software | The Contracting Education Academy

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/

May 29, 2019 By AMK

The Pentagon’s software buying has been outdated since 1987

The Defense Innovation Board warned that the Defense Department’s age-old approach to software procurement and development could dull the military’s technological edge.

“A large amount of DOD’s software takes too long, costs too much, and is too brittle to be competitive in the long run,” the board said in the study’s executive summary of its Software Acquisition and Practices report. “If DOD does not take steps to modernize its software acquisition and development practices, we will no longer have the best military in the world, no matter how much we invest or how talented and dedicated our armed forces may be.”

The SWAP study was mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act in fiscal 2018. It examines how the agency procures and advances software and offers recommendations on how it could do so more efficiently.

“This particular assessment, from over 30 years ago, referenced over 30 previous studies and is largely aligned with the assessments of more recent studies, including this one.”

Keep reading article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/05/pentagons-software-buying-has-been-outdated-1987/156782/

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

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.

The Defense Innovation Board warned that the Defense Department’s age-old approach to software procurement and development could dull the military’s technological edge.

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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