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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IT budget request focuses on savings

The Army Corps of Engineers expects to save $500 million over five years by consolidating information technology services, a strategy that enabled the corps to lower its fiscal 2009 IT budget request by $221 million compared with this year’s enacted funding.

President Bush’s proposed budget for the corps reflects a 36 percent decrease, the largest percentage among all agencies. Congress gave the corps $613 million in its 2008 omnibus spending bill, but the corps requested only $392 million for next year, budget documents show.

Much of the decrease can be attributed to the corps’ plans to shut down incompatible data warehouses and consolidate help-desk operations so that 56 installations can operate as a single enterprise. The streamlining “really forced us to sharpen our pencils,” said Wil Berrios, the agency’s chief information officer.

The corps’ approach is one example of a larger theme throughout the IT budget.

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Security could consume 10 percent of IT budget

The Bush administration’s fiscal 2009 budget proposal asks Congress to increase spending on information technology security by $646.8 million over 2008 levels.

The administration proposed $7.2 billion in IT security funding for fiscal 2009, while $6.6 billion was allocated in fiscal 2008. In other words, agencies as a whole would spend 10.3 percent of the $70.9 billion requested for IT on security. But the percentage for particular agencies would vary based on the nature of their projects.

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GSA issues laptops to kick off teleworking plan

Telework opens a contentious issue about employees’ accessing official agency networks via their own computers, the General Services Administration’s chief information officer said today.

Casey Coleman said GSA is issuing employees government-owned laptop computers as an initial step in reaching Administrator Lurita Doan’s goal of having 50 percent of the agency’s employees teleworking by 2010.

“We have a lot of control over that environment,” Coleman said after a speech at a luncheon.

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OMB adds to High Risk list

The Office of Management and Budget has added 50 information technology projects to its High Risk List since August, bringing the total to 603 projects the agency is concerned about.

The projects equal at least $15.5 billion in IT spending for fiscal 2008, OMB said today.

The boost in numbers continues a trend at OMB.

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Alliant protests won’t stop GSA

The General Services Administration is stuck at the starting gate with its latest major information technology contract, Alliant.

Seven companies have filed eight protests against the contract’s award, and GSA must await a Government Accountability Office decision. GAO has until early December to uphold or dismiss the protests.

In the meantime, GSA officials said, they plan to do as much as possible to prepare for launching the contract.

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SBA: Tech can help small-biz set-aside record

When members of the Senate’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee expressed frustration with agencies’ failure to send the required percentage of contracting dollars to small and disadvantaged businesses, a Small Business Administration official said technology can help address the problem.

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Jazzed about IPv6

Peter Tseronis was relaxing at Bethany Beach, Del., nearly two years ago, when he received an e-mail from his office.

He admits he shouldn’t have been checking his BlackBerry while on a family vacation, but the message had come from the top echelons of the Education Department, where he is director of network services in the office of the chief information officer.

Scrolling through the message, he found that the department’s executives had passed the e-mail down to the chief information officer, who sent it to the director of information technology. It traveled through a few more accounts, finally landing in Tseronis’ inbox.

The message informed Tseronis that he had been named Education’s transition manager for IPv6, the nascent successor to the current IP version.

“It was like, ‘Pete, I think this is your area.’ And I’m like, ‘IPv6? I’ve heard of it, but what?’ ” said Tseronis, recalling his reaction to the e-mail.

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Keeping modernization on track

The Internal Revenue Service must replace its aging tax processing systems, but the agency can’t stop running them while it builds replacements. So the IRS builds new systems while it operates the old systems, and it tries to make sure the new systems work with the old.

The job is “like trying to change the engines on a jumbo jet while it’s in flight, and you don’t have a complete set of blueprints to know how the original engine was put together,” said W. Todd Grams, the IRS’ chief information officer from 2003 to 2006.

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Tired of business as usual, SBA looks to upgrade

The Small Business Administration wants to put its 50-year-old mainframe systems to rest.

The agency says it is considering how to do that while also updating its technology, according to a notice posted today on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

"These mainframe-based loan-processing and accounting systems are inflexible and use obsolete technology,” SBA said in its notice. “These stovepiped systems are very expensive to maintain” and do not meet the agency’s business needs or comply with regulations.

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Want more votes? Improve your Web site, study shows

Having a good Web site could bring in votes, according to a study on congressional members’ Web sites.

The study uncovered a relationship between the quality of a member’s official dot-gov site and the number of votes he or she received in the 2006 midterm election. It could have been the margin of victory in close races.

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Bush asks for 3 percent increase in IT spending

The Bush administration’s fiscal 2008 budget proposal asks for a 3 percent increase to $65.5 billion in information technology funding as departments set priorities and seek to offer better results from their services, according to the document released today.

The number of major IT investments has decreased 2 percent, from 857 in fiscal 2007 to 840 in fiscal 2008. In fiscal 2006, there were 1,084 major IT investments.

The budget chalks up the decrease to better capital planning and investments aligning with enterprise architectures.

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2008 budget would boost IRS modernization by $85M

The Bush administration is seeking $282 million to modernize the Internal Revenue Service in his fiscal 2008 proposed budget, an $85 million increase over the fiscal 2007 request.

Modernization is one piece of a three-part strategy for closing the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid. Congressional leaders have discussed how to bring in the taxes owed. Through modernization, the Treasury Department intends to emphasize the other two parts: better taxpayer services and enforcement to eliminate the gap, according to the budget proposal, which was released today.

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Building the IT workforce is a priority for CIO council

The Chief Information Officers Council has issued its strategies for advancing information technology and e-government through fiscal 2009, including efforts to build up the IT workforce.

The council’s broad strategic plan, issued Jan. 24, pushes President Bush’s goals of applying IT governmentwide before the administration ends. The council intends to focus on the federal infrastructure, the line of business initiatives, secure information and the IT workforce’s capabilities.

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Bush: IT will help health care

President Bush, in his Jan. 23 State of the Union address, said better information technology can make health care more affordable and reduce medial errors.

Bush challenged Congress to use IT to improve insurance nationwide and to save small businesses money through association health plans and reforming medical liability lawsuits.

He proposed two new initiatives on affordable health care: a standard tax deduction for health insurance and federal funding to help states using innovative health care programs.

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