Summaries for January 1, 2010

FAA SOLDIERS ON IN NATIONWIDE ATC UPGRADE
The Federal Aviation Administration might get the prize for having a mission that's the simplest to state, but the most complex to implement: Keeping air transportation safe. Its brief mission statement: "Our continuing mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world."  The agency has been making steady progress in its signature project that will allow airplanes to fly much closer to one another safely, and enable the use of air routes that are shorter and more efficient than current technology allows.  -> Read More

LONG IT AGENDA GREETS AGENCIES AT START OF 2010
Wouldn't it be nice if business could be neatly closed out at the end of one year, to be followed by a clean slate on January 1? Unless you're a calendar manufacturer, issues stick around from year to year. And so, as a new year starts (coinciding with the availability of fiscal 2010 funds thanks to the annual tardiness of Congress) federal agency managers face a number of challenges. -> Read More

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Register Today for GSA's IRMCO 2010
Leading Reform for Mission Performance
Early registration rates for government are now available for IRMCO 2010.  Plan now to attend IRMCO 2010 on April 11-14, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. Federal Travel Regulation on Conference Planning-Prepayment of Registration Fee, FTR Amendment 2006-02 allows for the reimbursement of the prepayment of early bird registration fees to attend a conference, so take advantage of the IRMCO 2010 discounted rate. The 49th annual government-only gathering of agency career and political leaders is the premier place to network and discuss the government's challenges.

Go to www.irmco.gov to register and receive early discounted rates for government's management conference or call 202-237-0300. For further information, email Peg Hosky at peg@hosky.com.

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AFFIRM Luncheon – Open Government: Transparency and Dashboards
Join the Association for Federal Resources Management (AFFIRM) on Thursday, January 21 at George Washington University to discuss the merits of Open Government: Transparency and Dashboards. A group of expert panelists will lead a discussion about IT’s role in delivering Gov 2.0. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore what’s changed and what’s working, take a closer look at the Federal IT Dashboard, usaspending.gov, and recovery.gov initiatives, and consider transparent government plans for the future. Panelists to be announced shortly.

To register visit http://www.affirm.org/events/monthlyluncheons/jan10.

THE DOD BUDGET'S DELIVERED, IT AND ALL. SO NOW WHAT?
Even though the fiscal year technically started back on October 1, this week feels like the real start because it was just around Christmas that Senate and House conferees finished up work on 2010 budgets. So now the new money is available.  And, even though the Obama administration and the current Congress are joining a line of politicians dating back to the Lyndon Johnson era in trying to reform how the federal government buys and manages IT, the IT money continues to flow. -> Read More

A FEW TECHNOLOGIES WE'D LIKE TO SEE IN 2010
I'm always amused by the end-of-year roundups and forecasts. One of the funnier ones regarding technology comes from Mike Elgan, writing in Computerworld. He calls for getting rid of some technological vestiges, including fax machines, cigarette lighter sockets in cars, and land line phones.  In enterprise IT and the government itself, there are several technology advances I hope we see in the next year or few.  -> Read More

• FAA Soldiers On In Nationwide ATC Upgrade

  James Washington

  The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) might get the prize for having a mission that's the simplest to state, but the most complex to implement: Keeping air transportation safe. You have to click two pages deep from FAA's home page to find its brief mission statement: "Our continuing mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world."

  The agency has been making steady progress in its signature project, converting the ground-based radar system for air traffic control to one using the geographical positioning system. The NextGen system has technology that's been proven to work, but it requires large expenditures — both by the government and by airlines and other operators of aircraft — and painstaking testing to install and deploy an air transport system as large and complex as that of the U.S. Eventually, NextGen will serve both the efficiency and safety goals of the FAA. Airplanes will be able to fly much closer to one another safely, and that will enable the use of air routes that are shorter and more efficient than current technology allows.

  One member of the team making that happen is the FAA's chief acquisition officer, James Washington. Working in tandem with FAA's CIO and chief financial officer, he is part of the approval board for the agency's significant acquisitions.

  Right now, NextGen is in operation in the Gulf of Mexico area and Louisville, Ky. They use a technology called Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, or ADS-B, which basically gives pilots the same information display in their cockpits that controllers on the ground have, and it is a foundation block of NextGen. 2010, according to Washington, will be a year of expanding ADS-B geographic coverage, including the Colorado mountains, Juneau; Ala; and Philadelphia. The plan now is for ADS-B to be nationwide by 2013. NextGen in totality is scheduled for 2018 completion, according to the latest plan.

  Someday a book will be written about NextGen, but in the meantime FAA has many other projects going on, Washington pointed out. "You have specific transportation programs, and a host of significant investments to support them via administration — including where we have no automation support today," he said.

  One of those, surprisingly, is in contracting, which is mostly manual at the FAA. A project called the Automated Contract Management System, designed to end much of the paperwork, is now in the market survey stage, Washington said.  The FAA is asking vendors to identify basic capabilities of such a system. The FAA since 1996 has been exempted from operating under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and consequently can speed faster through the down-select stage, and entertain more oral presentations than other agencies.

  The resulting system will support investment analysis, bid evaluation and contract writing required to award contracts.

  FAA awarded $3.7 billion in contracts in fiscal '09, and Washington said about 29 percent of the dollars went to small businesses. Towards the end of the last fiscal year, FAA established a contracting program called eFAST, or Electronic FAA Accelerated and Simplified Tasks. It's a master ordering agreement with some 100 small businesses, 8(a)s, women-owned, and other disadvantaged businesses. The 7-year deal has an ordering ceiling of $2 billion for a variety of engineering and technical services.

  The program's acronym is no coincidence. Washington said that sole-source awards under eFAST can return the requirements in two weeks, after collaboration between the program office needing the service and Williams' contract shop. Competitive bids can be completed in six weeks.

  A third effort within FAA: "We have a huge focus on cyber security in the agency," Washington said. The FAA is taking what he called a "systemwide, enterprise approach that's global, not specific to each program investment." The cyber security architecture includes the NextGen efforts.

  For its 2010 budget, FAA received $2.9 billion for air traffic modernization, what the agency called facilities and equipment. This is $11 million more than the agency requested, and $194 million more than it received in 2009. The agency had requested $790 million specifically for NextGen, but in the omnibus appropriation signed by the president late last year, it received $834 million.

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• Long IT Agenda Greets Agencies at Start of 2010

  Wouldn't it be nice if business could be neatly closed out at the end of one year, to be followed by a clean slate on January 1? Unless you're a calendar manufacturer, issues stick around from year to year. And so, as a new year starts (coinciding with the availability of fiscal 2010 funds thanks to the annual tardiness of Congress) federal agency managers face a number of challenges.

  • Cyber security will be an area requiring a lot of attention in 2010, as it did in 2009. The interception of unencrypted video streams from unmanned aircraft in Afghanistan, discovered back in the summer but revealed by some Wall Street Journal reporting in December, drove home the extent of the cyber threat worldwide. The December revelation that the FBI was probing a massive cyber breach that cost Citibank tens of millions of dollars (denied by Citibank) showed the vulnerabilities of the financial sector, which experts believe has the best defenses in the first place.

  Finally, the administration got around to appointing a non-Senate-confirmed cyber security coordinator — Howard Schmidt. Given the Citibank incident, maybe the president was on to something in having the position report to both the National Security Council and the Council of Economic Advisors. In theory, Schmidt will have to make some sort of integrated sense out of cyber security programs and policies at a variety of departments, chiefly the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DOD), and Department of Commerce in the form of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Security Agency. And he will have to get control of a new cyber security strategy coming from the White House this spring. The question in Washington after the pre-Christmas appointment was whether the job has sufficient "juice," and that remains to be seen.

  Regardless of what Schmidt does, agencies will have cyber security strategies of their own to develop and maintain. NIST is in the midst of revising several of its special publications containing best practices to assessing and securing agency networks. Congress will likely take up bills to strengthen cyber security bills that were introduced in 2009, including a rewrite of the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

  Skills are more important than hardware, the SANS Institute's Alan Paller told the Washington Post in a story about the government's struggle to hire cyber security experts. DHS, the new DOD Cyber Command, Commerce and other agencies all have openings, but people are hard to find. So expect 2010 to bring renewed tension between contractors and the federal government over the limited talent pool.

  • Data sharing will also carry into 2010 in a big way. That agencies could collaborate across their "stovepipes" by sharing information was boosted by the 9/11 attacks, and pushed by the 9/11 Commission report.

  Yet on Christmas Day 2009, a grievous failure to connect the dots led to a near catastrophe aboard an airliner. Coming only a few weeks after the deadly Ft. Hood shootings by a fanatic Muslim — possibly connected to the same imam that would-be airline bomber Farouk Abdulmutallab is suspected to have been radicalized by — the aftermath left many on the Hill, the press and in the White House itself puzzled over how so many clues to both terrorists had been overlooked or not assembled in a way that could have, or should have, prevented either incident.

  In a spookily prescient release, a presidential task force on controlled, unclassified information found that that "Executive Branch performance suffers immensely from interagency inconsistency in SBU [sensitive but unclassified] policies, frequent uncertainty in interagency settings as to exactly what policies apply to given SBU information, and the inconsistent application of similar policies across agencies." The task force is recommending that the framework, which now applies only to terrorist-related information, be expanded to all sensitive but classified information. It called for "facilitating information-sharing through the promulgation of common and understandable rules for information protection and dissemination."

  This report came just as the White House issued a presidential order standardizing the way information is classified. The 22-page order calls for just three levels — secret, top secret and confidential. And it implements in a detailed way President Obama's stated goal of switching the orientation of federal agency managers regarding classification of information. The default policy favored by the administration is to not classify.

  Could any of these new policies and recommendations for classified and sensitive information have helped, say, someone from the public identify terrorists before they struck? That will never be known. Regardless, agencies will spend much of 2010 reviewing how they classify, declassify and share information. As it has with the IT dashboard and data.gov, the administration will try to engage the public in one of the government's most difficult tasks.

  • Data quality and reporting are also unfinished business from 2009. Remember when those first reports from state and local entities came in with how they'd spent their stimulus dollars?

  The truth is even now, no one can say with any certainty how many jobs were created or saved (an illogical concept), or even what the order of magnitude is for the number. Yet, depending on whose numbers you like, at least $200 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars on the spending side (not the tax relief) are still to be committed. Many more dollars are committed but not spent. So the issue of accurate reporting remains.

  The Office of Management and Budget has committed to educating stimulus recipients on how to report accurately. More likely, though, is that individual granting or spending agencies will have the burden of helping recipients with this effort.

  • Open government and transparency present a yearlong challenge for most agencies. Although as a news story it was subsumed by year-end developments such as the Senate health care debate and the underwear bomber, the Open Government Directive (see FedInsider #47) deadlines are looming, with the first on this month. Agencies will have to be publishing three new data streams.

  The administration is quite serious about this effort. Backed by Aneesh Chopra at the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Director of Management at Office of Management and Budget, the OMB's CIO, Vivek Kundra, is pursuing this effort, along with data.gov and the IT dashboard, with almost religious zeal. Kundra was named "chief of the year" by InformationWeek's government edition. In an interview with that publication, Kundra spoke of data.gov as helping "fundamentally change the way this country operates from healthcare to energy to education."

  All you potential "innovation leaders:" Heads up!

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• The DOD Budget's Delivered, IT and All. So Now What?

  Even though the fiscal year technically started back on October 1, this week feels like the real start because it was just around Christmas that Senate and House conferees finished up work on 2010 budgets. So now the new money is available.

  And, even though the Obama administration and the current Congress are joining a line of politicians dating back to the Lyndon Johnson era in trying to reform how the federal government buys and manages IT, the IT money continues to flow. Of particular note is the robustness budgeted into the Defense side of the equation, where there is considerable investment in new hardware and electronics-rich systems.

  It is true that the administration prevailed in its determination to end certain programs, notably the F-22 fighter, the new presidential helicopters, and other hardware. More important from a foreign policy standpoint was a cutback in the missile shield program for Europe.

  Here is a sample, from a summary offered by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey (D-Wis.).

  • E-8 JSTARS, or Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar Systems, gets $62 million for re-engineering and research.
  • Electronic Warfare, $248.5 million
  • Advanced Communications, including $880 million for development for the Joint Tactical Radio System and $1.8 billion for another Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite.
  • Missile defense receives $589 million for the Theater High Altitude Area Defense System, $569 million for development of a missile system called the Patriot/MEADS Combined Aggregate Program, and $638.8 million for Ballistic Missile Defense Sensors Capability.
  • Future Combat Systems (the name persists), nominally cancelled but reconstituted, actually receives $2.29 billion. This figure is below what the administration requested since FCS as it has been known for a decade is to be transformed to support the needs of the Army's emerging brigade structure.
  • The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gets $3 billion. The administration had requested $3.246 billion, but the Congress cut the request because, as Obey's office put it, of "chronic under-execution."

  In addition, the Air Force receives $325 million for development of the Combat Information Transport Systems, less than the administration requested. Also in the Defense budget, as reported, is the beginning of volume procurement of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which over its expected decades of service life, will pull along IT in both airborne systems and in the logistics systems needed to support it. Ditto for $15 billion to build seven new Navy ships, not requested by the administration.

  Notwithstanding the enemy interception of video streams from unmanned Predator planes, the military is planning to greatly expand the use of drones in Afghanistan. Development of their surveillance, communications and weapons capabilities will be an IT hot spot. For instance, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said last month that one of the drone models, the MQ-9 Reaper, can send 10 video streams to 10 users on the ground. And there is a new drone, shrouded in secrecy, called the Beast of Kandahar, that the military confirmed it is using. Online photos purporting to depict this machine show something that looks like a miniature B-2 bomber. Less exotically, there is $554 million for the Global Hawk drones made by Northrop Grumman, nearly $500 for the Reapers and $481 million for the MQ-1C Sky Warriors, both made by the privately-held General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. GA, incidentally, just sold a Predator drone to the Customs and Border Protection directorate at the Homeland Security Department.

  Overlaying the uptick in DOD procurements is extra scrutiny from Congress, especially for activity in Afghanistan, where the ramp up in hired help is moving ahead of the troop buildup. Sen. Clare McCaskill (D-Mo.), chairwoman of the Senate Subcommittee on Contract Oversight, is urging stepped-up monitoring in the hopes of avoiding the costly errors that occurred in Iraq. McCaskill, along with Sens. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), is also pushing the Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act and the Federal Acquisition Institute Improvement Act, both aimed at building up the numbers and skills of federal civilian buyers, including those who work in DOD.

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• A Few Technologies We'd Like To See In 2010

  I'm always amused by the end-of-year roundups and forecasts. One of the funnier ones regarding technology comes from Mike Elgan, writing in Computerworld. He calls for getting rid of some technological vestiges, including fax machines, cigarette lighter sockets in cars, and land line phones. Kevin McCaney in GCN picks out the ending decade's most important tech advances, including the widespread adoption of geographical positioning, open source and XML.

  Predicting technology — that's always dicey and always has been. One reason is that predictions fail to take into account technological progress in existing technology. This is why the electric car has been 50 years in coming. In the 1950s, no one imagined the degree of engineering advancement still possible for gas cars. Twenty years ago I remember predictions of the death of disk drives. But no one imagined disk drive engineering could ever result in terabyte drives that retail for $200.

  Things come seemingly out of the blue that throw off predictions — things we didn't necessarily know we wanted. I call it the Starbucks effect. Who would have dreamed the world needed another place to buy a cup of coffee, let alone 16,000 of them?

  In enterprise IT, there are several technology advances I hope we see in the next year or few.

  • Better trend analysis software. A variety of tools exist now that mine large datasets for relationships and trends. They are too complex and hard to deploy as applications that give actionable information.
  • Unified contact management. Why do people allow so much e-mail to accumulate? Most mailboxes have thousands of messages, creating a sludgy overhead on network resources and administrative time. People save an e-mail because they think they might need some piece of information from it.  Federal workers need an automated way, consistent with and incorporating archiving requirements, of processing e-mails such that wanted information can go into a personal database while mailboxes stay clean and light.
  • A workable cross between a smart phone and a PC. Years ago Apple had a device called the Newton, which was both clunky and ahead of its time. Current tablets are cumbersome. Smart phones' screens are too small. Netbooks are flimsy and underpowered. Now that processor, graphics, programming and communications capabilities have caught up with the idea, let's hope expected combos possess the degree of integration, ruggedness and portability to make them useful. This includes a rumored tablet-type machine from Apple itself. If mobility and cloud computing are to be realized, workers will need devices that support their use.

  As for the government itself, here are six dream technology goals for 2010:

  • How about a unified list of all federal contractors, once and for all, all de-duped, that could be viewed and understood by anyone? I wouldn't even bother with performance and all of that nonsense, just who they are, and what contracts they have with agencies.
  • The Veterans Affairs Department ends its backlog of benefits claims and install a system for handling them that prevents a return of long waits. Everyone agrees this is a top priority. Let's see it happen in 2010.
  • Social Security Administration tilts up a building and starts installing the equipment needed to populate its new, stimulus-funded data center. A year after passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, technology design of the center ought to be finished and construction underway already.
  • A crash program to get the latest version of Einstein network security devices that puts them in all federal internet connection points so that malware headed towards government networks are detected and eradicated.
  • Electronic medical records have been studied and talked about for 20 years. It's time Health and Human Services and the medical industry published final standards so that a market for records that can be used by all branches of the medical profession can get underway.
  • Regulations.gov is basically an incomprehensible mess to all but insiders. The average citizen could easily spend several hours trying to find a document, and too many are posted as big, fat PDFs that must be downloaded, or multi-hundred page Word documents — instead of HTML that can be viewed online. The whole site should be re-architected and re-thought from a citizen access standpoint. As it stands, it's an affront to transparency.

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