DOD drives deeper wedge between feds and contractors

Defense contractors worry about maintaining the delicate balance of the federal workforce

Federal employees probably wouldn't be surprised to see a contractor arrive at the office in an orange jumpsuit. Nor would a contractor blink if feds were to show up in Tommy Bahama shirts from the new Tropical Temptation collection.

The outfits would match the image that each holds of the other: Contractors are greedy enough to shoot their mother for a dollar, and feds treat work like a day at the beach.

As funny as those old stereotypes might sound, they reflect the often-bitter cultural divide between contractors and feds that, depending on whom you ask, is about to get wider.

Under a Defense Department rule that went into effect in September, contractor employees are required to identify themselves as such in all forms of communications, whether in person, on the phone or in e-mail messages.

At a time when contractors outnumber feds in some offices, the rule is intended to ensure that DOD managers do not inadvertently involve contractors in sensitive work that should be set aside for feds. The rule, in short, will show who’s on which side.

But some contractors fear that the rule could undermine the teamwork that's essential in a blended workforce, in which feds and contractors must work side by side on a daily basis. “How do you maintain unity of community when segregation is forced?” a reader named Skully asked in a comment posted at FCW.com.

It’s a tough question, especially given the existing distrust between feds and contractors in many government offices.

Bob Woods, a retired federal official and now president of Topside Consulting, said the rule only exacerbates the situation. Worse yet, it’s not even necessary, because feds know who the contractors are. If not, they’re not being diligent, he said. “The rule creates an awkward situation for everybody,” he said.

Another reader commenting on the story pointed out that the pink badges contractors wear are already pretty conspicuous. The lack of identification is not the problem — it is the “cries of ‘unclean!’ when the contractors pass through federal workspace that is distracting.”

As some contractors see it, DOD might just as well post a scarlet letter on their foreheads, marking them as people whose loyalties are not to the customer or the mission but to the bottom line.

But as touchy as the issue might be, contract employees know who is writing their checks.

“Some people would be very offended by that statement,” but it’s true, said Peter Tuttle, a former Army contracting officer and now senior procurement policy analyst at Distributed Solutions. He also said federal employees need that “healthy bit of skepticism.”

The rule isn’t bad, said Kevin Carroll, retired program executive officer of DOD’s Enterprise Information Systems office and now president of the Kevin Carroll Group, a consulting company. It will let other contractors and officials know whom they’re talking to.

The identity question is especially a problem outside federal offices — where badges are not required —in e-mail, and on the phone.

The lack of identification by contractors “clouds the water on a daily basis and causes delays and delivery of substandard technology and products to the DOD,” a federal employee wrote, adding: “Anyone not seeing this as a problem with the current procurement system is a victim of ‘.mil’ envy.”

There are ways to curtail segregation.

When Carroll worked in government, he included contractors in all of his office’s work and even invited them to social events. Overall, he tried to make them teammates. Over time, contractors usually became more loyal to the office than their companies, he said.

“It is just a matter of leadership and inclusion, with a careful eye on preventing conflicts within the workplace,” Carroll said.

Likewise, the mutual stereotypes need not be a problem.

Many people are good workers, and managers need to attend first to the motivated people in the office, Woods said. Then managers should deal separately with the select few who match the contractor and federal employee stereotypes. They'll soon find their motivated employees will want the unproductive people out of the office.

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DOD’s use of services contracts gets congressional scrutiny

The House version of the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act would require the Defense Department to hire an outside organization to assess its use and oversight of services contracts.

The House Armed Services Committee believes DOD doesn't have a strategic approach to managing its service contracts, according to the committee’s June 18 report on the authorization bill (H.R. 2637).

As a result, “the department is at risk of being unable to identify and correct poor contractor performance in a timely manner and is at risk of paying contractors more than the value of the services they performed,” the committee wrote.

The House passed the bill June 25 by a vote of 389-22. The Senate committee has marked up its version of the bill, but the committee has yet to approve it.

Under the House bill, the assessment would be conducted by a federally funded research and development center. The center would look at the guidance DOD provides its acquisition workforce on how to develop a services contract, including how to define requirements and the associated performance metrics.

The center also would look at whether or not DOD has enough people in its acquisition workforce to do the work appropriately. The report would be due in March 2010.

Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the legislation supports the Defense Secretary Robert Gates' plan to increase the civilian acquisition workforce’s size and to reduce DOD’s reliance on contractors for critical acquisition duties. DOD officials want to hire 9,000 new government employees and convert 11,000 contractor jobs to DOD civilian personnel.

“Defense acquisition reform is a top priority for our committee,” Skelton said in statement June 17 after his committee approved the legislation.

In another acquisition reform, the committee wants to find ways for DOD to buy IT more quickly.

IT systems require regular updates, because of changes in technology, which affects critical parts of the DOD infrastructure. But DOD’s process for buying IT makes it difficult for the department to keep up, according to a DOD task force.

The acquisition process is time-consuming and cumbersome, the task force wrote in a March report. "The process should be agile and geared to delivering meaningful increments of capability in approximately 18 months or less."

The House bill would allow DOD to pick 10 IT programs every year in which to test new procurement processes.Acquisition reforms in the House's fiscal 2010 National Defense Authorization Act concentrate on oversight of service contracts and buying information technology quickly.

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Acquisition workforce: Social media could be big draw

The government acquisition community ought to take a cue from President Barack Obama’s campaign strategy and use social media technology to bolster its ranks, one lawmaker says.

The government needs to be brave enough to draw on the younger generation’s new ways of interacting to help attract them to government service and to simply improve how agencies run, said Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), speaking at a congressional hearing last week.

Many older federal employees may not be as comfortable with that technology, but the up-and-coming employees live by it. “This is their primary way of thinking,” he said.

Obama’s campaign captured young people’s attention like no other presidential candidate has before. It created Change.gov, a hip Web site describing Obama’s agenda. But Obama also sent out text messages and had a presence on Facebook, MySpace and numerous other social networking sites. Obama posted videos on YouTube. He even tweeted.

As a candidate, Obama was “a socially enabled, socially connected, socially aware, socially conscious leader,” Barry Libert, author of “Barack, Inc.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign,” said in a recent speech.

At the hearing, Bilbray said the older generations that didn’t grow up with this technology will always be somewhat blind to it, unlike the younger people who have never known life without that technology.

“First of all, it intimidates us to some degree, and we may not understand it. But the potential is huge,” he said.

The next generation is heading toward more Web 2.0 tools and collaboration from the crowd.

The General Services Administration already has a technology-rich culture, said David Drabkin, acting chief acquisition officer at GSA, who testified at the hearing. The agency is adopting cloud computing and Web 2.0 collaboration tools internally and using social networking sites such as Facebook to interact with the public.

“We are on the edge,” he said.

Mary Davie, assistant Federal Acquisition Service commissioner for assisted acquisition services at GSA, is already thinking about the application of social media to acquisition. In a column in this week’s print edition of Federal Computer Week, Davie suggests opening the process of defining an acquisition’s requirements to get insight from a community of experts, inside or outside of the government.

“Using the wisdom of the crowd to define requirements and the best development process, participants could propose ideas based on experience, good practices, and standards, question and weed out bad ideas, build on one another’s ideas, and float the best to the top,” she writes.

Like Bilbray, Davie sees an opportunity not only to improve procurement but to appeal to younger recruits.

“Imagine what this might do to attract and retain the Net Generation workforce we are always seeking out,” Davie wrote.

At the hearing, Shay Assad, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, said technology will bring major changes in acquisition during the next two years.

The department is developing a database that will give Defense Department contracting officials quick access to information on business deals across the department, such as how the department negotiates with certain contractors, what they buy, and how much they may.

The system will be based on information collected by the Defense Contract Management Agency, which is the hub for analysis of the value and costs of DOD’s procurements.

At present, the individual services often don’t share information and know little about what the other services are buying, even from the same contractor, Assad said. “The fact of the matter is that we are not as capable as a number of organizations in terms of being able to share that information, but we are getting there,” he said.

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Supplemental bills would restrict award fees

Congress is working to restrict award fees for contractors’ work.

The House passed its fiscal 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act (H.R. 2346) on May 14 with a provision that would not allow the Defense Department to spend its money on award fees to defense contractors unless DOD judged their work using set criteria.

The bill would boost the importance of the guidance on award fees in the fiscal 2007 National Defense Authorization Act. That law required the defense secretary to write rules on how DOD should appropriately link award fees to acquisition outcomes. The law bolstered checks on what is good contractor performance worthy of the extra money.

In particular, the authorization law required, among other things, guidance on how to judge performance, determine if a contractor should get even a percentage of the award for satisfactory work, and analyze whether award fees actually work to improve contractors' work.

Also on May 14, the Senate Appropriations Committee also approved its version of the supplemental bill (S. 1054) that has a similar provision that would restrict award fees.

The provisions align with a March 4, 2009, memo from President Barack Obama designed to stop the use of cost-reimbursement contracts, including ones that would pay for contractors’ cost plus an award fee for reaching certain performance measures.

“We will end unnecessary no-bid contracts and cost-plus contracts that run up the bill that is paid by the American people,” Obama said at a press conference in March. Obama predicted his reforms would save the government $40 billion each year.

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Bid protests keep pace with DOD spending

The number of protests against the Defense Department's contract awards has grown at the same rate as the department’s spending has increased over the past several years, according to a recent report.

The Government Accountability Office has handled as few as 458 bid protests filed by companies against DOD’s contract awards in fiscal 2004 and as many as 540 protests in 2007, GAO reported April 14. In 2008, the protests increased to 611, a 23.9 percent jump compared with 2007, the largest margin in past four years, GAO said, adding that the greatest increase had been 17.9 percent in 2005.

GAO also said 2008’s increase comes from its expanded protest jurisdiction. The fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization Act granted federal employees involved in a public-private competition for government work to protest a decision to outsource the work to the contractor.

Excluding protests in the expanded jurisdiction, GAO said the protest number rose to 581, or 17.8 percent, over 2007.

GAO put the increase in context of DOD’s spending. Despite the 17.8 percent jump, DOD spent 15.7 percent more money in 2008, compared with the previous year’s spending. “These similar rates of increase may suggest that the increase in protests was due in part to DOD’s increase in procurement spending,” GAO said.

GAO also said during the last two decades, the number of bid protests against both DOD's and civilian agencies' award decisions has declined. In 1989, companies filed 1,490 protests against DOD's award and 750 against civilian agencies’ decisions. In 2008, there were 611 protests against DOD's decisions and 416 against civilian agencies' decisions. The total number of protests against defense and civilian awards peaked in 1993 with 2,336 and has continued downward since, according to GAO’s figures.

Congress required GAO in the fiscal 2009 National Defense Authorization Act to assess bid protest trends; some members of Congress are concerned about frivolous protests. The House Armed Services Committee wrote that bidders seem to automatically file a bid protest if they lose a competition for a contract.

When a company files a protest, the matter goes before GAO. A group of 30 attorneys in GAO’s Office of General Counsel, who serve as hearing officers, address a company’s allegations that an agency acted contrary to procurement law or its contract solicitation.

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Obama again touches on procurement reform

President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will soon offer more details on how to reform the federal procurement system, which will include an emphasis on Defense Department contracting, the president said during a news conference.

Obama said March 24 that he and Gates have been searching for ways to offset the more than $1 trillion in debt he and Congress have amassed in Obama’s 65 days in office. Obama said his administration has found ways to save as much as $40 billion through some reforms, a point he made in his speech March 4 when he called contracting reforms a priority for his administration.

Obama again provided no details on reforms in the recent televised news conference, except to say the acquisition changes are “pretty apparent to a lot of critics” yet hard to accomplish.

“I think everybody in this town knows that the politics of changing procurement is tough because lobbyists are very active in this area,” he said, adding that contractors build plants and create jobs across the country. Those plants often get support from House members and senators whose constituents hold those jobs.

Despite upset constituents and members of Congress, DOD and other agencies are losing a lot of money through projects with problems. Many defense contracts' costs increase above the initial estimates by as much as 50 percent while still not working as the projects should, Obama said.

On March 4, Obama discussed a general plan to reform the acquisition process, but many contractors and government officials are skeptical of any significant changes coming from the White House. Many of them have said new procurement policies may come, but changing how agencies' acquisition employees and program managers do their work is where Obama will find real reforms.

Obama has talked about shifting government work away from contractors and bolstering the acquisition workforce to do more government work in-house. He also wants to shift toward fixed-price contracts and increase competition for contracts.

He is intent on finding savings and reallocating agencies’ resources but wants "to make sure that we’re not simply fattening defense contractors,” he said March 24.

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IG: Job competition saps staff

DOD auditor’s report sends clear signal on what the acquisition workforce needs

A team of Defense Department auditors, through a series of surveys at military bases, has determined several foundational acquisition workforce issues that experts say must be priorities for President-elect Barack Obama’s administration.

Officials told auditors from the DOD Inspector General’s Office that competitive sourcing — a process intended to improve efficiency by having federal employees contend with private sector firms for work — saps their employees’ attention from their jobs and leaves offices with insufficient contracting support.

Because competition pulls employees from their regular duties to rigorously gather and analyze data, managers are reluctant to take part in the process. Advocates of competitive sourcing argue that government organizations usually win the competitions and become more efficient in the process.

When the private sector wins, agencies usually lose their experienced workers, according to the IG report released Jan. 5.

More importantly, an Army Contracting Agency official told auditors that the agency faces constant turnover of contracting officers during competitions. Agency leaders worry about getting and keeping competent contracting officers — especially as purchases become more complex — but the practice intended to compel efficiency can drive away talented ones.

OMB’s influence

The IG auditors conducted the review at the request of members of Congress who want to ensure that the Office of Management and Budget has not been influencing DOD’s decisions on whether to conduct a public/private competition. The competitions are possible only for jobs that are not inherently governmental function, which only federal employees can do.

Military officers and the officials in charge of overseeing the competitions told the auditors they felt no pressure from OMB, according to the DOD IG report titled “Office of Management and Budget Influence Over DOD Public-Private Competitions.” The fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization Act required the report.

The auditors concluded that early in 2008, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) had put pressure on the Army to conduct the competitions, but the pressure waned by the end of the year. Meanwhile, officials at the Army Materiel Command and Army Installation Management Command said the chain of command pushed them more than OSD or OMB did, according to the report. The two major commands announced their competitions because of pressure to reach a goal that the Army already set.

Wayne Arny, deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment, told the auditors that DOD independently determines its competitive sourcing program.

During the normal program and budget review process, the service branches create plans for public/private competitions.

The defense agencies are expected to carry out those plans, he said.



Arny added that competitive sourcing is an important management tool, and he encourages agencies to continue to use it as much as possible.

“Competitive sourcing consistently results in greater government efficiency and cost-savings to the taxpayer,” he wrote in a March 2008 memo. DOD saved more than $7 billion from competitions completed between fiscal 2000 and 2007, Arny said. The number could top $10 billion after the competitions started in 2008 are finished, he wrote.

A controversial initiative

Competitive sourcing is the second initiative on the Bush administration’s President’s Management Agenda. Administration officials believe the competitions decrease costs and trim a department’s operations.

Setting up the competitions can determine if it’s better to keep the work with federal employees or outsource it to contractors, officials say.

In the last Executive Branch Management Scorecard issued by OMB, released last week, only the Smithsonian Institution improved. Twenty-two of the 24 graded agencies received the top score or an average grade. The Energy Department and National Science Foundation again earned the lowest rating.

The sourcing initiative has never had widespread support: Congress steadily imposes limits on it. Army and Air Force officials said the congressional restrictions on competitive sourcing change every year, making it difficult to keep up with the laws and regulations while in the process of hosting the competition, according to the IG’s report.

Numerous laws have restricted the use of competitive sourcing, effectively stopping the practice. The fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization Act restricted OMB and the defense secretary from influencing DOD regarding competitive sourcing, and it also required the IG review.

The competitive sourcing initiative is now called commercial services management and includes business process re-engineering along with the competitions.

Some experts have questioned whether the initiative would survive during the Obama administration, but the president-elect is looking for areas where he can cut costs and save money.

“Change and reform can’t just be election-year slogans,” Obama said. “They must become fundamental principles of government.”

Challenges for Obama

Competitive sourcing is only one issue that awaits Obama’s pick for the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, experts say.

“The need for an acquisition workforce that can navigate the government’s contracting process, translate it for government buyers and private-sector contractors, and ensure the taxpayers get what they pay for has never been greater,” said Diane Denholm, a principal at Grant Thornton.

She recommended that the new administrator work with agencies to find ways to fill gaps with available resources. The administrator also should work with chief acquisition officers to learn what skills employees need, then maintain those skills with regular training.

A survey conducted by the Professional Services Council and Grant Thornton, which was released in December, showed the acquisition workforce’s continued concerns about recruiting, training and retaining the right people.

Stan Soloway, the council’s president, said the survey provided no surprises or raised new issues but showed lingering concerns that need a resolution.

The council and Grant Thornton said the Obama administration should view its procurement policy initiatives through the lens of strategic human capital planning.

“The future workforce needs to have the capability to provide innovative risk-based approaches to assist the agencies [as they] acquire products and services in a way that maximizes performance and minimizes costs,” said Denholm, who was involved in analyzing the survey’s results.

The need for a larger, better trained workforce is obvious, said Trey Hodgkins, vice president of federal government programs for the Information Technology Association of America.

“It’s a broader set of skills that we need to attract and retain,” he said. However, the broken hiring system is a major hindrance to bringing people in.

The system is another challenge awaiting the OFPP administrator, who will have to work with other agency officials to solve that problem.

A simple request

Many people in government acquisition consider success to be hiring the right people and training them well. Denholm said the survey respondents described success in terms of day-to-day operations rather than the rare award of a major contract.

According to many respondents, the workforce might be unprepared for the changing environment.

Acquisition is becoming more complex, and the volume of procurements has put new demands on contracting officers. Several interviewees stressed the need for better training in areas of business, analytical and management skills, the survey states.

“The current acquisition workforce doesn’t have sophisticated business judgment,” an oversight official said in the survey. “They are good at following the rules, but when the rules lead you to an illogical conclusion, you need judgment. Acquisition is more of an art than a science."

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Services contracts lead in Iraq funding

Contractors providing the government with administrative and management services in Iraq took the major share of federal contract dollars obligated between 2003 and 2007, according to a report released today.

In analyzing federal contract data, the Congressional Budget Office found government agencies obligated 80 percent of the $85 billion in contracts spent in Iraq on services contracts. Specifically, contractors offering administrative and management services received $26 billion, or approximately 30 percent of the money. Most of those dollars went to contracts classified as “logistics support services,” a broad subcategory of services contracts that can include equipment and property maintenance, according to the CBO’s report, “Contractors’ Support of U.S. Operations in Iraq.”

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DOD sets limits for lead systems integrators

Lead systems integrators cannot have a financial interest in a major acquisition when they are working closely with the Defense Department on the details of that purchase or one related to it, under a new interim rule.

The rule is a response to congressional concerns. Lawmakers said they are concerned about conflicts of interest and the potential for a company to end up evaluating itself or its competitors in making contract awards, according to a Senate report on the bill.

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Acquisition official: DOD, industry must communicate

Defense Department contracting officers need to talk more often to industry to improve the process of awarding contracts, a new memo states.

Shay Assad, DOD’s director of Defense procurement and acquisition, wrote in the memo that contract awards made without discussions should be rare. DOD officials need to encourage the various parties involved in source selections “to fully engage with industry at all stages of the competitive process.”

In the memo, he recommended DOD use industry days, requests for information and draft requests for proposals to exchange information and start dialogues with industry.

“Communication is a key element,” Assad wrote in the Jan. 2 memo.

After presolicitation, officers should continue talking with companies after they’ve submitted their proposals so the officers can understand the company’s exact intent when aspects of their proposal are blurry, Assad wrote.

“Such dialogue can only lead to more efficient, effective and improved source selections,” he wrote.

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Army: Bolstering acquisition workforce could take 10 years

Building up the Army’s acquisition workforce into an adequately staffed, experienced labor force will likely take as long as 10 years, a top Army officer told a Senate panel Dec. 6.

The Commission on Army Acquisition and Program Management in Expeditionary Operations stated in a report released Nov. 1 that the Army should add 1,400 employees to balance the dramatic increase in defense spending since the 2001 terrorist attacks against the 25 percent of the acquisition workforce cut in the 1990s.

Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said it would take about three years to fill 400 positions with military contracting officers and 1,000 jobs with civilian contracting officers.

But getting contracting officers training, certification and essential hands-on experience will require the most time, he told the Senate Armed Service Committee’s Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee.

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IG: DOD fails on competition

The Defense Department awarded numerous task orders without competition, and it failed to justify why officials went outside of the department for acquisition services, a new report found.

The DOD inspector general audited 98 task orders worth $33.2 million in commercial supplies purchased through the National Institutes of Health’s Electronic Commodities Store III governmentwide acquisition contract. Of those orders, 95 failed to afford all contractors a chance to bid. And on 31 of the orders, contracting officers did not document their reasons for the award, the report states.

“Competition was limited, and DOD did not have assurance it received the best value when procuring goods,” the IG concludes.

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Panel finds contracting disarray

A panel of Defense Department experts has concluded that the Army overworks and undervalues its contracting officers, and it has recommended that the service immediately make some tough decisions to fix its contracting problems.

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Army’s contracting workload has increased 600 percent and spending on contracts is up 300 percent, said Jacques Gansler, former Defense undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, who led the Commission on Army Acquisition and Program Management in Expeditionary Operations. During a period when workloads and spending increased, the Army’s acquisition workforce numbers stayed the same or declined in some cases, Gansler said.

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Congress endorses GSA's assisted services

Lawmakers want the Defense Department to use the General Services Administration’s assisted acquisition services so DOD experts are free to work on defense-specific procurements.

That congressional endorsement in a conference report on DOD’s fiscal 2008 spending bill was welcome news at GSA, which faces shrinking revenues from its assisted acquisition services and fresh criticism from DOD’s inspector general.

The reports highlight divergent views among oversight officials: Congress likes GSA’s assisted services, while DOD’s IG questions their value. The lawmakers’ endorsement came two weeks after DOD’s IG told employees to stop wasting money on GSA’s assisted services.

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House passes $460B defense spending bill

After less than 10 minutes of debate, the House passed a massive $460.3 billion defense spending bill for fiscal 2008 that contains a resolution to continue funding the government through Dec. 14.

The bill, in the form of a conference report, addresses many problems inside the Defense Department, including contract accountability.

The legislation would provide funding for additional civilian inspector general employees to bring more oversight to defense contract services.

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GSA lashes back at DOD IG

A top General Services Administration official said today he was very disappointed by a report from the Defense Department’s inspector general condemning the Air Force for wasting money by using GSA’s assisted-acquisition services.

The report states that DOD wasted $607,000 when it turned to GSA for help in placing 91 orders on an Air Force task-order contract known as Network-Centric Solutions. Officials should have used DOD resources to handle the work and put the money to better use supporting the warfighters, the report states.

“Frankly I take great offense at that.... I don’t appreciate it, and I think they got it dead wrong,” said Jim Williams, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service.

Williams said the Air Force had three options in such a circumstance: It could have failed its mission by not doing the work; the service could have handled the work in-house despite its already overworked acquisition staff and still faced failure; or the Air Force could have gone to GSA for help.

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IG: DOD wasted money by placing orders with GSA

The Defense Department wasted more than $600,000 when it turned to the General Services Administration for help in placing orders on an Air Force task-order contract, according to a new report from DOD’s inspector general.

The IG said the officials should have sought assistance from DOD’s procurement officers, not GSA, for the orders placed under the Network-Centric Solutions (NetCents) contract.

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Senate amendment aims to restrict competitive sourcing

The Defense Authorization bill passed by the Senate Oct. 1 includes provisions that would restrict competitions between private contractors and government employees for federal work, a practice the Bush administration advocates as a way to save money.

An amendment Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) added to the Fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization Act seeks to level the playing field for civilian defense employees in public/private competition, known as competitive sourcing under Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76.

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Consolidation changes the game

The success of the Air Force’s consolidated quarterly purchases of information technology from a few select vendors caught Kevin Carroll’s attention. Carroll, the Army’s program executive officer for enterprise information systems, began using the Air Force contracts to take advantage of the large discounts available through that service’s strategic sourcing program.

But soon afterward, Carroll realized the Air Force’s model wouldn’t work for the Army, so he took consolidation in a different direction.

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Military can't buy IT fast enough

Information technology advances much faster than the Defense Department’s cumbersome acquisition process can buy it. Senior military officials said last week the situation leaves forces on the front lines today with yesterday’s IT.

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