software acquisition | The Contracting Education Academy

March 11, 2020 By cs

Pentagon teeing up nine programs to test new ‘color of money’ for software development

Of all the challenges the Defense Department faces in buying and building software, the rules that govern how it pays for it are widely-considered one of the biggest.

And Defense officials think they have a plan to convince Congress to finally change them.

The Pentagon is lining up a series of nine acquisition programs it wants to use as test cases to prove out the concept of using a new Congressional appropriations category that’s specific to software. They would let those programs break free from the “color of money” strictures that were originally designed for military hardware, but make little sense in the context of the agile software development model DoD aspires to embrace.

Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, said DoD plans to announce the programs it’s nominating for the software appropriations pilot “soon.” Assuming Congress gives the okay, the department would start implementing the new funding line for those programs as soon as next fiscal year.

“It’s a very, very significant move, structurally, in how we get money,” she told attendees at the annual WEST 2020 premier sea services in San Diego recently. “But I think we will begin to see results almost instantaneously, because the administrative burden of making sure you are charging the right development number, the right production number, the right sustainment number, slows things down. And we know with coding, we’re getting feedback constantly. We want people to literally be able to update systems on the fly.”

The nine programs DoD is teeing up for the pilot will be a mix of software-intensive weapons systems and IT business systems across the military services and Defense agencies. Congressional appropriators would need to approve the idea of allocating funds into software-dedicated accounts before the department could proceed.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition/2020/03/pentagon-teeing-up-nine-programs-to-test-new-color-of-money-for-software-development/

March 10, 2020 By cs

Agencies struggle with DevOps procurement

DevOps remains a “small pilot effort on a handful of applications” at many federal agencies, in part, because it requires accepting greater ambiguity in the procurement process, according to a new white paper.

**Click on the image above to download the DevOps white paper.**

ACT-IAC defines DevOps as an organizational philosophy where practices like the agile software development methodology are combined with tools to rapidly deliver IT apps and services.

ACT-IAC’s DevOps Working Group released a white paper last week compiled from survey results and hundreds of conversations with government officials. The paper includes case studies from agencies six agencies: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, IRS, National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Park Service, and National Science Foundation.

DevOps has agencies seek potential solutions earlier in the development process than traditional procurement, when specific requirements aren’t known, which makes evaluating contracts more challenging, according to the paper.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/agencies-devops-procurement-challenges/

February 6, 2020 By cs

Pentagon’s number-two officer vows to fix software acquisition ‘nightmare’

The new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the Defense Department needs to fix its requirements processes — not just its acquisition procedures — if it’s going to make real progress toward buying and building software as quickly as Silicon Valley does.

And as of now, according to Gen. John Hyten, the process is a “nightmare across the board.”

At the suggestion of the Defense Innovation Board, Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment has promised to create a software-specific acquisition pathway for DoD systems.

But Hyten told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that changing DoD’s buying procedures won’t solve the problem if it’s still stuck with a requirements process that takes too long, and was built for tanks and aircraft carriers.

In his capacity as the chairman of Joint Requirements Oversight Council, Hyten is largely in control of that process — known as the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS). He believes it’s stuck in the industrial age.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/01/pentagons-number-two-officer-vows-to-fix-software-acquisition-nightmare/

May 21, 2019 By AMK

Software acquisition – still a tough nut to crack

Effectively acquiring and sustaining the massive number of software systems the Pentagon employs is a perennial problem, experts say. It often takes too long for the Defense Department to purchase and deploy new, cutting-edge software or upgrades.

Despite efforts by Congress to root out the problem through various well-intentioned reports, issues persist, said Jeff Boleng, a special assistant for software acquisition at the Defense Department. He is a key member of Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord’s executive leadership team.

“We’ve got a whole bunch of numbers staring us down — we’ve got 804, 805, 809, 813, 872, 873, 874, 868,” he said, referring to sections of recent National Defense Authorization Acts.

“Essentially, Congress is inside DoD’s decision loop here telling us how to fix software more quickly than we can actually address some of the problems and implement them,” he noted.

Boleng is working closely with the Section 872 panel which — alongside the Defense Innovation Board — is focusing on software acquisition regulations, he said during a recent event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

The report will soon wrap up and is slated to be delivered to the Pentagon in April and then to Congress in May, he added.

“There’s a lot in there. Surprisingly, there’s not a ton that’s new,” he said. “I hope that the timing is right for some of these recommendations. We’ve been looking back in history at various other studies that have been done on acquisition reform, software technology, information technologies. [And] we’ve been lamenting about this problem since the ‘70s — literally when software first started to even be created for defense systems — and a lot of times we say the same things.”

Keep reading article at: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/3/19/algorithmic-warfare-software-acquisition—still-a-tough-nut-to-crack

Of all the challenges the Defense Department faces in buying and building software, the rules that govern how it pays for it are widely-considered one of the biggest.

DevOps remains a “small pilot effort on a handful of applications” at many federal agencies, in part, because it requires accepting greater ambiguity in the procurement process, according to a new white paper.

The new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the Defense Department needs to fix its requirements processes — not just its acquisition procedures — if it’s going to make real progress toward buying and building software as quickly as Silicon Valley does.

Effectively acquiring and sustaining the massive number of software systems the Pentagon employs is a perennial problem, experts say. It often takes too long for the Defense Department to purchase and deploy new, cutting-edge software or upgrades.

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