cs | The Contracting Education Academy

March 22, 2019 By cs

Why contracting challenges put VA on the ‘High-Risk’ list

The Department of Veterans Affairs has not updated some of its purchasing regulations since 2008, and the resulting problems created for contracting officers at the agency have caused the Government Accountability Office to designate the problem a high-risk area for 2019.

“The VA acquisition is a huge part of the mission over at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They do about $26 billion in procurements each year, and tens of thousands of procurement actions. Since 2015, we’ve had over 31 recommendations that we’ve done there and, unfortunately, 21 of those remain open, and so the high-risk designation centers on a couple of longstanding weaknesses that they’ve had in the acquisition area,” said Chris Mihm, managing director of the GAO Strategic Issues Team, in an agency podcast.

“First is that they don’t have a consistent and coordinated set of policies and regulations across the department. Second is that there is the importance of just a human capital, to make sure that their people are trained, to make sure that their workloads are being appropriately managed. Third, there’s problems that we’ve seen in terms of data and transparency over the acquisition process. And then fourth, that we’re very concerned about the absence of a strategic approach to procurement at the department.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/management/2019/03/07/why-contracting-challenges-put-va-on-the-high-risk-list/

March 21, 2019 By cs

In acquisition, standing still is the biggest risk

The biggest risk in federal acquisition today is not taking enough risks.

Not reckless risks, but deliberate risks consistent with Federal Acquisition Regulation Part 1 guidance.

The largest chunk of U.S. research and development spending, the most significant technological innovation, and its fastest evolution all reside in the private sector. And the private sector has little interest in slogging through the rule-burdened, prescriptive, intellectual-property-devouring federal procurement process. These facts are driving a tidal wave of change in government buying, especially in Defense organizations.

Here’s the January 2018 National Defense Strategy:

“We must not accept cumbersome approval chains, wasteful applications of resources in uncompetitive space, or overly risk-averse thinking that impedes change. Delivering performance means we will shed outdated management practices and structures while integrating insights from business innovation.”

Not only is the Pentagon challenged in attracting the most innovative companies in America’s most vibrant business sectors, but our adversaries—like Russia and China—have little acquisition oversight or regulation so they are beating us to the cutting edge.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2019/03/acquisition-standing-still-biggest-risk/155397

March 20, 2019 By cs

Creating space for innovation

“Innovation” is an overused buzzword that obscures the messy reality of making change happen.

True innovation requires the right people, the proper mix of technologies and a critical grasp of customers’ needs and expectations. For agencies, the many layers of federal governance and regulation add another degree of difficulty.

FCW recently gathered a group of IT leaders from across government to talk about the obstacles they’re encountering and how they’ve addressed them. The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution, and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.

Procurement is no longer the obstacle — security is

The Federal Acquisition Regulation’s restrictions, both real and perceived, have long been a friction point for digital reinvention efforts, but most participants said the contracting process is not holding them back.

“It used to be the in-vogue complaint was, ‘Oh, it’s all procurement’s fault,'” one executive said. “But actually, procurement has gotten much better. What our agency is grappling with is the IT monstrosity that came out of” the Federal Information Security Management Act.

“FISMA came out because we were doing these things wrong in government,” he acknowledged. “But now we’ve created this very burdensome process that is not well-aligned to where cloud architecture is going,” and agencies must find new ways to navigate that process. “Obviously, we can’t bend security principles, [but without a new architecture,] you’re waiting two years to deploy. That’s not innovation. That’s not acceptable in this day and age.”

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/articles/2019/02/21/fcw-perspectives-innovation.aspx

March 19, 2019 By cs

Army bets big on service contracts to fix aging IT

The Army’s information technology is too old, and modernization is too slow.

So the service needs a “fundamentally different” strategy that relies heavily on the private sector, Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford said the Army has to start relying on contractors to own and operate IT on the Army’s behalf — what he calls “enterprise IT as a service” — and start moving on-base IT to Defense Department clouds.

“Around 70 percent overall of that [IT] infrastructure — in the case of voice, it’s probably as high as 90 percent — is at or near end of life,” Crawford told the Association of the US Army. “[It] would take beyond the year 2030 — if we stayed on the current path — to modernize. We ran into one brick wall after another [asking], ‘how do we get speed,’” Crawford continued. So, about six months ago, he and Lt. Gen. Steve Fogarty, head of Army Cyber Command, realized “we needed to do something fundamentally different.”

This effort’s urgent because the aging IT on Army bases can’t protect data from high-end hackers, provide the bandwidth for new augmented-reality training systems or support combat units waging high-intensity warfare against great powers (i.e., Russia and China), Crawford said. “This reform and modernization initiative,” he said, “is less about saving money than it is about increasing operational effectiveness throughout the force.”

Keep reading this article at: https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/army-bets-big-on-service-contracts-to-fix-aging-it/

March 18, 2019 By cs

VA procurement and security clearance processing land on GAO’s high-risk list

The Veterans Affairs Department suffers from “fundamental management weaknesses and is one of the most challenged in the federal government,” Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told a Senate panel recently.

Leadership instability, high-level vacancies and a lack of accountability are all problems at the sprawling, decentralized VA, which appears three times on the newly released biennial list of high-risk programs compiled by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie “has a plan but there’s not a lot of detail” for implementing GAO recommendations in such areas as the department’s outdated procurement system that relies too heavily on expensive emergency procurements, Dodaro said.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/03/va-procurement-and-security-clearance-processing-land-gaos-high-risk-list/155354