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Welcome back to the Public Works Digest!

Public Works Digest is back

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works
Published Feb. 3, 2020
Ms. Sally G. Pfenning was selected for Senior Executive Service in September 2018, as the Chief of Installation Support Division for US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).  In this position she works to provide solutions in support of America’s Installations by expanding the technical expertise of members of the DoD engineering community and effectively applying USACE capabilities, contract capacities and other tools required to operate, maintain, sustain, restore and modernize America’s military infrastructure and real property assets. She is responsible for public works engineering technical expertise and guidance throughout USACE. She works collaboratively with the Office of the Assistant Secretary Army-Installations Energy and Environment and the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Army for Installation Management; Army land holding commands and Installation Management Command (IMCOM) senior leadership to develop and implement USACE installation engineering support policy and doctrine.

Ms. Sally G. Pfenning was selected for Senior Executive Service in September 2018, as the Chief of Installation Support Division for US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). In this position she works to provide solutions in support of America’s Installations by expanding the technical expertise of members of the DoD engineering community and effectively applying USACE capabilities, contract capacities and other tools required to operate, maintain, sustain, restore and modernize America’s military infrastructure and real property assets. She is responsible for public works engineering technical expertise and guidance throughout USACE. She works collaboratively with the Office of the Assistant Secretary Army-Installations Energy and Environment and the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Army for Installation Management; Army land holding commands and Installation Management Command (IMCOM) senior leadership to develop and implement USACE installation engineering support policy and doctrine.

Welcome back to the Public Works Digest! As a former public works director and the senior leader at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers charged with ensuring that the Corps provides the needed engineering support to installations, I am honored to represent your interests here at headquarters in Washington, DC. 

SES Sally G. PfenningAs a public works professional, I struggled for many years to learn my job, to make connections, and to find information about how I could meet the demands of our supported commands while ensuring the stability of the infrastructure on my installation. Every day the challenges were intense, often overwhelming, and always new and evolving. The energy of my community—the Directorate of Public Works (DPW) family—is what kept being a public works director and employee exciting, challenging , and rewarding. Thanks to the help from many of you, I survived! However, finding this community was not easy. In fact, it happened only over many years by word of mouth; chance; travel; and, maybe, just plain luck. We need to do better for our future. Looking back, I continue to say to myself, “If only I had known better, I would have done better!”

As we move forward, without a modern communication tool package and an Army installation public works community of practice, we will not be able to keep up with the rate of change to our profession. The expectation of infrastructure modernization is that new technology will lead to smaller, more technically capable public works staffs. The staff cuts have already come, but the training and modernization have not followed. ‘Smart city infrastructure,’ facility-related control systems, energy conservation and resiliency technology, and artificial intelligence and machine learning are all coming at us with huge leadership expectations in uncertain and unstable ways. Most of us go to work under-resourced to hold together installations that, while sprinkled with modern buildings, are still of yesterday.

Although the challenges that we face at the headquarters level are new each day, they do not carry with them the daily pain, frustration, excitement, and reward of being in the field. For me, the goal of working at a headquarters is to move things forward in ways that better the Army civilian engineer’s future by making it a more advanced and more technically capable one than that of our current path. We at the Installation Support Division (ISD) within the Corps want to be a bridge and resource to help the Army and its installations in their current fight and to prepare them for the future fight. The Corps has over 30,000 richly varied technical resources that can sometimes be difficult to find, but we in the ISD can help connect you with the right resource at the right time.

Here in the ISD, we are innovating how the Corps communicates with the greater Army engineering community. First, we are digitizing and Web-enabling the Public Works Digest. In addition, we are asking for commentary on the Digest to further tailor it to meet your needs. Second, we are developing a prototype app that could create real-time, cross-communication among public works directors and their Corps brothers and sisters. We are working with the Installation Management Command (IMCOM) to find ways to standardize and visualize data that relates to products and services delivered to you. We strive daily to maintain and improve Corps enterprise data integrity. In addition, we want to be a leader in communication transparency. Through the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), we are working with Headquarters, Department of the Army, to better display information from Builder and ISR and to improve investment decisions. Together, we can find ways to deliver the best engineering services for the Army.

I know that you have a choice in how you execute your SRM and BASOPS  public works mission. The Installation Support Division, working with the districts; the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville; and ERDC strive to be an integrated part of your team and THE BEST CHOICE for large and technically complex public works-related challenges.

I look forward to hearing from you and working with you, but most of all, learning from you through your future contributions to and engagements with the Public Works Digest. Whether you are a USACE employee, a DPW stakeholder, or an Army Soldier on a troop construction project, you are a part of one Army engineer team. You are who we put the Digest together for. Thank you for everything you do each day to ensure the security of our Nation!

We look to the past to inform us, the present
to correct us, and the future to inspire us.

Sally G. Pfenning
Chief, Installation Support Division HQ, USACE    USACE Headquarters