innovation | The Contracting Education Academy

December 31, 2020 By cs

Making best-in-class contracts better for innovation

In recent years, federal acquisition policy and practice has been a competition between two different priorities: Efficiency and innovation.

Instead of balancing these priorities, innovation has taken the backseat, denying agencies access to companies that can deliver transformational solutions.

The Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration have an opportunity to implement several straightforward changes that can address these competing priorities.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office provided several recommendations for OMB and GSA to improve their category management initiative, which oversees efforts such as the best-in-class contracts (BIC). While most of the GAO recommendations focused on improving guidance around category management, better defining requirements, acquisition workforce training and cost savings, what was left unaddressed was how OMB and GSA can improve the most important outcomes — delivering the best and most innovative product and service solutions to agency customers and citizens.

Category management has pushed government agencies to buy more like a single enterprise. This focus has prioritized driving savings and efficiency by eliminating redundancy by developing more useful governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs), such as BICs. However, having a too narrow focus on streamlining and scale sacrifices the more important priority of attracting more innovative, non-traditional companies to the federal market. That focus — long championed by organizations like the Alliance for Digital Innovation — has pushed the government to leverage inventive acquisition authorities, prioritize commercial capabilities over onerous and restrictive requirements, and encourage speed in both the pilot and production phases of IT acquisition.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2020/12/making-best-in-class-contracts-better-for-innovation/

December 1, 2020 By cs

Navy seeing ‘explosion’ in use of OTA for IT, cyber development work

The last several years of Defense spending have a seen a more than seven-fold increase in the amount of money being spent through other transaction agreements for technology development. And although the Navy has been a relative latecomer to OTAs compared to its sister services, the approach is taking off in a big way in the areas of information technology and cybersecurity.

In August, the Navy announced it was increasing the ceiling value for its Information Warfare Research Project OTA to $500 million after having exhausted its initial $100 million ceiling in just a little over a year-and-a-half. Meanwhile, last month, officials announced the project’s first three programs to have moved from prototypes to full-blown production systems.

“It’s been a very large success. We’ve been able to promote this, both internally and with our sponsors to identify requirements that fit our rapid prototyping construct, ultimately with the goal of getting things into the warfighters’ hands quicker than in other contract strategy approaches,” Kevin Charlow, the chairman of the IWRP Executive Steering Group and deputy executive director of Naval Information Warfare Center-Atlantic said in a recent interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “As we continue to identify new requirements and as the word gets out, and people get more comfortable using this type of vehicle, the available ceiling has been used up. So we’re pleased about that and we’re looking forward to the future.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/on-dod/2020/11/navy-seeing-explosion-in-use-of-ota-for-it-cyber-development-work/

November 2, 2020 By cs

Staffing government procurement in the 21st century

In America’s public and private sectors today, just about everything which has not yet become digital is well along its way toward becoming so.

Retail, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, social services, defense and even agriculture, have all become dependent on streams of data for their managers to analyze and use in making decisions — decisions that typically turn out better than those based on past experience, intuition or seat-of-the-pants reckoning alone.

That can be a good thing.

But for long-serving members of the workforce, it’s also an uncomfortable change. Back when veteran employees began their careers, data was the province of IT departments, and it didn’t have that much to do with the organization’s routine operations.

Now it does.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/thought-leadership/2020/10/16/staffing-government-procurement-in-the-21st-century/

October 13, 2020 By cs

Combat leaders go through hell to learn about risk … the acquisition corps should do the same

One reason the ‘culture of innovation’ hasn’t taken proper hold at the Pentagon is that its buyers aren’t trained over and over to weigh uncertainties.

Why does the Pentagon remain unable to properly exploit the opportunities afforded by advances in technology and other fields?

It’s not for lack of exhortation: a long list of Defense leaders, up to and including the current secretary, has urged the Department’s people to innovate, to take risks.

They don’t know how.

This is no slur on today’s acquisition corps, which is full of bright, hard-working people. But making good judgments in the face of risk is hard. It involves a complex web of decisions, actions and counteractions that often spiral well beyond the scope of the original task. The higher the stakes, the tougher risk management becomes. The same is true of combat — which is exactly why the military insists that its combat leaders train and study and review and practice, over and over again, in ever-more complex scenarios, so that they are as ready as possible to handle real risk.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/09/combat-leaders-go-through-hell-learn-about-risk-acquisition-corps-should-do-same/168543/

October 7, 2020 By cs

10 tantalizing topics testing procurement in the new fiscal year

Change is in the air.

The leaves are beginning to fall to the ground, the morning air is turning crisp, the days are getting shorter — all signaling that we are approaching the end of the government fiscal year.

The beginning of a new fiscal year provides an opportunity for reflection, during which, we can look ahead at the issues and questions that likely will shape procurement over the coming year.

With that in mind, here are 10 topics that surely will be of interest across the procurement stakeholder community.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2020/09/10-tantalizing-topics-testing-procurement-in-the-new-fiscal-year/

In recent years, federal acquisition policy and practice has been a competition between two different priorities: Efficiency and innovation.

In America’s public and private sectors today, just about everything which has not yet become digital is well along its way toward becoming so.

One reason the ‘culture of innovation’ hasn’t taken proper hold at the Pentagon is that its buyers aren’t trained over and over to weigh uncertainties.

Change is in the air.

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