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.