By Gregory McQuerter, CEO I've been up and down Pacific Highway, and I can't find anybody to prove my theory. Not a waitress, not a shoe-shine boy, not even a tattered photo from the newspaper morgue to prove that County Chief Administrative Officer Larry Prior and Navy Rear Adm. John Gauss have ever met each other, much less conspired together. But they must be in cahoots. Either that, or they saw the light at the same time. Both Prior and Gauss, who commands the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), have embarked on information technology (IT) initiatives that, when complete, will transform our County and our Navy. And both are betting their budgets, and perhaps their careers, on the power of the "Net." Last fall, the County and SPAWAR announced their intention to charge into the 21st century by modernizing their IT organizations through major contracts with outside vendors. The County has a total budget of $3.8 billion and plans on outsourcing about $100 million a year for the next 10 years. SPAWAR, with an annual budget of about $3 billion, will contract out roughly $90 million a year for five years for systems management to help modernize the C4ISR (command, control, computers, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities of the fleet and its shore infrastructure. The numbers alone -- some $1.4 billion -- are huge. But they pale in comparison to the magnitude of the County and Navy visions -- nothing less than creating world-class service organizations out of ponderous bureaucracies. Here's how they'll do it: 1. They're leveraging "fungibility." "Fungibility"in this context is the ability of media to be reduced to digital gruel -- a slurry of interchangeable bits and bytes that can be pushed down a wire, then reconstituted at the other end. The spoken word, Polaroids and guitar riffs are fungible. As the County knows, so are tax bills, building permits and dog licenses. For the Navy, it might be maintenance manuals, hat sizes, even deployment plans. The beauty is that these digital payloads can perch on Websites (Internet or Intranet), where they can be viewed, transacted or otherwise processed. If you're a sailor, you can deposit $36 into your credit union account from the Kitty Hawk. If you're a landlubber, you can buy a cat license from your Del Mar den. Prior calls this a shift to "virtual government," so citizens can "go online, instead of standing in line." 2. They're shifting paradigms. "Customer-driven" is about the last phrase you'd expect to hear in a county courtroom, or on a carrier flight deck. Yet that's exactly the driving principle that Prior and Gauss are using to get their workforces to view their constituencies (citizens and sailors) in a different light. After all, if you've got to pay a speeding ticket, isn't $250 punishment enough? Why be forced to stand in line for half a day? And if you've been suffocating in the Sea of Arabia for six months, can't you at least get some e-mail from your honey? Is that too much to ask? Gauss thinks not. Both men also are refusing to pay development costs for IT when they can buy "off-the-shelf." This is not surprising for Prior, who knows there are many commercially available applications he can inject into county processes to save millions. But for a Department of Defense guy -- steeped in the mil-spec tradition of "hardening" everything to withstand thermonuclear pulses from Russian ICBMs -- to say he'll buy commercial IT and then test it to see if it's tough enough for the Navy borders on heresy. (If anybody can get Joe Voter to forget that infamous toilet seat, it may be Gauss.) 3. They're demanding "best-of-class" solutions. This may sound grandiose, but it's quintessentially frugal. If you're deploying a piece of software that is going to replicate a function 1,600 times a day, day in/day out for 10 years, shouldn't you invest in the most efficient? The County thinks so. As Robert Payne, senior project executive for IBM Global Systems, notes, "A great efficiency-enhancer is 'groupware' software that 'Web-enables' work-flow management. It allows citizens to electronically trigger a series of streamlined processes within County departments, culminating in transactions that are delivered back to the citizen, either via mail or the Internet." 4. Both are driving for "zero-latency enterprises." Latency is all about lag time, of which a combat-ready Navy can tolerate zero. If a forward recon team sees a SCUD fire, can the signal indicating this occurrence experience any lag as it ramifies through the chain of command? Nope. Likewise for a County that truly wants to serve its citizenry. Knowing all supply-chain events instantlythroughout the enterprise will be a boon. 5. Both organizations are deploying Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP means consolidating data resources into a single, enterprise-wide facility -- a unified knowledge reservoir. Then, through the use of common tools and common processes based on successful business models, workers can inspect it, number-crunch it, slice-and-dice it to their heart's content. As Ken Regan, president of ACS Services, a program management consultancy with many years of service to SPAWAR, explains, "SPAWAR is working to build a network-centric, knowledge-centric structure that allows authorized workers to fully exploit all available information. ERP is a critical component of that." 6. Both are consolidating telecom traffic into Big Pipes. By integrating dozens of small networks into single Wide Area Networks, and by co-locating servers at centralized data repositories, both the county and the Navy can minimize money spent on commercial telecom circuits to transport data. Both are calling for the unification of all voice and data transport into secure, highly integrated broadband networks. This means combining voice, videoconferencing and huge data files such as needed in telemedicine. 7. Both agree that the Net will be their saving grace. Note that we didn't say the Internet. For the County, it will look more like an "Extranet," a password-protected wide-area network that interconnects openly with the Internet, allowing citizens and county workers to freely communicate. For the Navy, it will configure as a true Intranet, a rigorously locked-down network with highly secure "portals" that enable interaction with the outer world. But make no mistake, they'll behave like Internets. E-commerce-driven county Websites truly will be interactive and robust, allowing contractors to check the status of their construction permits, professionals to renew business licenses, and home owners to pay real estate taxes and water bills -- all online. The admirals like this too. One even talks about "working out of a browser" to surf the Navy-wide Intranet (and of course Internet) to access databases through "hot links." If this happens, it will signal a shift from fully featured desktop workstations to "hollowed-out" computers. Mere shadows of their former selves, these "thin clients" will look to their servers for their data and the applications to run the data. With thousands and thousands of new PCs needed -- and soon -- these "portal PCs" will likely save both the County and Navy million of dollars over the next decade. All these changes will not be easy, and not without missteps and restarts. But huge credit should go to Prior and Gauss for having the courage and the political will to get us started down the right IT track. Gregory McQuerter, CEO of the McQUERTER Group, has been providing marketing support to San Diego's top high-techs for more than a decade. Two of the companies mentioned above -- IBM, a bidder for the county's IT contract, and ACS, a contractor for SPAWAR -- are McQUERTER clients.