40 years of DAI

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of new office space. Individually, each decision
made sense and could not have been deferred
much longer, but the combination put the
business under pressure. Then came the ARDI
overrun, reducing earnings by $5 million just
when the Board and employees were expecting
the company to show returns on these big
investments.
Jim Boomgard, with two years as COO under
his belt, stepped onto this moving escalator
as DAI’s new President in September 2006.
ARDI had come to a screeching halt, and the
OTI project in Iraq had wound down at the end
of June. Replacing the revenue from those
two signature contracts was obviously critical,
and 2007 looked like a “rebuilding year,” in the
vernacular of a sports franchise. Winning new
business was the top priority for several Board
members, but Boomgard believed he should
give equal attention to the internal workings of
the company. The Oracle system was starting to
rationalize the flow of information between different
departments and improve financial management.
But these steps alone wouldn’t bring
about the cohesion and teamwork necessary to
sustain DAI’s core values and get the firm back
onto a growth path.
In the past, the company’s groups and even
project teams had been given lots of latitude.
“Each of the projects was a world of its own,”
explained Spake. As “development guys,” field
employees were usually uninterested in tracking
costs and reconciling bank accounts yet always
ready to improvise when faced with a new development
problem. A tendency to reinvent the
wheel had ensured that hard-learned lessons in
any one project did little to benefit the company
as a whole. When it came to taking the time to
share information companywide, Spake noted,
“individual project demands frequently won the
day.” Boomgard realized that DAI would always
make mistakes, but he was determined that it
must not make the same ones twice. Thus the
company had to improve its business processes,
encouraging centralization, standardization,
and corporate discipline to an extent never
before entertained.
In one respect, this was an opportune time for
such an effort. Several key executive positions
were unfilled, but by late summer a new and
carefully chosen team was in place that included
Kevin Haggerty as CFO and Cindy Limoges
as VP for Human Resources. Haggerty instinctively
saw the mission behind the numbers and
set about rebuilding the finance office team with
people who shared his enthusiasm for what
DAI could do. Over the next year, management
initiated some of the business process improvements,
beginning with budgeting, needed to
take advantage of the Oracle infrastructure. By
early 2008, Boomgard believed that—financially
at least—DAI was back on track. Indeed, the
company was again surpassing all of its revenue
targets. But he was still convinced that there
remained “many internal disconnects” in the
organization, and he thought he knew where
they were.