software | The Contracting Education Academy

January 11, 2021 By cs

Army aims to be less dependent on contractors for software

The command of the military branch in charge of looking ahead is soliciting prototypes for a major knowledge-transfer initiative.

By March, Army Futures Command plans to award an offeror with an agreement to establish a program that would start with coding workshops and beginner training and, after five years, end with a scalable government-only software development facility.

The Army’s first soldier-led software factory “shall be staffed, built, and run from zero existing infrastructure or policy precedent, to ultimately transition to Army self-sustaining operation as a fully-uniformed agile software development unit without a heavy reliance on contracted presence,” reads a solicitation posted to beta.sam on Dec. 28th. “The future operating environment will include contested communications and the Army can no longer singularly rely on industry to provide software solutions given the infeasibility of contractors on the battlefield in a high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2020/12/army-aims-be-less-dependent-contractors-software/171098/

September 29, 2020 By cs

Pentagon acquisition chief hints Section 889 supply chain waiver may be extended

The Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are discussing extending a waiver that gives the defense industrial base more time to ensure certain noncritical weapons systems comply with a new rule aimed at excising Chinese telecommunications equipment from the supply chain, according to the Defense Department’s acquisition chief.

Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord talked briefly about implementation of Section 889 Part B, a provision of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, during a Defense News Conference. Her remarks came a day ahead of a feedback webinar the General Services Administration will host to solicit questions, comments and concerns from stakeholders about Section 889 implementation.

“So what we did is we got a waiver from ODNI for noncritical weapons systems,” Lord said. “We continue to discuss an extension beyond September of that with them.”

Part B of Section 889 officially went into effect August 13, about a month after the final version of the rule was released in July. The rule prohibits federal agencies from contracting with entities that use equipment from certain covered companies including Huawei and ZTE. In effect, Part B requires contractors to search through their supply chains to determine and disclose to the government whether they use any of the covered equipment or services.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2020/09/pentagon-acquisition-chief-hints-section-889-supply-chain-waiver-may-be-extended/168332/

August 24, 2020 By cs

Number of foreign companies within Defense supply chain grew over past decade

Reliance on foreign suppliers in the defense industrial base rose — notably in packaged software and IT services — even as calls for reshoring increase, according to a new report.

Reshoring the defense supply chain may reduce national security risks, but a new report detailing a heavy dependency on goods and services from foreign countries like China shows reshoring may be easier said than done.

Researchers at Govini, a decision science company supporting the defense industry, analyzed data from over 1,000 Defense Department vendors across 100 industries to show how supply chain reliance on products from foreign countries has increased over the past decade. According to the survey, the number of Chinese suppliers in DOD’s base increased by a total of 420% since 2010.

For cyber and information technology, two statistics stick out. The share of companies based in foreign nations in the supply chain grew the most in the packaged software and IT services between 2010 and 2019. Companies based in foreign countries made up 3% of the packaged software supplier base in 2010. That number rose to 7% in 2019. The numbers are similar for IT services: Companies based in foreign countries made up 3% of the IT services supplier base in 2010 and 7% in 2019.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/08/number-foreign-companies-within-defense-supply-chain-grew-over-past-decade-report-says/167767/

August 20, 2020 By cs

Ban on Chinese products starts despite confusion over acquisition rule

The second and more arduous deadline for agencies and vendors to ensure they are no longer using certain Chinese made telecommunications products and services is here, and few are happy about it.

Industry and agencies alike continue to sound the alarm about the potential and real impacts of the interim rule implementing part B of Section 889 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.

“There is likely going to be significant impacts that will be felt across the federal sector,” said one government official, who requested anonymity in order to talk more candidly about the interim rule. “It’s very clear that the Defense Department and other agencies fully support the intent of the rule. We all know there is a lot of information about how China transmitted data and stole intellectual property so the intent of the rule is to protect our national security is good. But there will be unintended consequences because of how the specific language was written.”

Under the interim rule, which remains open for comments through mid-September, agencies cannot award new contracts, task orders or modify existing contracts to any vendor who doesn’t self-certify that they are not using products from Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition-policy/2020/08/ban-on-chinese-products-starts-today-despite-confusion-over-acquisition-rule/

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/

The command of the military branch in charge of looking ahead is soliciting prototypes for a major knowledge-transfer initiative.

Reliance on foreign suppliers in the defense industrial base rose — notably in packaged software and IT services — even as calls for reshoring increase, according to a new report.

The second and more arduous deadline for agencies and vendors to ensure they are no longer using certain Chinese made telecommunications products and services is here, and few are happy about it.

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.

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