Paul A. Strassmann, 96

Paul A. Strassmann, who survived Nazi occupation as a teenage resistance fighter to become one of the world’s foremost authorities on information management and the first Director of Defense Information for the Pentagon, and Chief Information Officer of NASA, died on Friday at his home in New Canaan, CT. He was 96.

Paul A. Strassmann

Over a career spanning more than six decades, Strassmann held executive positions at General Foods, Kraft, and Xerox before being appointed as the first Chief Information Officer of the Department of Defense in 1991, and CIO of NASA in 2002. Throughout his extensive career, he championed the concept that information should be measured and managed as a crucial corporate asset — a revolutionary idea when he first began advancing it in the 1960s. He developed methods for calculating “return on management” and “information productivity.”

A prolific author, and influential thinker and public speaker, he wrote 9 books and over 500 articles. Steve Jobs spoke about how Strassmann’s ideas influenced him in a talk delivered at MIT in 1992:
https://www.strassmann.com/pubs/mit/1992-steve-jobs.html.

During his tenure at Xerox (1969-1985), he was responsible for all its information systems worldwide and was a key contributor to shaping Xerox’s business strategy for office automation. During this time Xerox established the famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the birthplace of the personal computer and fundamental inventions widely used today, including the mouse, the desktop, displays with movable windows and fonts, laser printers, ethernet networking, object-oriented programming, and the internet.

Born in Trenčín, Czechoslovakia in 1929, Strassmann joined the partisan resistance fighting Nazi occupation. After the war in 1948, he emigrated to the United States, where he studied at the Cooper Union in New York and met Mona Frankel, to whom he was married for 68 years. He later earned a master’s degree in industrial management from MIT.

Strassmann began his corporate career at General Foods in 1961, before joining Xerox in 1969, where he rose to become Chief Information Officer. His meticulous research into quantifying the business value of information technology resulted in his seminal 1985 book, “Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age.”

In 1991, Strassmann was appointed to serve as the Pentagon’s first Director of Defense Information. He helped design and implement the Pentagon’s plan to achieve $71 billion in post-cold-war budget savings. He is a 1993 recipient of the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service – the Defense Department’s highest civilian recognition.

In 1997 he was named to the CIO Hall of Fame by CIO Magazine as one of the twelve most influential CIOs of the decade. He has held faculty appointments at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the University of Connecticut, Imperial College in London, England, and as Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences at George Mason University.

His public involvement includes presentations to the US Senate and House of Representatives, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the British House of Commons, and the USSR Council of Ministers. Strassmann was chairman of the committee on information workers for the White House Conference on Productivity.

Strassmann is a recipient of the Gen. Stefanik Medal for his actions as a guerilla commando from September 1944 through March 1945 in Czechoslovakia. He is survived by three children and seven grandchildren.

https://www.strassmann.com/bio/ 

For online condolences please visit www.hoytfuneralhome.com.

[This obituary appeared on the Hoyt Funeral Home website.]