Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money: The ACT-IAC Time of Troubles, Part Two

Recap from Part One, The Time of Troubles:

1979: ACT chartered IAC to provide a source of funds for ACT scholarships and activities.

1995: The ACT Management of Change conference, held at the Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, lost nearly $150,000.

1996: ACT told IAC to pay the deficit, since ACT did not have the reserves to do so.

When ACT President Neil Stillman ordered IAC Chairman Izzy Feldman to pay the Lansdowne bill, Izzy balked. He accused ACT of mismanaging their funds. To be fair, Izzy and others had warned ACT that holding a conference at Lansdowne was a terribly risky, for reasons cited in Part One. And ACT had been prolific in spending revenues raised by IAC, not solely for scholarships, but also to fund ACT Executive Committee (EC) members’ attendance at the international forums held by the International Council for Information Technology in Government Administration (ICA) in locations like Barcelona and Budapest. IAC paid for those delegations through transfers to ACT accounts.

At the time, IAC was ascendant, holding what was rapidly becoming recognized as the best IT policy conference, the Executive Leadership Conference, which was, after three years in a Charlottesville venue, selling out all available seats. As Chairman of the IAC Executive Committee, Izzy felt that ACT was spending IAC revenues excessively and irresponsibly.

When IAC said, “No” to the ACT demand to pay the Lansdowne bill, Neil was incensed. He had been elected ACT President in 1994, and was in his second term. He viewed IAC as a subordinate organization – which it absolutely was – that merely collected industry dues and fees for FGIPC.

Izzy had a different viewpoint. He saw his role as IAC chairman as steward for responsible disposition of funds collected from IAC members for the benefit of those members. Izzy had taken over as Chair in 1990 when Jim Ridgell resigned for health reasons, and he was the irresistible force that built IAC a power in the federal IT community.

Two proud and powerful leaders, with opposing perspectives on who owned the IAC coffers, butted heads and neither blinked. Both had defensible interpretations of the situation, but Neil had a bit more desperation – ACT had a firm contract with Lansdowne and delinquent bills to pay.

Neil struck first. He called for an emergency ACT Executive Committee teleconference, and pushed through a resolution to dismiss the IAC Executive Committee. Although several ACT committee members questioned the legitimacy of an unseemly swift decision, Neil then hired legal counsel, sent formal letters to the IAC committee members dissolving the Executive Committee, and claimed the IAC bank account as the property of ACT.

Izzy, no stranger to legal and fiduciary gamesmanship, had the bank account frozen, and posited that Stillman had acted illegally in removing the duly elected Executive Committee and was in breach of ACT by-laws.

Claim and counter-claim, threat of suit and counter-suit, played out at the Tower Club. IAC members were furious that the organization they joined to enhance their relationship with the government was embroiled in a battle with government executives. The ACT Executive Committee repudiated Neil’s actions, voting that he should resign. Chaos reigned, and egos were splattered across the pages of Federal Computer Week.

After several weeks, tempers calmed and cooler heads prevailed. The consensus was that IAC was undeniably subordinate to the ACT, and that ACT could rightfully direct the disbursement of IAC-collected funds. The IAC EC was reinstated, elections were held, and new leadership was installed. Izzy chose to step down as Chairman, and Ken Johnson was elected as Chairman and conciliator.

IAC returned to normal operations, humbled but intact.

ACT had a different reaction. Neil’s solitary decision-making rankled others on the ACT EC, and the EC demanded in a six-to-two vote (with two abstentions) that he apologize to the IAC. Neil refused, claiming the vote taken by electronic mail did not meet the “physical meeting” requirement in the ACT by-laws. “Stillman said he would not apologize even if the resolution were passed legally and would continue to represent FGIPC unless impeached,” reported FCW.

At the time, the ACT EC had ten members, each representing one of the member councils in accordance with the charter and by-laws. Confronted with overwhelming opposition Neil took the only reasonable course: He formed additional Councils, inducted them into the Federation, and out-voted the opposition. Some of the new Councils had fairly small constituencies – easily in the single digits, and often enumerable on a single hand. The ACT power struggle played out in slow motion over months, and even years, until Neil resigned in 1999 after an unprecedented five terms.

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Those were troubled times for ACT and IAC, but we weathered them and emerged…well, perhaps not stronger, or even wiser, but at least changed. 

ACT had institutionalized the appointive election process, and Stillman was “President for Life” until his retirement in 1999. IAC conceded the supremacy of ACT as the policy maker we operated under. Control of funds soon evolved into IAC hands to avoid conflict of interest or ethics issues, with the expectation that IAC use those funds to fulfill ACT policies.

The ACT and IAC staffs were eventually merged into a single ACT-IAC staff, and control migrated from the ECs to the Executive Director. ACT-IAC became a real entity, and staff expanded to take on more responsibilities previously handled by IAC volunteers.

And here we are today, after 35 and 25 years of ACT and IAC. 

Any resemblance of the current organization to the events of 1996 may be coincidental. Or maybe not.

The Time of Troubles

Part One

There was a dark day in ACT and IAC history, in the mid 1990’s, that has  been discretely called “the Time of Troubles.” For this writing, I will use the former ACT name “FGIPC.”

FGIPC had continued since inception as a federation of councils, with representative councils electing the FGIPC president, while IAC blossomed with the success of the Executive Leadership Conference (ELC) and other programs. The principal FGIPC activity remained the Management of Change (MOC) conference, but it was getting more difficult to attract a large crowd to the annual event as competing conferences snared government participants with limited travel and education budgets. The ELC was substantially more successful in gaining participation and generating revenues. As ELC waxed, MOC waned.

At the time, both organizations had retained a full time staff member. There were bills to pay.

As separated organizations, each had its own budget and bank account, and operated as separate entities – except when FGIPC would request IAC to transfer funds to pay for their expenses. Like the conferences, IAC’s balances increased while FGIPC’s declined. Some friction developed over the “Who’s in charge here?” issue of the parent (FGIPC) having to ask (beg?) the child (IAC) for an allowance. [You may find parallels in real life.]

One area of contention and competition was around who could throw the best conference. With an outré role model in the Council of Federal Data Center Directors (CFDCD then, GITEC today) annual Information Processing Interagency Conference (IPIC). [Check your Program for abbreviations and acronyms.] IPIC was more party than conference, and set the bar high for boondoggling, including once advertizing the “great food and fine wines” in the federal trade press. THAT was frowned upon…

So FGIPC decided they need a blockbuster MOC, and the best way to boost attendance was to hold it near Washington. In August, 1995, MOC kicked off at Landsdowne Resort in Leesburg.

To secure the property, FGIPC committed to a large room block and then discovered three things:

• ·         Lots of government personnel lived in Northern Virginia, and Lansdowne was an easier commute than DC, so they opted to go home each night.
• ·         Landsdowne RESORT was flagged as too pretentious for government rank-and-file IT folks, and many travel requests were denied.
• ·         Leesburg was within the Washington “home station” radius, and attendees were denied overnight expenses. They commuted or just skipped the conference.

…and that left FGIPC with a revenue shortfall, and accompanying bill from Landsdowne, of nearly $150,000.

No problem – just have IAC foot the bill.

But it wasn’t quite that simple.

Next blog: Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

If you want background for the next blog, consult the trade press archives:

http://fcw.com/Articles/1996/04/28/Late-deal-dodges-FGIPCIAC-split.aspx

http://fcw.com/Articles/1996/05/05/FGIPC-IAC-groups-maneuver-for-new-leadership-policies.aspx?Page=1

http://fcw.com/Articles/1996/06/23/Cordants-Johnson-tapped-as-Industry-Advisory-Council-chair.aspx

http://business.highbeam.com/436948/article-1G1-18267300/fgipc-and-its-iac-feuding-makes-decisions

IAC: A Show About Nothing

In the beginning, after IAC was chartered and recruiting the initial 20 Charter Member companies, the Industry Advisory Council had a nebulous mission. That is, IAC had NO mission. We held monthly meetings in a borrowed conference room – frequently we met in a room that had no windows, in the distant suburbs of Silver Spring. Ten or fifteen industry representatives met, and discussed…well… Not much.

We paralleled “Seinfeld” as an Association about Nothing.

A core group nattered over by-laws, we revisited the Charter frequently, but the bottom line was there was nothing we were charged to do. We were invited to “assist“ with planning the Management of Change (MOC) Conference, which meant we could suggest our corporate luminaries as speakers, but that wasn’t new, and it didn’t require a Council. The IAC Chair, Jim Ridgell, was invited to ACT (FGIPC) meetings, but there was never much to report. Jim had been a member of the ACT Executive Committee since its inception, so going to those meetings was just a continuation of his government career in that regard, and the rest of us just sat in a windowless room and blathered about how cool it was to be an ACT Council. I think we paid travel expenses for Jim.

It was bleak. It was boring. It even got contentious at times, as we argued over how to best do nothing. While many of us weer not really good at anything, we were even worse at nothing.

Our charter specified that we were an educational organization, so eventually – with the emphasis on “after endless internal bureaucratic meandering" – we decided to develop some educational material. And so “The Decision To Bid”, a full-day training course, was assembled by a subcommittee of the members, and we presented it to the ACT with a full-on look at the internal processes of industry in deciding when to bid, and when to protest. Protests were a pretty big deal in those days, when GSA had a separate entity to adjudicate protests. The General Services Board of Contract Appeals, GSBCA, had staff judges who were the penultimate Deciders in protest cases. You could always appeal to GAO, but that tended to be slower and less satisfying. 

We launched the course for a number of government events, ultimately presenting it to about 2000 government employees over the 1990 – 1992 timeframe. It was developed by Barry Ingram and Fred Steubner from EDS, Clara Booth from CSC, Bob Guerra from Everex Federal Systems, Walter O’Neill from IBM, and Don Arnold from the Computer Corporation of America. Phil Kiviat was responsible for oversight of our efforts as a vice chair of the IAC. Somewhere in the process, Barry asked the EDS marketing department to develop a logo for IAC, and the stylized IAC with the curved arrow emerged. [If I have left out anyone, I apologize and blame a less than perfect 25-year recall.]

It was a pretty interesting course for government acquisition staff – they did not get a lot of insight into how the process they knew so well from the government side was mirrored by industry. All in all, for a couple of years work from a volunteer association, you could at least say it was no longer nothing.

That was about all the IAC did the first couple of years. And then…Jim had a heart attack, and was forced to cut his travel from his home in Denver. He asked Israel Feldman, a respected industry leader (and founder of Government Computer News) to step in as Chairman. Izzy was not excited about doing nothing, so he led us into brainstorming for an action plan. 

Izzy was inspired to initiate the Executive Leadership Conference as a counterpoint to the Management of Change. That created an entirely different role for IAC.

WHY an Industry Advisory Council?

So why was the Industry Advisory Council formed by ACT (FGIPC, at the time)?

ACT (I’m going to use the current nomenclature from now on) was not a government organization, although it was formed by government personnel, with official sanction, to meet government needs. As such, it had little funding. The Management of Change conference was the main revenue producer, and it did not produce much profit. Once industry was invited to attend MOC – my first year was 1987, and the event was 90 percent government attendees – ACT realized that industry could boost scholarships and other expenses. [There will be another blog on “other expenses” soon!]

In 1988, ACT offered a paid membership to allow industry to join ACT. “Lifetime Membership” was attainable to industry supporters for a modest sum – somewhere around $500 as I recollect. Since I was member number 124, it is a safe bet that ACT coffers swelled by more than $62,000 that year. That was a lot of spare change for the ACT Executive Board, and things got more interesting. Talk about forming an industry component began to get serious, and the premise of the Industry Advisory Council took on substance.

It was a simple equation – ACT needed a more robust funding mechanism, and industry was anxious to get closer to the government information technology community. At that time, there was very little socialization between the two communities in any organized forum, so everyone stood to gain, with several companies willing to make a small investment in building closer ties to their best customers. To be sure, ACT executives also saw value in better communications – hence the term “advisory” in the IAC name. But the real motivation was fiscal. It is also notable that the first IAC Chair was Jim Ridgell, who had lately departed government and was no longer eligible to serve as an ACT executive. Jim had coincidentally been the first President of ACT, and wanted to remain involved in the fraternity. He remains the only person to have served as head of both ACT and IAC.

The relationship of ACT and IAC as separate and separable entities got even more interesting over time.

Destiny’s Child, or How the ACT got its Trunk

The Federation of Government Information Processing Councils (FGIPC) was formed in 1979 because it was necessary. It was an early Social Network, before LinkedIn and all the others furnished a way for professionals to forge connections and share information.

In the 1970’s, you could count the number of computers owned by the government. Quite literally – Ken Allen has a book in his office from the late Sixties than lists all 600 or so government computers. Every computer tended to be a little bit different. You might have the identical make and model as a system in another agency, but the parts would be somewhat different, and the baseline software probably had a different level of release and patches. But it was always advantageous to know someone who had the same ostensible configuration – perhaps to consult on the costs and advantages of installing new software or peripherals, or to help troubleshoot some balky issue. A series of local associations of government ADPE - Automated Data Processing Equipment – professionals sprang up in local areas and regions to facilitate information sharing, and were generally across agencies within a metropolitan area or region. The ADP Council of the Southeast, the Southern California Technology Council, the New England ADP Council, and others, totaling fifteen or twenty regional and a couple of vertical Councils.

The Federation – FGIPC – was launched from a vision of extending the collegial sharing beyond regional and onto a national basis. FGIPC provided an annual conference – the Management of Change – and used its meager funds to support scholarships for federal IT students. It was a shoestring operation, with no paid staff but intense support from several motivated elected officers. It was actually subsidized by the home agencies of those officers in time and travel. It had nominal support from OMB and GSA. FGIPC provided a valuable forum for meeting technology managers beyond the home agency or local region. In 2003, FGIPC elected to re-brand itself as the American Council for Technology, and ACT as we know it presently was born.

While this is a pretty desiccated recitation of yesteryear, it is consequential to comprehend why ACT was originated and the value that it delivered in order to appreciate some of the later events and some of the current challenges. In subsequent blogs, we will delve into some of the less savory practices and events of FGIPC that represent lessons for today.

How the Industry Advisory Council Got its Ears

How the Industry Advisory Council Got its Ears

[NOTE: This is perhaps the only blog on ACT-IAC that will be posted that is more rumor and innuendo than observed fact. It is however, a Good Story, and may be completely true, and it is part of the lore from the early days of the Industry Advisory Council. Corrections, denials, and alternate versions are welcomed from anyone with a better story.]

In 1991, H.R. 3161 was introduced by William Conyers, House Government Operations Committee Chairman. The legislation was a mishmash of new rules, including the stipulation that GSA fully compete any and all acquisitions with a total value in excess of $1000.00 – including schedule buys. It would lay an ponderous burden on contractors and agency procurement staff. Because it was a Conyers pet project, the bill had gained acquiescence from a wide spectrum of industry advocates – no one wanted to thwart potent and vindictive Conyers. So AFCEA, ITAA, NAM, ADAPSO, EIA, and everyone else in town voiced no protest.

IAC was initially a pretty Small Deal – it took most of 1990 to enlist the 20 charter member companies, and growth was a slow process. The first Executive Leadership Conference attracted about 140 attendees to Charlottesville. And there was frankly not much else going on in IAC. The second ELC (1992) was fundamentally an acquisition colloquium, and one of the workshop topics encompassed pending legislation to reform procurement. ELC was a success, in terms of audience satisfaction and intense discourse. One of the byproducts of the conference was a published “Proceedings.”  Each of the workshops included a recorder, taking notes compiled into a brief treatise distributed to attendees and press, with no attribution of comments or identification of discussants. 

At ELC, the impacts that H.R. 3161 would have on contracting personnel on both sides of the fence was widely recognized, and it was discussed in a procurement workshop in less than salutary terms. That spirit was reflected in the Proceedings. While companies and their trade groups would not vocally object to HR 3161, everyone knew that it included inopportune requirements.

One of the pointed Capitol Hill news publications – it could have been Role Call or the National Journal– acquired the Proceedings and published a story that noted the broad support for HR 3161, with solely the tiny upstart IAC expressing any reservations about the wisdom of the GSA restriction. While no one cared much about the Proceedings from a conference of less than 150 participants, or the opinion of an association with less than 50 members, IAC had inadvertently been branded as an opponent of the Conyers bill.

And the bill failed. It never made it to the House floor for a vote.

With no one else visible, pundits assumed that the IAC opposition had been instrumental in defeating the potent committee chair, and IAC became noteworthy in the press. While strictly barred from lobbying, and actually endorsing no position on any legislation, IAC was abruptly more interesting to the federal IT Trade Press, based on anonymous remarks made in off-the-record discourse.

You know what they say about assumptions.

The actual story of the defeat of HR3161 was entirely different, and engendered no backlash from Conyers to IAC. An ascendant House leader from Louisiana had a wish for a commemorative coin to honor Louis Armstrong, who had died twenty years earlier. That congressman – let’s say it was Bob Livingston, who was designated Speaker of the House in 1996 – blamed Conyers for the defeat of that proposal, and quashed HR 3161 in retribution. Conyers probably never knew that IAC had been posited as an opponent of his bill, which encompassed a diversity of rules more substantial than the competition rider. But IAC was quietly elevated, and membership began to grow, especially after the more ensconced trade associations had poorly represented the wishes of those companies in the GSA matter.

To be sure, the details on this are a bit hazy to me after nearly 25 years. I’m not sure if it was Livingston who confounded Conyers’ bill, or where the story of IAC opposition originated. It was a story quietly told in IAC circles, relayed from member-company legislative coordinators and lobbyists. Call it apocryphal – I cannot promise that it is any more than a story I heard at the time. But it does add some spice to our history.