I had a rare opportunity to sit and listen to Ret. U.S. Army General Colin Powell.
Mr. Powell has had a distinguished career in public service, with 35 years in the U.S. military where he became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest position in the military. He later became the first-ever African American Secretary of State for his country.
With all of his accomplishments and smarts however, he admitted to the audience of 1,000 IT security experts at the McAfee Focus 09 conference in Las Vegas that he needs to be a digital person.
Now Mr. Powell is not a man where technology has passed him by. He’s a limited partner in Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm that spawned Google and Netscape. He said that he’s always been fascinated with technology and is a computer geek, but was born analog and has a “devil of time in the visual world.”How does one become a digital person? Well, for Mr. Powell it’s not been an easy process. For example, he stopped answering e-mails because the new generation is texting and tweeting. He decided not to go onto Facebook, but two days after coming to that conclusion, he found out he was on it. Someone else signed him up.
“Low and behold I’m on Facebook. So I got my lawyers and told them to sue Facebook and then my grandson said you have 15,000 fans on Facebook. So I said okay,” Powell said.
However it took several days for Mr. Powell, a gentleman with clout in the government and military to recapture his identity, which illustrates how severe the security problem is around the world.When Mr. Powell started his military service, soldiers used to shout at each other to communicate. He later had the opportunity to use the ArpaNet, the forerunner to the Internet. He also tested one of the first fax machines. He said with a fax, soldiers could communicate in minutes, but the machine weighed 40 pounds and cost $75,000. Fax technology eventually went down in price to around a few hundred dollars, but it was never secure.During the Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf, with the push of a button, received satellite communications and soldiers could navigate the vast desert with a GPS device. The U.S. Army bought GPS devices from a retailer – Radio Shack.
Mr. Powell stated that many times during his military service he updated the technology that was used.
He said that a change in brain-ware needed to take place and he fought against resistance from the bureaucracy.
Today, everyone is interacting on a transaction basis so updating a Web site every quarter will not work.
“You have to react to every transaction the same as Wal-Mart does. If a person wants information, I want them coming to us not the CIA or Google.
But again, it goes back to making the systems secure. Mr. Powell’s approach was to take on the role of CIO even though he did not have the title. “It’s a leader’s responsibility to protect the force,” he said.
He concluded that he’s not in the crowd’s league when it comes to IT security, but added, in a sort of pep talk, that “the last thing we need is to lose confidence in this system.”