,ents
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Amy Alving, SAIC
Chapter 2: Don Ferguson, CTO, CA Technologies
Chapter 3: Craig Miller, The MAPA Group
Chapter 4: Jerry Krill, CTO, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Chapter 5: Wesley Kaplow, Polar Star Consulting
Chapter 6: Jeff Tolnar, CTO and CIO, BPL Global
Chapter 7: Marty Garrison, National Public Radio
Chapter 8: Cherches, Loveland, Mosca, and Natoli, Mind Over Machines
Chapter 9: Darko Hrelic, Gartner, Inc.
Chapter 10: Jan-Erik de Boer, Springer Science+Business Media
Chapter 11: Paul Bloore, TinEye/Idée
Chapter 12: William Ballard, Gerson Lehrman Group, Inc.
Chapter 13: David Kuttler, Johnson & Johnson, Vertex
Index
,Amy Alving
SAIC
Amy Alving, Ph.D., is the CTO and senior vice president at Science Applications International
Corporation (SAIC). She is responsible for the creation, communication, and implementation of
SAIC's technical and scientific vision and strategy.
Alving joined SAIC in 2005 as CTO for the Engineering, Training and Logistics Group and later
served as corporate Chief Scientist. Prior to joining SAIC, Alving was the director of the Special
Projects Office at DARPA. In this role, she was responsible for strategic planning, operations,
finance, security, program development and execution.
Alving was a White House Fellow (1997-98) serving at the Department of Commerce. Prior to
that, she was an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota.
She serves on the Board of Directors for Pall Corporation and, previously, the Fannie and John
Hertz Foundation. She is also a member of the Georgia Institute of Technology Advisory Board
and has been a member or advisor to the Naval Research Advisory Committee, Army Science
Board, Defense Science Board, and National Academies studies. She is a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations.
Alving has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in mechanical
and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. She also carried out post-doctoral research
in Berlin, Germany.
Siegel: Amy, we'd like to begin with your journey to CTO, and it's my understanding that you
have multiple technical degrees. The question is, given when you went to school, what motivated
you to develop a career in science and technology because at that time, if memory serves me
correctly, there was a glass ceiling for women regarding getting into science and technology?
Alving: I am a very curious person. I like to know how the world works. I didn't actually know
what engineers did growing up because my whole family was in medicine. So I knew a lot about
what physicians did. We talked about that at the dinner table. When I got to college, I actually
started in physics because I like basic science and stayed a physics major for a little over a year
while I figured out what I really wanted to do. I wound up in engineering because I decided that,
although I like physics, I like the discipline of it, what I really wanted to do was solve problems.
, Physics is an important element of that, but it's a little bit more upstream than where most of our
practical problems are. So I wound up in engineering.
I got my bachelor's at Stanford. The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I went
to work in industry as an intern at a company that has since been acquired and merged and changed
its name, but even then it was a large aerospace engineering company. I knew I was just there for
the summer, so I wasn't making career decisions based on what my summer job was, but I watched
what the people with bachelor's degrees did. They seemed to be working on very small pieces of
somebody else's problem, and they didn't get access to the big picture. I found it hard to be
interested in that, and so I decided to go on and get a Ph.D. I didn't know in particular what I was
getting into. At Princeton, I got my Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and then I
needed to decide what to do after that because I had kind of used up my earlier career decision.
I decided to do a postdoc overseas to see the world and learn about other cultures. It's always a
broadening experience to step out of your comfort zone. I didn't speak German when I decided to
do my postdoc at the Technical University in Berlin. On the one hand, that might seem very
reckless, but on the other hand, in the technical community—the Europeans certainly, and pretty
much around the world—the professionals speak English. So I was pretty fortunate and could get
along just fine. I learned a lot during my postdoc. I took ownership of a technical investigation and
we made some advances and discoveries. That was very rewarding. In my personal life, I learned
German, which was, of course, a great benefit from living overseas. Also on a personal level, it
was an exciting time to be in Germany. I started out in West Germany and by the time I left, a
couple of years later, I was in Germany because the Iron Curtain had come down. I had started in
West Berlin and then Berlin unified. So it was certainly a very interesting time from a geopolitical
perspective. It was also important to live in a different culture. Germany, being part of Western
Europe, in some ways is very similar to the United States, but it's still not the same. I really gained
an appreciation for the importance of culture, the differences and similarities. I gained an
appreciation for the experience of people who move to another country. There's always a transition
into a new culture, and I'm glad I got the chance to understand that better.
Siegel: Let's switch gears now and go to your career as an associate professor at the University of
Minnesota.
Alving: I started as an assistant professor on the tenure track, and I worked my way up. The
environment was very familiar to me, because I had spent my whole life in an academic
environment. So, in that sense, it was very comfortable. What was really valuable from that
experience is the ability to go really deep in a particular technical area, to create new knowledge
that, by definition, nobody has known before. You're adding to the amount of wisdom, so to speak,
in the world. The intellectual rigor of academia is extraordinary. I really value the way it prizes
intellectual integrity—the process of peer review, transparency around experiments and results,
the way the data are analyzed and deciding what you can and can't conclude based on the
evidence… That whole level of discipline associated with the pursuit of truth is extraordinary. So,
to your question: I got tenure, with the rank of associate professor. And I enjoyed that.
In my last few years of being an academic, I was actually starting to branch out. I valued the depth
that academics afforded, but I also had the opportunity to work with and then later join the Army
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Amy Alving, SAIC
Chapter 2: Don Ferguson, CTO, CA Technologies
Chapter 3: Craig Miller, The MAPA Group
Chapter 4: Jerry Krill, CTO, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Chapter 5: Wesley Kaplow, Polar Star Consulting
Chapter 6: Jeff Tolnar, CTO and CIO, BPL Global
Chapter 7: Marty Garrison, National Public Radio
Chapter 8: Cherches, Loveland, Mosca, and Natoli, Mind Over Machines
Chapter 9: Darko Hrelic, Gartner, Inc.
Chapter 10: Jan-Erik de Boer, Springer Science+Business Media
Chapter 11: Paul Bloore, TinEye/Idée
Chapter 12: William Ballard, Gerson Lehrman Group, Inc.
Chapter 13: David Kuttler, Johnson & Johnson, Vertex
Index
,Amy Alving
SAIC
Amy Alving, Ph.D., is the CTO and senior vice president at Science Applications International
Corporation (SAIC). She is responsible for the creation, communication, and implementation of
SAIC's technical and scientific vision and strategy.
Alving joined SAIC in 2005 as CTO for the Engineering, Training and Logistics Group and later
served as corporate Chief Scientist. Prior to joining SAIC, Alving was the director of the Special
Projects Office at DARPA. In this role, she was responsible for strategic planning, operations,
finance, security, program development and execution.
Alving was a White House Fellow (1997-98) serving at the Department of Commerce. Prior to
that, she was an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota.
She serves on the Board of Directors for Pall Corporation and, previously, the Fannie and John
Hertz Foundation. She is also a member of the Georgia Institute of Technology Advisory Board
and has been a member or advisor to the Naval Research Advisory Committee, Army Science
Board, Defense Science Board, and National Academies studies. She is a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations.
Alving has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in mechanical
and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. She also carried out post-doctoral research
in Berlin, Germany.
Siegel: Amy, we'd like to begin with your journey to CTO, and it's my understanding that you
have multiple technical degrees. The question is, given when you went to school, what motivated
you to develop a career in science and technology because at that time, if memory serves me
correctly, there was a glass ceiling for women regarding getting into science and technology?
Alving: I am a very curious person. I like to know how the world works. I didn't actually know
what engineers did growing up because my whole family was in medicine. So I knew a lot about
what physicians did. We talked about that at the dinner table. When I got to college, I actually
started in physics because I like basic science and stayed a physics major for a little over a year
while I figured out what I really wanted to do. I wound up in engineering because I decided that,
although I like physics, I like the discipline of it, what I really wanted to do was solve problems.
, Physics is an important element of that, but it's a little bit more upstream than where most of our
practical problems are. So I wound up in engineering.
I got my bachelor's at Stanford. The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I went
to work in industry as an intern at a company that has since been acquired and merged and changed
its name, but even then it was a large aerospace engineering company. I knew I was just there for
the summer, so I wasn't making career decisions based on what my summer job was, but I watched
what the people with bachelor's degrees did. They seemed to be working on very small pieces of
somebody else's problem, and they didn't get access to the big picture. I found it hard to be
interested in that, and so I decided to go on and get a Ph.D. I didn't know in particular what I was
getting into. At Princeton, I got my Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and then I
needed to decide what to do after that because I had kind of used up my earlier career decision.
I decided to do a postdoc overseas to see the world and learn about other cultures. It's always a
broadening experience to step out of your comfort zone. I didn't speak German when I decided to
do my postdoc at the Technical University in Berlin. On the one hand, that might seem very
reckless, but on the other hand, in the technical community—the Europeans certainly, and pretty
much around the world—the professionals speak English. So I was pretty fortunate and could get
along just fine. I learned a lot during my postdoc. I took ownership of a technical investigation and
we made some advances and discoveries. That was very rewarding. In my personal life, I learned
German, which was, of course, a great benefit from living overseas. Also on a personal level, it
was an exciting time to be in Germany. I started out in West Germany and by the time I left, a
couple of years later, I was in Germany because the Iron Curtain had come down. I had started in
West Berlin and then Berlin unified. So it was certainly a very interesting time from a geopolitical
perspective. It was also important to live in a different culture. Germany, being part of Western
Europe, in some ways is very similar to the United States, but it's still not the same. I really gained
an appreciation for the importance of culture, the differences and similarities. I gained an
appreciation for the experience of people who move to another country. There's always a transition
into a new culture, and I'm glad I got the chance to understand that better.
Siegel: Let's switch gears now and go to your career as an associate professor at the University of
Minnesota.
Alving: I started as an assistant professor on the tenure track, and I worked my way up. The
environment was very familiar to me, because I had spent my whole life in an academic
environment. So, in that sense, it was very comfortable. What was really valuable from that
experience is the ability to go really deep in a particular technical area, to create new knowledge
that, by definition, nobody has known before. You're adding to the amount of wisdom, so to speak,
in the world. The intellectual rigor of academia is extraordinary. I really value the way it prizes
intellectual integrity—the process of peer review, transparency around experiments and results,
the way the data are analyzed and deciding what you can and can't conclude based on the
evidence… That whole level of discipline associated with the pursuit of truth is extraordinary. So,
to your question: I got tenure, with the rank of associate professor. And I enjoyed that.
In my last few years of being an academic, I was actually starting to branch out. I valued the depth
that academics afforded, but I also had the opportunity to work with and then later join the Army
