Winning Season

Bob Otto and his 'dream team' transform Postal Service technology.

This isn't the article Bob Otto hoped I would write. "What I really wanted was someone to build a piece about a team," says the Postal Service's chief technology officer. He's bored with articles about one person, one technology or one management challenge. According to Otto, the real story is about "a company that's done it all, that's looked at every piece."

That company is the U.S. Postal Service, he says, and his top managers comprise that team. "I call it the 'dream team.' Together, we look at everything in the company," Otto says. He gave me an outline for the article he envisions. It covers nine characters and 15 topics, ranging from "distributed computing environment" to "IT leadership," which is his specialty.

It's not easy to tell Otto that something can't be done. "Failure is not in my vocabulary," he says. One of his subordinates describes him as "the iron man." Another says perfection is his goal. He's widely credited with turning a department that was in shambles into one of government's top IT operations. In just a few years, Otto has overseen the development of sophisticated self-service tools for customers and employees, the replacement of an outdated infrastructure, and the overhaul of the organization's financial systems. "He's changed the nature of information technology in the Postal Service," says Chief Financial Officer Richard Strasser.

So when I tell him it would take an entire book to cover all 68 points on his outline for a "dream team" article (a book I don't have time to write), he sounds impatient, like a casting director interrupting an audition by calling out "Next!" I'm not the first journalist to say his idea is too broad, and I don't expect to be the last.

Otto wears his success on his walls. Technology awards and framed magazine articles line his office. He became the Postal Service's chief information officer in January 2001. Two years later, he took on the role of chief technology officer, too. Since he was appointed CIO, Otto has earned 17 awards for projects he has done or managed. He's been the subject of enough articles to acquire an unwanted reputation among peers as a news-hound. The recognition is nice, but the articles never turn out the way he expects.

Otto reported to work at the Agriculture Department in Washington in 1969. He was four days out of high school and fresh off the family farm in Fishertown, Pa. He couldn't afford four years in college, so he took classes at night. Eventually he earned a master's degree in public administration. Thirty-six years and about 20 promotions into his career-and within two years of retirement, he says-Otto keeps the same hours he worked on the farm. He turns his office lights on at 4:30 in the morning and shuts them off at 7 at night.

"I've been antsy all my life," Otto says. "I look at everything as an opportunity. My lifetime is short, and if I don't try to do as many things as I can, I'm going to miss out on life. I don't want to look back with regrets." The size and complexity of the Postal Service present enough challenges to hold his attention. And Otto likes the people and the culture, a sentiment he expresses with fervor. "We believe that this company is our company," he says. "You want to make a difference; you want to do something to help."

More important than his work ethic is his strategy, says George Wright, manager of USPS finance and administrative systems, who has worked with Otto as a boss, contractor, peer and now subordinate. "I don't have the time, the energy or the hours to work for someone who doesn't know where they're going," Wright says. "Bob, because of his direction-setting activity, eliminates 90 percent of the nonsense you have to deal with in a corporate environment."

Charts and graphs in bright colors hang in rows on the walls of the conference room next to Otto's office. The most telling, he says, is a bar graph showing the average number of daily technology failures that affect customers.

The massive Postal Service infrastructure-which includes 225,000 personal computers, 600 applications and 1,000 Web sites-encompasses about 1 trillion potential failure points. In fiscal 2000, some part of that infrastructure broke down on average more than 200 times daily. Now the average is less than 20.

As coach of his dream team, Otto focuses on the basics. His credo of "standardize, centralize, simplify" guides everything the department does, such as giving users a single logon for all systems and consolidating servers into two facilities, a decision that helped winnow the number of contractors the department pays from 1,000 to 64.

If a system comes with a long manual, Otto doesn't want it. When he took over, many Postal Service departments had their own technology employees because they didn't trust the organizationwide IT department. "I centralized all that," he says. "After a couple months, they saw they were getting better service, and they didn't care who worked for them."

Like any good coach, Otto takes pride most of all in the team he's assembled. "I wanted people who were customer focused," he says. "If you weren't customer focused, you weren't going to be a manager." Even with his key team members in place, recruiting, mentoring and succession planning remain top priorities. The best part of the job, he says, is taking someone who believes they have reached their peak, pushing them and watching them exceed their own expectations. As he says, "I just really believe that we are the best at everything."