John C. “Chuck” Williams was sworn in August 2005 as the assistant deputy under secretary of defense for Installations and member of the Senior Executive Service. Serving in the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, he is the lead Pentagon official responsible for all U.S. military installations worldwide.

Williams entered the Air Force through Officer Training School, and after flight training, flew 150 combat missions in Vietnam in AC119G Shadow gunships in 1969-70. He subsequently served in assignments in aviation, administration, information systems and logistics. His final military assignment was at the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, and he retired as a lieutenant colonel in May 1988.

In 1989, Williams received a presidential appointment to the National Park Service, and was sent on special assignment to California to manage the base closure and transfer of the Army’s Presidio of San Francisco to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. In November 2001, he became project director for a 9/11 memorial foundation to raise money and build two memorials, one in New York City and the other in Southern California.

In October 2003, Williams became director of personnel for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Following Iraq’s transition to sovereignty in June 2004, he became the regional programs coordinator, NE, for DoD’s Projects and Contracting Office. He was responsible for more than $2 billion in reconstruction projects in four of Iraq’s 18 governorates.

Williams has a bachelor’s in geography and geology from California State University at Chico, an MPA in public administration from the University of Northern Colorado, and an MA in human resources management from Pepperdine University.

Williams was interviewed by MGT Editor Harrison Donnelly.

Q: What is your role as assistant deputy under secretary of defense for installations?

A: Our mission is what we attempt to accomplish on a daily basis. It is a complex and costly mission. The worldwide installation assets and resources under the Department of Defense’s management are immense: 32 million acres/570,000 individual buildings and structures with a plant replacement value of $710 billion, and more than $55 billion in annual expenditures.

BRAC, joint basing, installations energy programs, facilities sustainment, housing, the installations portion of the Wounded, Ill and Injured Warrior program, competitive sourcing, enhanced use leasing, global posture, the Business Enterprise Architecture, and of course the geospatial mission to support these mission areas are all part of our portfolio. It also includes policy, guidance and oversight of the geospatial information capabilities and services supporting all business functions on DoD installations.

In plain language, I’m a champion for the geospatial teams that support the DoD installations business domain, and I am an advocate for broader application of geospatial technologies to solve our most pressing installations business mission priorities.

Q: Please give us an overview of how your office uses geospatial standards and technology to accomplish its mission.

A: It all starts with our vision, which is to ensure that defense installation assets and services are available when and where they are needed. The Defense Installations Strategic Plan [DISP] also calls for joint capabilities that effectively support DoD’s warfighting missions. In terms of geospatial standards and technology, the transformational activities include geoenabling our business processes.

I work closely with the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure program [DISDI] to implement the DISP goals so the DoD geospatial community can provide the data and services needed by the department’s business mission areas.

Q: What is the current status of the DISDI, and can you give us some examples of how it is improving installation management?

A: The current state of the DISDI program is strong. The DISDI staff is “lean and mean,” but staff members have been very busy, and they’ve achieved some significant goals in spite of being such a small team.

The biggest recent success is in governance. It may not seem like an exciting development, but all corporate executives know that at the enterprise level, governance is the key to success. It is a best practice, so to speak. We have now firmly established a governance group for installation geospatial information and services [IGI&S]. We call it the DISDI Group. This group is made up of leaders from each of the services’ IGI&S programs, and they are charged by the deputy under secretary for installations and environment—my boss—to develop strategies that ensure we are implementing geospatial solutions across the department in a smart way.

One specific responsibility of the DISDI Group is leading the re-engineering of our geospatial data standard, the Spatial Data Standards for Facilities, Infrastructure and Environment [SDSFIE]. This standard has been in need of a major “face lift” for some time. The upcoming release of a completely revised standard, aligned with all of our business processes, will set the conditions for very significant improvements in installation management.

In several pilot projects, the DISDI program has demonstrated the incredible potential of geospatial technologies to implement two key enterprise initiatives: real property accountability, and environmental liabilities recognition and reporting.

Q: A RAND study last year called for greater sharing of geospatial data among various DoD programs. Do you agree, and what are some enterprise initiatives that implement the recommendations in the report?

A: We have done our best to communicate to all levels within the department that data sharing is no longer optional, it is expected. For the most part they have been responsive to this goal, but we still face many barriers to sharing.

One enterprise initiative I am particularly proud of is our Strategic Installation Picture [SIP]. I asked the DISDI Group to agree to a common set of geospatial data layers that will provide a solid “view” of the fundamental mission support infrastructure on all our installations. They did that, and I followed by tasking them to share those SIP layers up to the OSD level where we could make them visible on our DISDI Portal due to the need for better defined processes for network connectivity.

Q: Do you work with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to strengthen cooperation and improve mutual use of information?

A: Certainly. We’ve seen a very active effort on the part of NGA leadership to reach out to us, especially for coordination of federal level issues like those raised in the Federal Geographic Data Committee [FGDC]. The DISDI staff has worked hard to develop a variety of contacts within NGA, at many levels. For example, we’ve had great success in leveraging NGA’s commercial imagery program to benefit the needs of installations, reducing the services’ costs for getting new imagery and reducing redundant acquisitions. One of the results will be the new Defense Installations Map for use by DoD, Congress and other federal agencies.

Q: What is the relationship between your office and the components’ Installation Geospatial Information and Services programs?

A: I personally deal with the deputy assistant secretaries who are responsible for installation management functions. Through them I have advocated for the continued development of their IGI&S programs, because I feel strongly that we are not leveraging these tools to the greatest extent possible for business transformation.

I also work directly with the DISDI program manager on a regular basis to see that our overall DISDI program goals are on the right heading, and that we are developing the geospatial policy, guidance and oversight that will help the services integrate these capabilities into their business processes.

Q: What do you see as the major barriers to more effective sharing of geospatial information?

A: Effective sharing of geospatial information, in a net-centric fashion or otherwise, requires information assurance and geospatial metadata. Recent DoD enterprise initiatives, such as the DoD Metadata Registry and enterprise security services, address both of those issues. My office works through the DISDI program to ensure that the interests of the geospatial community are represented.

Another obstacle we are facing is the difficulty of classifying geospatial data. In general, the geospatial data we use on our installations is unclassified but all of us are sensitive to the need for controlling the distribution of at least some of that data— the critical infrastructure data, for example. A recent memorandum published by the Office of the President [“Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, Subject: Designation and Sharing of Controlled Unclassified Information”] will help alleviate some of the classification issues.

Q: Can you give us some examples of effective joint use of geospatial information to improve installation management?

A: Examples include:

Q: How are you working to achieve the goal of transferring geospatial standards and technology to lower organizational levels?

A: The DoD component IGI&S programs work closely with my staff to ensure that the standards and architecture elements developed at high levels can be implemented own to the installation level. We operate under the assumption that a consensus is needed before any decisions are made.

The DISDI staff participates in various communities of interest meetings as well as leading standards and architecture working groups. Recent work led by our Standards Working Group produced the DISDI Geospatial Metadata Profile, a metadata standard based on ISO standards, that is aligned with the NGA and FGDC metadata standards efforts.

Q: What are some of your major initiatives in the geospatial policy arena?

A: Well, I can’t talk specifics on future policy, but I will say that we at the OSD level have some catching up to do with the services. Each of the services has issued formal policy or guidance on installation geospatial information and services in recent years. There is more policy in development. The good news is that all this guidance has been very sound, well aligned with our overall goals as a department. I credit the DISDI program with much of this, because they have been spreading the word and laying the foundation for what constitutes “IGI&S best practices.” The sound thinking and pilot projects executed under the DISDI program have given the services a great deal of information upon which they have based their policy and guidance.

As you probably know, writing policy at the department level takes time. In order to kick-start the process and set the conditions for future IGI&S policy, we intend to issue a guidance memorandum in the near future. This will define some fundamental things like data and metadata standards, as well as challenge the services to put a mark on the wall towards achieving greater net-centricity in how we discover, share and use geospatial data to support DoD installations. The DoD directive requiring us to become more net-centric has been out for several years, so it is time we put pen to paper and made a commitment on how we will achieve these goals.

Q: How does your office approach implementation of DoD’s net-centric data strategies?

A: Effective implementation of net-centric strategic goals starts with establishing a common installation picture. We worked with the components’ IGI&S programs and developed a consensus to establish the Strategic Installation Picture [SIP]. The SIP includes 19 data layers and installation imagery. The SIP is meant to provide a high-level common view of an installation. The data is also meant to be compliant with our common data standard, the SDSFIE.

The IGI&S programs are varied in their own implementation of geospatial technology. Given those differences in architectures, a common service-oriented architecture approach is required. The DISDI program staff has been working with the IGI&S staffs to complete all the technical actions necessary, as well as the agreements we use to formalize and sustain the netcentric connections over time. They are also ensuring that our data and services are registered using Enterprise DoD Metadata Registry and Services Registry.

Q: Please give us an overview of the DoD geospatial standards development efforts.

A: There are two major components to our standards development efforts. First, we are poised to formally start implementation of the DISDI Geospatial Metadata Profile. This profile, based on international standards [ISO 19115], was developed in a collaborative fashion under the governance of the DISDI Group. It will be a big step forward for us. We are fielding tools with the standard which will reduce the workload necessary for implementation. Once implemented, our metadata will become a powerful tool for data discovery, as well as for understanding the data quality and suitability for use.

Another big effort for us right now is the re-engineering of the SDSFIE. The effort, led by the DISDI program manager and the IGI&S service leads, is concentrating on removing redundancy and improving element definitions. Once the cleanup is complete, the SDSFIE will undergo a transformation towards a logical data model. This process involves a high level of participation from subject matter experts across the DoD.

Q: What do you see as your major accomplishments in this position?