Government/Military Trends
February 2005
Q&A: A Conversation with Dale Karraker - the Vision, the Visibility, and the Nineteen-Year-Olds
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Dale Karraker is the Senior Director of Foreign Military Sales for IHS.
Q: What are the steps for developing a project of this scope?
First you have to invest in the vision. Then you have to invest in visibility. To make a paradigm shift in the entire acquisition process, you have to have vision and you have to have forward-leaners, forward-seekers, over-the-horizon thought. There are some of those in the company. I like to count myself in that number - time will tell if I'm just another noisemaker. But as much as we want to be visionaries, and we're trying to do this, the people who have to make the shift are not us. It's the clients. The Navy has to say, We've got to do this differently...It's a process change. It's a thought change. And it's time. That's where I believe that Charles Picasso [IHS's new CEO] and this company have invested in the vision, and they've laid out a strategic plan with some very steep goals.
Q: Can you give an idea of the scope for a client, in concrete terms?
Sure. Let's say you're responsible for a fleet of aircraft, like the F-18 E/F. In a year, you'll spend about $18 million just dealing with obsolescence issues. But once the ePortal process is in place, you'll reduce that by $4 million. And that's $4 million that can go toward refreshing the technology, toward new systems.
Q: These are the indications from testing the prototype?
Right.So now that we have the prototype out and we're showing it to people, it's turning into higher and higher interest. Our first client was the Navy. So now we take it [the prototype] to market; and we've got the Navy and Boeing talking together, we've got the Navy and Lockheed talking together, we've got the Navy and Raytheon talking, and we've got that entire community talking to the entire FMS community. I mean, my travel budget would choke the national debt-just going and showing this to people, showing this thought process, showing this concept. And that's investing in the visibility.
Q: How do you sustain that kind of effort?
You have to be a little bit passionate. I travel 75 to 80% of the time; an 85 or 90 hour workweek is nothing… nothing… for me. You've got to believe in it.
Jim Kiracofe's [Senior Director of Department of Defense Programs at IHS] son just returned from Iraq. We've got a picture of him standing there in the sand with an IHS screwdriver in his pocket. And when people say, Why do you do it? and I'm quoting a phrase from Jim I say, ' We're doing it for the 19-year-olds.Because there's a 19-year-old on an aircraft carrier who is responsible for turning an aircraft around and getting it ready to fly again. My process can mean he can go to bed at the end of his 12-hour watch, or write a letter to his sweetheart at home, or she can write to her sweetheart, instead of working all night to get an airplane flying. Then it's worth my time. I can lose some sleep.
Q: That must require huge amounts of energy?
The people who are involved in these solutions at IHS, many of them are career military people or have children or loved ones in the military, and our Services are present at every level…. We're talking about doing it for the 19-year-old kid half way around the world who would like it to be just a little bit better, and if you can concentrate on that, if you can zero in on that thought, all the rest just becomes ground clutter.