Tug of War by Jocelyn Wills

Author:Jocelyn Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

7

“One Amorphous Mass”

Systems Integration, Strategic Planning, and the Search for Liquidity, 1988–1993

Between 1987 and 1988, members of the Systems Division expanded MDA’s horizons by generating banner profits, despite the firm’s product losses. With mounting political, environmental, and economic pressures to reduce military spending in Canada and elsewhere, the Systems management team assessed trends, set crucial goals, and began to target areas removed from but still essential to the weapons business, particularly in geographical information and aviation systems, as well as space and defence. Having completed the company’s first major projects for the European Space Agency and United States Air Force during 1987, MDA quickly won three systems integration contracts from Italy, Spain, and Canada, and received a second contract to work on ground station components for ESA’s ERS-1 satellite. During 1988, the Meridian system won an industrial research award for technological innovation in geocoded image correction. Combining that expertise with synthetic aperture radar, the Systems Division bid on and won contracts to supply systems for Canada’s Atmospheric Environment Service as the foundation for all future meteorological applications with Canada’s Department of National Defence. The division additionally won a SAR-based contract with the Republic of Korea, which promised to enhance MDA’s (and Canada’s) position in Asian markets. In the United States, the firm received an opportunity to work with Lockheed on a satellite data acquisition system for the US Navy Tactical Environment Support Service. MDA’s performance at the automated weather distribution system acceptance tests in Florida also led to additional USAF contracts to enhance the system and provide user training to Air Force personnel.1

On the strength of Systems’ abilities to profit from Canada’s connections to ESA and Reagan’s strategic defence initiatives, MDA’s board authorized the five-year plan during 1988. Bob Hamilton and his Systems management team then began implementation. With product divisions disassembling and ground station sales declining as MDA began to work on new contracts in aviation as well as space and defence, many of the firm’s government allies, shareholders, and employees began to argue that the Systems Division had articulated, perhaps for the first time in the company’s history, the core business expertise MDA had begun to develop after Dave Sloan first walked into John MacDonald’s office in 1971. Neither a remote sensing nor a product company, MDA had evolved into a systems integrator employing software development and off-the-shelf hardware to serve the interests of governmental entities worldwide. From that moment forward, and with engineering processes reduced to writing, the company came together under a vision that finally married Pitts’s profit-oriented focus to MacDonald’s technical concepts, which laid the foundations for Dan Friedmann’s ascent within the firm. Although more than five years later than expected, that vision also provided a chance for many of MDA’s investors to liquidate their holdings. MDA travelled a difficult road as the firm adjusted to the realities of another economic downturn, changing government priorities, and the five-year plan’s painful restructuring. But as they gained experience in the vagaries of defence contracting and an increasingly

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