| Managing At
the VA, Adair Martinez is deputy CIO for vet's benefits She's
done apps and systems, DB, data center and telecom in every branch of government.
Now she's pointing toward even higher levels of work  | | Adair
Martinez makes a point at a staff meeting. "I went from managing projects
to managing organizations. I impact what an organization looks and feels like." |
As
deputy CIO for benefits at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Adair Martinez
manages the IT systems of the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA). These are
the systems that make sure 2.3 million veterans get their benefits on time. VBA
benefits include compensation and pensions, education, insurance, loan guaranty,
and vocational rehabilitation and employment. VBA payments go to the vets themselves
or to their beneficiaries, colleges, lenders and others. Overall,
VBA has approximately 13,000 employees and a $1 billion annual budget. It pays
out $25 to $30 billion a year in benefits. Martinez runs the IT organization on
a budget of $173 million with 500 employees in five locations. She reports to
the CIO of the VA. "It's
a big job," she says. "I'm the advocate for all the VBA business lines." Martinez
gained experience in both government and private industry before settling at the
VA. "I wanted to do government service," she says. "I believe in
the government." Starting
out
Martinez was born and grew up in New Orleans, LA, the daughter of a
career Coast Guard officer. "He's my hero," she says. She
attended Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA), receiving her BA in history
and geography in 1979. After college she did a sort of IT internship with the
Army Corps of Engineers, but in those days it was manual entry into a computer
system. One fateful day she asked if there wasn't a more interesting way to perform
the tedious work. Her supervisor thought she might try to write a program, and
the rest is history: one class in programming and her career track was set. Programmer
for the House
She got a job as a programmer at House IS, the support arm
for the U.S. House of Representatives. After three years on the legislative side
she moved over to the executive office of the president. And a year later it was
time to try the private sector. Acing
the private sector
Network Solutions (now part of VeriSign, Mt View, CA),
a systems programming and apps company, was just starting up in the Washington,
DC area. When Martinez joined as a DBA she was the company's sixty-third employee.
She learned on the job, working on projects for the Department of Labor and OSHA. While
there, she completed an MS in IS management at the American University (Washington,
DC). Then
she moved to telecom giant MCI (Ashburn, VA). "That was where I learned about
real production work," she says. "Everything was done with IT and you
can't be down for a minute." Next
she worked for Unisys (Blue Bell, PA) as the sole DBA for a new corporate acquisition
that did data center outsourcing. "I was on beeper duty for nine months,"
she recalls. She
also directed 200 people as project manager, got interested in systems and data
center work and managed the disk farm. But all the time she was hoping to get
back to government work. Then
Unisys lost a bid to SAIC (San Diego, CA) for a contract with the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). Martinez knew all about the project and had been hoping
to work on the job. Since
Unisys had lost the project, Martinez decided to try to follow the work to SAIC.
She used her sources to identify the project manager and applied for a job. Impressed
with her determination, SAIC interviewed and hired her. Supporting
the DEA
In 1993 Martinez moved back to direct government work. She was
hired as section chief in the IS office at the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA). Now she was responsible for all information resources management programs
and ops. Her staff of thirty supported 7,500 people in 500 locations in the U.S.
and seventy foreign countries. She
also led information resources policy and planning and software support for the
database management system and DEA's field programs. Her first year on the job
she received the DEA administrator's award, that agency's highest recognition. The
biggest challenge was creating an info-sharing system between the FBI and the
DEA. She thought it would be simple enough, since she was familiar with the specialized
mainframe languages used by the intelligence community. "It was good I didn't
know what I was up against culturally," she says. Not knowing, she waded
right in and successfully persuaded both agencies that their data would be kept
separate and safe even in a shared database. Department
of Justice
In 1996 Martinez moved to the Department of Justice (DOJ) telecom
services staff, lured by the opportunity to head up a 110-person organization
and sharpen her skills in telecom. Her emphasis was on using IT to support the
missions of DOJ and its individual agencies. "I
went from managing projects to managing organizations," she says. "I
could really make an impact on what an organization looked and felt like." With
a maturing staff, turnover in her operation was fairly significant. She made it
her business to balance her staff with more diverse hires and, in fact, received
the DOJ's management division equal employment opportunity award in 1999. "That's
the award I'm really proud of," she says. Senior
exec and mother
In 1999 she was eligible for the Senior Executive Service
(SES), the government's personnel system for staffing upper-level positions. She
applied for the VA benefits position and was hired. "It's
like taking the DOJ and multiplying by five," she says. About
the time she entered the SES and took on the VA job, she also got married. Now
she has a daughter who's almost three. "My colleagues' kids are in college,"
she says with a laugh. "I'm definitely out of sync on this one." Martinez
thinks IT is a fine career for women. "You have to have good interpersonal
skills and be very logical," she says. To
this, Adair Martinez adds her executive skills and management experience with
every phase of IT in every branch of government. For the woman who wanted government
service, plenty more is obviously in the cards. D/C -
Kate Colborn & Christine Willard | 
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