Eagle awards honor Schambach, DiPentima

Patrick Schambach, the chief information officer at the Transportation Security Administration, and Renato DiPentima, president of consulting and systems integration at SRA International Inc., won Eagle awards on March 25 at the 14th annual Federal 100 gala.

Federal Computer Week presents the awards to two individuals — one from government and one from industry — who made outstanding contributions to federal information technology the previous year.

Schambach led the effort in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to tighten security at the nation's airports and screen passengers and luggage to make the nation's skies safer, building an operation from scratch.

"We still have employees using pay phones in the airport concourses to make business calls and their personal computers at home to access our Web site because we haven't provided the connectivity," Schambach said.

"But we do have a vision of the technology-enabled TSA. We have a very workable model in our IT managed services contract with Unisys [Corp.]. We have basic bare-bones services in place at the airports. We've laid the foundation for a much more robust solution with our headquarters," Schambach added.

DiPentima is well-known as a pillar of the IT community working to make government and industry operate effectively together.

"Those [Federal 100 award winners] are real partners, partners in the good sense," DiPentima said. "Government people know what their responsibilities are, and industry people know what their responsibilities are. But I have never seen them work together so well."

The CIO Council chose the government Eagle award winner, and the Information Technology Association of America chose the industry winner.

Last year's government winner was Mark Forman, associate director of information technology and e-government at the Office of Management and Budget, and the industry winner was Linda Gooden, president of Lockheed Martin Information Technology.