100 Days in Iraq: The Creation of a National Technology Strategy

The twin-engine plane flew high above the rocky terrain, over the Euphrates River, and spiraled sharply toward Baghdad International Airport, thus eluding surface-to-air missiles. Upon its descent, the constant banking strained the engines, and they began to smoke. "We're fine! This is normal!" the pilot barked.

George Danforth shook his head. These were his first moments in Iraq. He and the plane's other two passengers had spent the last seven days preparing for their mission, with debriefings in Washington, D.C., and cultural acclimation in nearby Amman, Jordan. They had been handpicked to create a sweeping technology strategy for a new Iraq. But now, as Danforth watched smoke spilling from the engines, he thought: This is going to be a lot harder than I imagined.

There has never been a CIO assignment quite like Danforth's. He stayed nearly 100 days in war-torn Baghdad, from February to May last year, helping to unlock technology's great potential for some 26 million Iraqis. And he was in harm's way nearly all this time, staying at a hotel where insurgent informants lurked in the hallways. He traveled to city slums amidst mortar blasts and gunfire.

Danforth's mission was to assess Iraq's current technology capabilities, propose strategic projects that could be accomplished over the next three years and deliver a detailed roadmap for doing them. These documents, officially known as the IT Strategic Plan, would consist of a 97-page report detailing 10 recommendations for building an IT infrastructure and a more tactical 900-page CIO handbook. The plan was a critical piece of a massive and controversial U.S. contract with consultancy BearingPoint Inc. to rebuild Iraq's shattered economy.

The mission called for a nimble three-person team, with each member having special skills in one of three IT areas: strategy, process or architecture. Assembling the team was no easy task. Each member had to be willing to work in a combat zone and possess enough political savvy to navigate a complex network of giant organizations and playmakers. Among them: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; the Department of Defense; BearingPoint in the U.S.; BearingPoint in Iraq; the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which controlled spending; and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by L. Paul Bremer. (The CPA administered Iraq from March 2003 to June 2004.)

Two BearingPoint consultants with deep knowledge in process and architecture joined the team. Rumsfeld's assistant called CEO Doug Tatum of Tatum Partners LLP, an Atlanta-based provider of professional services for top companies, and asked if he knew of a strategic CIO to fill out the roster. Tatum searched his firm's database and came across George Danforth, 57, a 30-year technology veteran with stints in Australia, Asia and Europe who had managed technology projects that served 40,000 or more customers. He'd worked at IBM Global Services Australia, Fidelity Investments, Lend Lease Corp., GTE Corp. and FMC Corp. "Looking at what he'd done in the past, I got a sense that he could capture strategy in a practical form," Tatum says.

Tatum called Danforth and laid out the dangerous mission. Danforth, who had just returned from Australia, had been with Tatum Partners for less than a month, making this his first assignment. "My initial thought was that I must have drawn the short straw," he says. Later, he admitted being swayed by the prestige of such an assignment. "If I did this and survived, I'd gain an immediate impact-reputation within Tatum Partners," Danforth says. He discussed it briefly with his wife, Diana, and then signed on. (Money didn't really factor into his decision, he says. Compensation, including a danger bonus, amounted to less than $1,000 a day -- not exactly a windfall for a CIO of Danforth's caliber.)

A few days later, Danforth met his teammates in Washington, D.C., for briefings. At the time, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue was only six months old, car bombings targeted mostly military personnel, and the world had yet to witness the horror of civilian beheadings. Still, much of the debriefing proved fruitless at best, and irresponsible at worst. One senior advisor told Danforth that he'd be able to dine at restaurants and visit shops in downtown Baghdad. "He either didn't have a clue or was on a super sales mission to keep the team staffed," Danforth says.

Perilous Arrival

After a brief stop in Jordan, the team's plane touched down in Iraq on Feb. 7, 2004, at Baghdad International Airport. The three men were ushered onto an old shuttle bus and dropped off at a nearby checkpoint. Due to a logistical screwup, they waited five hours for transport to their final destination: the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad. Sitting on their luggage at the checkpoint, they saw the reality of Iraq. Tanks and Humvees rolled past in columns, plumes of black smoke rose on the horizon, dust swirled and there was an omnipresent whump-whump-whump of Apache helicopters. "The whole thing was just surreal," Danforth says.

To get to the Babylon Hotel, the men had to travel a portion of what's widely considered the most dangerous road in Baghdad, a 10-mile stretch from the airport to the "Green Zone." Bordered by the Tigris River, the Green Zone is a heavily fortified makeshift camp housing the provisional government; it was where Danforth's team would work closely with U.S. authorities. Some five miles beyond was the hotel, and there was no mistaking that it was a perilous place.

An aura of danger seemed to choke the hotel, he says. For starters, a private security detail made up of Italian guards greeted the team, their rifles raised as they swept rooftops and windows for snipers. Danforth and others were issued 28-pound bulletproof vests and helmets. Daily trips to the Green Zone became feats of security prowess. Guards, for instance, would escort Danforth from the hotel to two cars at a nearby lot. Each had a driver and a shooter, with the second "chase" car providing extra security and a potential escape vehicle. The route changed daily. Upon returning to the hotel, Danforth would hear his driver call out on the radio, "pick 28, arriving at A5." A tall, trim Italian-baker-turned-security guard named Fabrizio Quattrocchi was assigned to protect No. 28.

Inside the Green Zone, Danforth met CPA senior advisors responsible for the development of Iraq's 26 ministries. It didn't take long to realize that progress was happening in silos. The problem, Danforth says, stemmed from an executive order. "Bremer had issued a warning to senior advisors, telling them that the June 28th deadline for handing over sovereignty to the interim government of Iraq will be met, come hell or high water, so they better be ready," he recalls. This kind of pressure set off an epidemic of tunnel vision up and down the command chain. Senior advisors began making decisions that benefited only their assigned ministries, he says. Independent satellite communication networks and other sundry IT investments sprang up.

Iraqi ministers also had a silo mentality. They pressed Danforth's team to advocate for separate ministerial data centers -- a telltale sign of mistrust within Iraq's political hierarchy, Danforth notes. "We were constantly walking through quagmire." As a result, the team agreed that a major thrust of the IT Strategic Plan had to be a call for unity, in the form of common applications, standard procedures and shared services.