over 50,000 square miles

of central Germany, with a total of 500 PC, 32 minicomputers and

thousands of peripheral devices, but the organization sees no

critical value to this endeavor. My principal obstacle is the

lack of technological sophistication of the higher authorities'

system experts and the decision makers at all levels. I am not

laying out this scenario to bemoan my fate of working for a large

federal bureaucracy, but to illustrate that the systems problems

which the private sector has been addressing for over a decade are

just now becoming an issue with the larger government agencies.

The education and experience which could be provided to government

systems professionals by our association and its chapters could

help them to bypass the numerous obstacles on the path the

development of successful systems. The government, the US

citizen, and the world could only benefit from more productive and

efficient government systems. Then the concern during elections

could be addressed to how much a government has improved or

produced during an administration, not which programs should be

cut or how much should taxes be raised.

I have a personal request. I would like to know the number of

persons who are ASM members, JSM subscribers, and CSP holders who

identified the US Government as their employer. This would make

an interesting comparison to the complete inventory of each

category. I recognize that that size of the government in terms

of total employees, and therefore systems personnel, is low in

proportion to the total private sector, but the federal government

could be considered a single employer. In that case it is

probably the world's largest single employer of systems personnel,

and therefore your largest market. A market which I believe is

tremendously under-represented.

I personally would be interested in starting a local chapter of

the ASM, but would require assistance from your organization.

Your attention to this would be appreciated.

I thank you for your fine work and the efforts to date.

ROY E. ROEBUCK III, MSSM, CSP