Outstanding Alumni Award

Dr. David Boyd, who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences in 2000, is Walden University’s Outstanding Alumni Award recipient for 2006.

Boyd is director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Interoperability and Compatibility. He was appointed to this position by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge after helping stand up the Office of Research and Development and the Office of System Engineering, where he was the deputy director for operations—which includes managing or overseeing all DHS laboratories. Boyd also runs SAFECOM, a presidential management initiative under the Office of Management and Budget that was set up to address public safety communications issues such as wireless interoperability among the nation’s first responders.

Interoperability has been a problem in the emergency response community for years, Boyd says. He shares an illustrative anecdote: “The state and county police are chasing a suspect on the highway. The officers are closing in on him and want to share information but they can’t because their radios don’t use the same frequencies. So the police communicate the only way they can—by shouting out of the windows of their speeding cruisers,” Boyd recounts. “It happened in California in the mid-’90s.”

Boyd says it’s a prime example of how the lack of telecommunications compatibility—or interoperability—in the United States impedes the work of American public safety agencies and ultimately threatens their response to crime, disaster and terrorism. How the interoperability crisis came about, Boyd explains, is “an accident of history.”

“When radios were first installed in police cars, they operated on a very low frequency. Over time, different systems were put in place—after World War II, it was VHF; in the 1970s, it was UHF. The newer technologies were never compatible with the older ones,” he says, adding that public safety agencies around the country operate on up to 10 different bands.

Although all new police, fire and emergency vehicle radio systems must now meet SAFECOM standards before installation, most agencies can't replace their “legacy” equipment. “It’s expensive and is often funded by a bond issue,” Boyd says.

Boyd has studied the lack of interoperability since the early 1990s when he directed the Office of Science and Technology in the Department of Justice. It was there that Boyd completed his Walden dissertation on organizational change in a law enforcement technology development organization.

His research examined how a technology organization is best constructed and how, in theory, it operates. “In conducting my interviews and surveys for the dissertation, I realized that some of the assumptions I took to be valid about my own organization were not valid,” he says. “We assumed that the processes we established were the reason for our success—but our success really had more to do with the overall environment: the level of support we received from the administration, Congress and especially the public safety community.”

Boyd’s dissertation was of considerable interest within the agency because it represented the first systematic study of its technology programs. “Former directors and the General Accounting Office asked for copies,” Boyd says. Understanding the importance of support—especially from the public safety community—influenced how Boyd approaches his work with SAFECOM, which was designed by and for the public safety community.

Today, Boyd regularly meets with District of Columbia-area and local first responders across the country and routinely briefs government agencies. He also regularly testifies before congressional subcommittees regarding first-responder interoperability.

Since Boyd took over SAFECOM in 2003, the states have made significant progress toward achieving interoperability on several levels. To gauge the states’ improvement, the DHS will be distributing interoperability score cards to major urban areas by the end of 2006.

Boyd says: “I expect that we will see pretty good scores for the highest-risk cities.”

Parts of this article were taken from a Walden Ponder story that appeared in 2004.