competition | The Contracting Education Academy

January 10, 2020 By cs

After 2 years, JEDI is finally underway

The second year of competition for the Pentagon’s controversial cloud contract was as dramatic as the first.

The Pentagon’s high-profile Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract is right back where it was one year ago: tied up in litigation.

The circumstances have changed in the past calendar year, with Microsoft winning JEDI in October and former favorite to win the contract, Amazon Web Services, protesting the decision in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

At best, the Defense Department and Microsoft cannot begin work until at least mid-February, putting the Pentagon more than a year behind its initial schedule for JEDI. An internal JEDI strategy document released in November 2017 sought a JEDI award in fourth quarter of 2018 and migrations to the cloud platform by the beginning of 2019.

And yet, what unfolded in 2019 was high drama in the federal contracting world over an improbably high-profile government contract.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-two-years-jedi-finally-underway/162005/

December 24, 2019 By cs

Amazon’s protest of GSA’s e-commerce platform RFP tells us why the silly season is in full swing

There may be no better indicator that the General Services Administration’s e-commerce platform solicitation is facing a host of uphill challenges than the fact that the company many believe will be the ultimate winner filed the first protest.

Federal News Network confirmed that Amazon fired the first salvo in the federal e-commerce war.

Government sources say the Seattle, Washington company submitted an agency-level, pre-award protest in November.

Sources say Amazon challenged whether GSA’s market research was sufficient, and it questioned some of the terms of the solicitation, particularly around the compliance of laws like the Competition-in-Contracting Act, the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act and even the provision in the 2018 defense authorization bill requiring GSA to set up an e-commerce marketplace in the first place.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2019/12/amazons-protest-of-gsas-e-commerce-platform-rfp-tells-us-why-the-silly-season-is-in-full-swing/

November 6, 2019 By cs

How a new acquisition approach is changing — and challenging — HHS

The Department of Health and Human Services has adjusted its approach to technology acquisition in order to keep pace in innovation.

In a moment when agencies across the government are grappling with how to adjust their acquisition framework to ensure they have the most advanced technology, HHS CIO Jose Arrieta said his agency has decided to approach acquisition by laying out its objectives first.

“We establish the way we want to interact and work with the contractor,” Arrieta said Oct. 30 at the Data Coalition’s GovDATAx conference.

Another key to the HHS approach has been taking “price off the table” and setting maximum awards ceilings for contractors. Then, the contractors can compete for the work.

HHS has been a leader in federal government in deployment of emerging technologies.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/cloud/2019/10/30/how-a-new-acquisition-approach-is-changing-and-challenging-hhs

October 24, 2019 By cs

Just 1 bidder is vying for 2 Pentagon programs worth $130 billion

The defense acquisition chief is looking into the Army’s disqualification of a second bidder to replace Bradley armored vehicles.

It’s a pretty widely accepted business principle that competition is good for business. But for two separate programs potentially worth a combined $130 billion, the Pentagon has just one possible bidder.

That’s prompted the U.S. Defense Department’s top weapons buyer to look into the U.S. Army’s $45 billion effort to replace the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Service officials recently disqualified one potential competitor, leaving just one company to bid.

“I’m just getting more involved in that one right now,” Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said at a Friday press briefing.

DoD leaders have spent the past few years delegating the oversight of most major acquisition projects to the individual military services, a move intended to remove bureaucratic hurdles, speed up development and get weapons to troops faster. This marks the first time that Lord, who has held her job since August 2017, has publicly said she would step in to review one of those programs.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/business/2019/10/just-one-bidder-vying-two-pentagon-programs-worth-130-billion/160718/

December 27, 2018 By AMK

Three competing options for acquiring innovation

The DoD’s technological edge is eroding.

Since 2015, the department has pursued a strategy to regain the lead. During the Obama administration, it was called the Third Offset. The Trump administration has abandoned that nomenclature, but it is pursuing the same objective.

The DoD seeks dominance in robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and three-dimensional printing, among other fields. It recognizes, however, that such innovation will not come from the usual sources — government labs or the defense industrial base.

Nondefense firms have a decisive lead: The center of gravity in cutting edge, military applicable research is shifting abruptly away from the defense establishment to relatively new commercial firms. The DoD must engage with these nondefense firms to build the next generation of weapon systems. But how should it do so?

Two decades ago, defense economists David Parker and Keith Hartley, mapped the options for procurement along a continuum. On the far left, managerial diktat determines sourcing, and prices have little role in the process. On the far right is a fully competitive market, where the “relationship between buyer and supplier is transitory, non-committal beyond the current purchase, and arm’s length”; between these extremes are, from left to right, subsidiary purchases, joint ventures, partnerships, networks, preferred suppliers, and adversarial competition.

Keiran Walsh, Yale professor of economics, distilled these options down to three:

[T]here are three basic ways of getting people to do what one wants done. One can force them to
behave as one wishes them to. One can give them a set of incentives that aligns their interests with
one’s own. Finally, one can try to shape the values that they hold so that they will naturally want to
do what you wish them to do.

Walsh’s three alternatives, Parker and Hartley explain, correspond to coercion, competition, and long-term partnering. Of course, the same option needn’t be chosen for every procurement, and perhaps different alternatives may work better in some cases than in others. But the DoD must choose from these options as it determines how to buy innovation from nondefense commercial suppliers and perhaps should identify a default that works best in most cases.

Keep reading this paper at: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Volume-32_Issue-4/V-Schoeni.pdf

The second year of competition for the Pentagon’s controversial cloud contract was as dramatic as the first.

There may be no better indicator that the General Services Administration’s e-commerce platform solicitation is facing a host of uphill challenges than the fact that the company many believe will be the ultimate winner filed the first protest.

The Department of Health and Human Services has adjusted its approach to technology acquisition in order to keep pace in innovation.

The defense acquisition chief is looking into the Army’s disqualification of a second bidder to replace Bradley armored vehicles.

The DoD’s technological edge is eroding.

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