Stephanie Rowe: 100 percent secure air travel not possible

think the threat of losing a little bit of your dollars is very real part of information sharing.

The last piece of that is about privacy and the records. There is a bit of an overlap with policy, but I think it is an important one because of the nature of the information. With programs like Secure Flight that are person-centric, you have to be very careful about privacy issues.

If I could add one more, the last challenge would be an agency where they are now going to depend on a piece from another agency. The example I gave at AFCEA was where the data entry point for Secure Flight, which TSA owned, was through a CBP router. TSA is 100 percent dependent on CBP to make sure that that router is up and running. If it goes down, TSA is dependent upon CBP to get it back up.

In any cross government types of data sharing, to the degree that an agency’s mission depends on another, that other agency has to own that outcome because if a TSA program like Secure Flight program goes down, TSA owns that. The newspaper does not say it was this other agency’s infrastructure. It only says Secure Flight went down.

HSNW: You have a tremendous amount of experience working both in and out of government on improving employee performance as well as redesigning core business processes. Based on your experiences what processes or business practices did the private sector really excel in and how can those be applied to TSA?

Rowe: I think for me going into government, one of the greatest challenges that the it had with implementing a large scale technology program was really understanding all of the integration issues and managing the complexity and breadth of those integration issues.

In my experience, I think that the government has a really difficult time finding people that have those integration skills at that level across a large complex implementation. I had a hard time finding those skills in government. I would find those skills, but they were more specific. So I could find people who had done acquisitions specifically for IT, or someone who had done a specific training program, but I had a very hard time finding folks that managed something across the board with proper control, process, and rigor.

HSNW: It seems that you are suggesting that there is somewhat of a knowledge gap in these