Robert Rovinsky is Director of IT Enterprise Services in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, Federal Aviation Administration, Government of the United States of America. Robert B. Rovinsky directs an office responsible for reviewing and improving all IT investment decisions within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). His office reviews and helps prepare the capital investment business cases reported to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as part of the annual budget process. He also co-leads the implementation of earned value management in the FAA, and his office produces the FAA’s IT strategy, conducts software and process engineering reviews of FAA programs, and is responsible for forms, privacy, directives and records management. Prior to taking this assignment, Dr. Rovinsky led the team responsible for leading the investment analyses of the FAA’s communications, navigation, surveillance, facilities, infrastructure, and telecommunications programs. He led, from October 1998-September 1999, an investment analysis team that reviewed all the agency's satellite navigation programs, whose total investment (FAA plus industry) exceeded 10 billion dollars. He also was program manager for air traffic flow modeling, and worked on an airspace design effort for New York City's airports. Prior to coming to the FAA in 1990, Dr. Rovinsky directed the Office of Research and Statistics for Fairfax County, Virginia, where he was responsible for all software systems used by the County and for the statistical and economic analyzes used in County decision-making. From 1977-1987 Dr. Rovinsky was the Senior Information Manager and leader of an Operations Research Group within the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. Dr. Rovinsky has consulted in the areas of information technology, statistics, and management in Egypt, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, and Morocco, and has taught Operations Research, Engineering, and Statistics at several universities. He holds a doctoral degree in Operations Research and a Masters degree in Mathematics, both from Cornell University, and has published widely on the applications of Operations Research. He did his undergraduate work in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, and took graduate work at George Washington University in economics and managerial accounting. Bob is married and has two young children. In Bob's spare time, he is a professional storyteller.
Editor’s Note:The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) operates the largest - and safest - air traffic control system in the world, controlling the flights of over 45 million aircraft and 800 million passengers in 2007 over much of North America, the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. FAA also operates a system with less than .14 accidents for each 100,000 flight hours, and "a passenger would have to take an US commercial flight every day for 200,000 years before their chances of being involved in a fatal aircraft accident turns positive" (Arnold Barnett, Professor of Statistics at MIT). But the FAA's program management record is less stellar. Following the firing of almost all the FAA's air traffic controllers in 1981, the US Congress gave the FAA over 30 billion dollars over 12 years to modernize its air traffic control system, but this program fell behind schedule and overspent its budget, and in the mid-1990s the Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) put the program on its "high risk" list, where it has remained until now, affecting the agency's credibility and budget. But a new effort by the FAA is attempting to convince the GAO that the agency can manage its acquisitions on schedule and within cost and specifications, through the adoption of such best practices as Earned Value Management and Portfolio Management. In the interview that follows Dr Robert Rovinsky will describe some of these efforts.
PM World Today (PMWT): What is your role at FAA with regards to program management within the agency? What are your personal responsibilities?
Robert Rovinsky:I direct an organization responsible for helping FAA's program and project managers incorporate best practices in all areas of capital planning from earned value management to portfolio management. This includes helping those project teams that produce our major air traffic and safety projects, on which our capital investment exceeds 2 billion dollars per year, to our smaller administrative and mission support information technology project managers who among them have expenditures exceeding 200 million dollars per year.
PMWT: What types of programs and projects are you responsible for?
Rovinsky: I work directly for the Chief Information Officer, whose projects include our major information security program, a special project to implement logical access to information systems and data, and a series of IT consolidation efforts.
Read complete interview in English
