by Dan Perkins

In May of this year, Charles Keegan became head of the FAA's Office of Research and Acquisitions.  As the agency's acquisition chief, Keegan is accountable for modernizing the nation's airspace system.  His responsibilities include research, acquisition, integration, development and deployment of air traffic control systems.  He has oversight of 2,000 employees at the FAA's Washington headquarters and at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, NJ.

Keegan also manages the implementation of the agency's
Operational Evolution Plan.  He coordinates with leaders in the aviation community to increase airspace capacity and better meet demand.  The Operational Evolution Plan is a 10-year rolling plan that covers systems, procedures and community-wide participation.

Keegan graduated from Daniel Webster College in 1981 with a bachelor of science degree in air traffic control management, aviation management, and transportation management. He has managed quality assurance and training programs, and supervised system requirements and acquisition organizations.  He is also a pilot.

I recently sat down with Keegan to understand the value he places on supplier diversity and diversity within the FAA's workforce.  The following are edited responses to the questions posed during the interview.

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dib:	From your viewpoint, what is the role of small, minority and disadvantaged businesses within the supply chain of the FAA?
CK:	Let me start off by saying, fundamentally, I'm a believer in diversity.  The more diversity we have, the better the answers we get to the hard questions and the more progress we make.  Small businesses, disadvantaged businesses, and minority-owned businesses are part of how we get best in class in a number of areas, particularly in our knowledge and in the way we think.  We have to maintain a broad base of contractors who provide us with various goods and services, and contractors who represent all different kinds of thinking.  This diversity enables government to make appropriate progress. I recently read that more than half of all inventions come from small businesses.  They don't get half of our funding, but you have to value the fact that small businesses have intellectual capacity and capability that may exceed that of the institutionalized contractors.  Small businesses, disadvantaged businesses and minority-owned businesses serve an incredibly important role in what we do.
dib:	With most of the money going to large contractors, what is being done to help small, disadvantaged and minority-owned businesses become a more integral part of the supply chain?
CK:	It's true the majority of our funding goes to institutionalized contractors.  We run billion dollar programs and the majority of that goes to large-scale contractors who deliver giant systems, satellites, rockets, all kinds of things. But within those programs, we maintain a set of goals that we want them to fulfill.  We set goals to make sure that the prime contractors have diverse input on the product and services they provide us.  We also set goals to make sure small, disadvantaged and minority businesses fill niches that normally aren't handled by the primes. I'm finding here in Washington that there are a number of organizations including small businesses that have very focused areas of expertise and have very specific skill sets that are incredibly valuable to us.  Without them, we wouldn't exist.  It's very easy to find small companies with 25 employees or less that do an incredible job for us.   As an agency, we sometimes go back and forth on whether to bundle contracts or not. There are times when bundling is appropriate and times when bundling is unnecessarily restrictive. We have to watch that, but our intention is to make sure small, disadvantaged and minority businesses remain a part of our supply chain, even as we try to find ways to speed up our procurement processes. We also have a Mentor Protégé Program where we ask a major contractor like Lockheed-Martin to work with and help a smaller firm become a larger, more capable entity.  We believe the program holds a great deal of promise.  The issue for us is not to just have a lot of one-person companies, but to grow viable companies.  There's a lot to be learned before a company can take on large-scale projects.  Our primes have the expertise, and we're asking them to help bring along smaller companies.  We just established our first one with Lockheed, and it's within the air traffic management area.  We will monitor that situation.  It's very significant for us to build up that capability, but its also important for us to utilize the expertise of our institutionalized contractors.
dib:	What has been your personal experience with supplier diversity?
CK:	I have been an advocate for small, disadvantaged, minority- and women-owned businesses for a number of years.  In my first management experience, here in Washington, I brought in businesses with very specific skill sets to work in niche capacities on our advanced automation system, which is nearly ten years old now.  From that we designed new processes and new organizations that filled the gap where we had been unsuccessful.  Without input from small businesses, I don't think we would have even thought about what the problem was.  For me, I think having diversity is how we get smart.   When I was the Director of the Free-Flight Program Office, we brought in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and also Hispanic Serving Institutions to support our Centers of Excellence.  We were asking tough questions about the role of aviation, and we wanted a diverse academic component to help us develop intellectual answers.  We provided grant money that enabled those institutions to conduct research in areas where we needed help. For me, supplier diversity is about bringing in new ideas and perspectives to fill pockets of opportunities, but there's another piece.  Including small businesses in our procurement processes also helps them to grow.  It's a great thing to help companies get to the point where they are no longer small.  Granted, it becomes more difficult when a 100-person firm moves up to compete against a giant like Boeing, but many smaller companies have niche capabilities that make them the best in class.  Although the transition is somewhat difficult, many of our smaller contractors have made it successfully.
Small Businesses Provide Niche Services to the FAA To the left is one of the views from Keegan's office.  The buildings in the foreground house many of the small businesses that service the FAA.  Many specialize in business and financial management, engineering services, testing, software and systems integration. The FAA relies on small businesses for its human factors work.  Firms specializing in this field look at how human beings interact with machines.  Their findings assist the FAA in formulating performance and safety related policies concerning pilots, air traffic controllers and facilities technicians.  Small businesses also play a key role in helping the FAA evaluate and implement new systems.  Keegan says opportunities abound for small firms that specialize in installations across diverse environments.
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dib:	How do the employee coalitions within the FAA support the agency's mission?
CK:	We're a big agency, 50,000 strong. We have issues and the coalitions help us deal with them every day.  They also help us develop strategies to achieve what we call a Model Work Environment, which is a targeted goal to have our work environment represent the civil labor force, grow our people, and value diversity. The coalitions are helping us to understand how and why people react and respond to certain situations, and that understanding is making it a lot easier for us to work together.  Everything we do now is in teams that span across the country and having that understanding is fundamental to being successful.   We're also working globally, which increases the amount of understanding we need to have in order to be successful with the implementation of our systems and in our ability to serve the flying public.  All of that understanding is tremendously valuable. I think the key is for the leadership here at the FAA to maintain an open door policy with the coalitions, to make sure that their views are well known and understood.  I think it's also our responsibility to be accountable, to respond and react with strategies that work in line with the views put forth by the coalitions.   I'm new here in ARA (Associate Administrator for Research and Acquisitions), it's a large organization, and the issues of Model Work Environment expand to a much larger horizon.  So far, it has been extremely important for me to be able to work with the coalitions and bring a certain set of values to the situation.   We're going to work very hard and diligently to maintain those values; and I'm looking for improvement.  I'm not concerned just with process, I want results.  I want absolute, positive results in how our workforce responds, in our performance, in how we relate to each other.  I want to see all these things improve in some kind of quantitative manner.   We have a good team here, and they are extremely responsive; but the communication channels have to stay open, and we have to make sure everyone has access.
dib:	When it comes to diversity, often there's a gap between directives coming from the top and implementation throughout the organization.  How do prevent that gap from occurring?
CK:	I'm a results-oriented kind of guy. I bring a few skills to this job and one of them is being able to hold people accountable.  I'm pretty clear what my direction is, and I'm pretty clear what the results are suppose to be, and I expect people to achieve them.   I think the team here has been extremely receptive of that.  They're highly capable.  They're relatively diverse in their experience, age, and ethnicity, so I expect them to work together.
dib:	What else would you like our readers to know about you or the FAA?
CK:	There are a couple of things.  First, I think public service is a very good deal, particularly here in the FAA.  The FAA is constantly on the hunt, recruiting talent: entry level talent, mid-level talent, senior level talent.  Across the country, there are incredible opportunities in all types of fields, including operations, engineering, software development and business management.  You name it; we have that career path.  We cannot reach out enough to fill the positions we have.   The other part is we have a tremendous effort underway to recruit small and disadvantaged businesses.  There are opportunities not just here in Washington, DC, but across the country.   We need to reach out to achieve our goals for a diverse work force and to get the best ideas available from our supply base.  The coalitions have been extremely helpful in this regard.  I don't think its their primary function to be the FAA's recruiters, and I hate to put that burden on them, but it has been a successful way to go about it.

The End

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