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IRS moves to speed up contracting through new procurement research partnership

The Internal Revenue Service recently set sights on introducing new technology-driven capabilities and applying innovative data science techniques to improve and elevate its procurement operations.

And last week, the agency launched a research partnership valued at almost $1 million that marks a deliberate move in that direction.

Through the newly unveiled collaboration, agency officials, university professors and students equipped with procurement and machine learning experience, and members of Virginia-based small business Data and Analytic Solutions will form a multidisciplinary team intended to accelerate the IRS’ contracting and award processes.  It emerges as federal buying largely remains notoriously slow.

“When it comes to contracting, everyone seems to want it faster, cheaper, and better,” IRS Chief Procurement Officer Shanna Webbers told Nextgov over email Tuesday.  “We recognized that we cannot continue to do business as usual and expect a different result.”

With that view top of mind, Webbers’ office earlier this year embarked on what she called “a game-changing transformation” that drew from feedback shared by procurement employees within the agency, as well as its customers and industry partners.  Building on that, the organization is bringing forth new tools and techniques — like data analysis, visualization, and machine learning, among others — to advance how work is performed.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2020/12/irs-moves-speed-contracting-through-new-procurement-research-partnership/170431/

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DoD’s Space Development Agency shows how fast the FAR can be

When it came time for the brand new DoD modernization organization charged with rapidly innovating in the space domain to award one of its first big contracts, you might expect they’d turn to a new, en-vogue acquisition mechanism like other transaction agreements (OTA) or middle-tier acquisition.

If so, you’d be wrong.

DoD’s new Space Development Agency is showing that the boring old processes embedded in the Federal Acquisition Regulation don’t have to be synonymous with slowness.  Late last month, SDA awarded a somewhat complex systems integration contract to help build the first elements of a brand new architecture of low-Earth orbit satellites. The total time from final request for proposals to contract award: three-and-half months.

“There was nothing magic about our contracting approach. We found that the FAR is actually quite flexible and useful to get things done,” Ryan Frigm, SDA’s deputy director said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “The reason we were able to be successful is because we have a very talented, dedicated and motivated team that shares a singular focus, which is being the department’s constructive disrupter for space. And the team knows that we need to get space capabilities out to the warfighter at the speed of need.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/on-dod/2020/11/dods-space-development-agency-shows-how-fast-the-far-can-be/

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A high-profile OTA program goes off the rails

It had to happen at some point.  A high-profile, big-ticket Army program using an other transaction authority (OTA) agreement has turned into a fiasco.
One prototype of the Army SMET (squad multipurpose equipment transport) concept.

In December, the Army Contracting Command announced it was canceling and re-soliciting a contract issued in October to manufacture hundreds of robotic mules. This is bad news.

For critics of the Army’s acquisition system, it’s another example of the service’s poor record over the last 20 to 30 years of developing and fielding new weapon systems. While Army leadership say they are going to speed procurement of badly needed technology to take on “great powers” — this is a black mark and will certainly get the attention of Congress.

And the same goes for proponents of other transaction authority agreements — touted as a way to put new technology into the hands of warfighters faster by forgoing the traditional acquisition system.

The program in question is the squad multipurpose equipment transport, or SMET, the Army’s answer to helping dismounted troops lighten their loads. This so-called robotic mule has been on the service’s wish list dating back to the Future Combat Systems program, which was canceled in 2009.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/2/4/a-high-profile-ota-program-goes-off-the-rails

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How OMB can make ‘agile government’ not an oxymoron

Over the last 18 months, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) painstakingly went over nearly every federal technology policy that came out in the last 20 years with an eye toward modernization.

Every new policy, whether for cloud or identity management or data center consolidation and optimization, that came from that effort included a list of rescinded regulations which had grown old and held no value any more.

The most recent update to the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative rescinded four policies, some dating back 12 years.

The identity management policy from May terminated five policies, of which some went back to 2004.

As you can see, OMB did more than a little spring cleaning.

This exercise over the last two years or more has led to a new way of thinking about policymaking. OMB and other agencies are taking a page out of the agile software development playbook and applying this methodology to policymaking.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2019/09/how-omb-can-make-agile-government-not-an-oxymoron/

 

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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/

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