Darwin John Takes IT Reins at the FBI

By Sarah D. Scalet
Sat, February 15, 2003

CIO — On the five-minute morning walk from his Washington, D.C., apartment to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover building, Darwin A. John, the bureau’s new CIO, thought about his upcoming interview with this reporter and made himself a promise: "I’m just going to talk specifics." Infrastructure upgrades. A virtual case management system with multimedia capabilities. A data warehousing project with advanced search functions that would help the FBI "know what it knows," and thereby prevent intelligence failures like the ones that led to 9/11.

But despite his best intentions, that’s not what happens. By 9:30 a.m., John, a slightly rumpled, deeply jowled elder of the CIO profession, is talking about how the FBI needs to think "holistically," how law enforcement agencies and the Department of Homeland Security can work together to find "simplicity on the other side of complexity," and how having a philosophical bent could work to his advantage at an agency that worships action, not thought.

Got all that?

"I’m talking about three things at once, which I always do, because that’s the way I think," says John, 64, who’s tall (5 feet 11 inches) without seeming so (he hunches) and speaks authoritatively in a quiet voice. He has clear blue eyes that he veils and unveils by taking off and putting on his eyeglasses throughout the day. "For me," he says, explaining how he thinks about his plans to remake the FBI’s IT, "there’s a canvas, and we’re painting a picture, and we’ll draw a little tree here or rock there. I don’t start at the top and work to the bottom. That drives some people crazy."

What remains to be seen is whether it will drive Washington crazy enough to prevent John from completing his picture. The FBI is not known for valuing introspection, yet on July 8, after an extensive national search, it chose this compulsively thoughtful and unassuming man, and charged him with transforming this almost mythical agency from a Keystone cop shop into an IT-powered hive of supersleuths. As one of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s most prominent appointments after 9/11, John, former CIO of the Mormon Church and Scott Paper, has put his neck on the line in a way few federal government CIOs ever have.

He didn’t do it for the money. The position was advertised at between $125,972 and $138,200 a year for a person who, as the recruiter who led the search puts it, "could be pulling down his $500K." John and his wife of 45 years, both lifelong Mormons, left their home state of Utah last July so that John could move into a bare office in the seventh-floor executive corridor known to FBI insiders as Mahogany Row.

Continue Reading

This white paper describes the business challenges and opportunities that are driving interest in Identity Governance while discussing considerations your organization should make to help achieve project success.
This paper explores the concept of content-aware IAM, describes the integrated architecture for this new approach, and highlights the benefits that this approach provides.
One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.
For your IT organization to keep pace with the business, you need a new, faster approach to infrastructure deployment-an approach that increases agility and accelerates time to application value. That's HP Converged Systems. Built on Converged Infrastructure, these systems deliver the industry's first portfolio of pre-integrated, tested, and optimized infrastructure solutions for applications running in virtual, cloud, dedicated, or hybrid environments.
The nature of the blade platform makes system management, monitoring and provisioning easy and efficient. Access this resource to learn how blade migration will save your data center time and money while increasing performance.
This white paper examines IT management challenges from a fundamental and system standpoint. In addition, it introduces the concept of a service-oriented and automated approach to IT management.
Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.
VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment
IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.
Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center