modernization | The Contracting Education Academy

February 19, 2020 By cs

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

October 15, 2019 By cs

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or identity management or data center consolidation and optimization, that came from that effort included a list of rescinded regulations which had grown old and held no value any more.

The most recent update to the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative rescinded four policies, some dating back 12 years.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

March 19, 2019 By AMK

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 15, 2018 By AMK

Acquisition disruption: Innovative concepts in government contracting

Government procurement often gets a (not altogether undeserved) bad rap as a cumbersome process that is lacking in imagination and innovation.

Today more than ever, however, the federal government is making use of cutting-edge procedures and methods to attract commercial companies to government contracting and to encourage modernization and efficiency in procurements.

Here we discuss some of the creative tools being used to benefit both contractors and the government, including other transaction agreements, contests, public-private partnerships, and other novel approaches.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=676092

March 9, 2018 By AMK

GSA’s IT modernization efforts will take a village

As the General Services Administration leads the acquisition piece of the federal IT modernization puzzle, it’s become apparent to some officials that the agency’s tech acquisition team can’t alone bring about such a large-scale transformation.

Rather, “it takes a village to really solve some of these problems,” said Bill Zielinski, deputy assistant commissioner for Office of Information Technology Category in GSA’s acquisition arm. “I don’t look at it as, ‘How am I going to build and maintain a highly technical skilled staff.’ I look it as the idea that we are working as a broader community to be able to bring the right talent to the table to solve the challenges.”

Grappling with uncertain budgets, talent gaps and the opening stages of a massive technology upgrade in the federal government, Zielinski said plans to tackle those challenges have to reflect the changing nature of technology and the interdependence of GSA’s acquisition teams to achieve their goals.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/gsas-modernization-efforts-will-take-village/

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.

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.

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

Government procurement often gets a (not altogether undeserved) bad rap as a cumbersome process that is lacking in imagination and innovation.

As the General Services Administration leads the acquisition piece of the federal IT modernization puzzle, it’s become apparent to some officials that the agency’s tech acquisition team can’t alone bring about such a large-scale transformation.

Search this Website