DEVELOPMENTS IN ACQUISITION ARE NOT ALWAYS WELCOME
Two recent protests demonstrate how ugly things can be, and the variety of factors that can make them that way. -> Read More

EVEN LITTLE PROCUREMENT CHANGES CAN MEAN BIG PAIN
Congress' helpful attempts to fix what it sees as problems in contracting can be, well, not so helpful. -> Read More

ARE CIOs LOSING SEAT THEY NEVER REALLY HAD?
CIOs feel like they don't really have the seat at the secretary's or agency head's table . -> Read More

6 REASONS TO SIGN UP AND ATTEND IRMCO
What? You haven't signed up yet for IRMCO? Better get a move on because it is filling up fast. -> Read More

REQUIREMENTS SHOULD BE LIKE YOUR THERMOSTAT
Set ‘em and leave ‘em. That's how government program managers should treat requirements. -> Read More

• How To Achieve The Right Amount Of Program Oversight

  Norman Mineta

  When you listen to Norman Mineta, you wonder for a moment if he is addressing the question you asked, or just meandering into the wilderness. After a few minutes, you realize that he knows precisely the point he wants to make. It's just that he likes to spiral from a wide circle in towards the answer.

  That type of answering provides an ironic counterpoint to his own life's journey , a steady trajectory from a Japanese internment camp during World War II to Secretary of Transportation in a term that bridged two presidents of opposite parties. Mineta is a Democrat who has endorsed the Obama presidential bid, but he stayed on as Transportation Secretary at the end of the Clinton Administration and served in the Bush cabinet until 2004. It was under Mineta's guidance that, post 9/11, the Transportation Security Administration came into being.

  In between have been a 10-term career as a member of the House representing California's Silicon Valley, mayor of San Jose, and Army officer in Korea.

  Today he is vice-chairman of the big PR outfit, Hill & Knowlton, working from its Washington office. Mineta will be the Sunday evening keynote speaker at IRMCO next month.

  In Mineta's view, the seeming frenzy of federal program oversight that's taken place since the Democrats regained control of Congress is more of a return to normal than an unleashing of pent-up frustration.

  “Oversight is always an important function. But President Bush [received] very little oversight from the Republican Congress,” Mineta says. Besides, “there's always conflict with the Congress of one party and the executive branch of the other.”

  He adds, “My approach was not so much finger pointing, but assuring we were getting our dollars' worth from our expenditures. Politics has become politics of annihilation. We used to fight in committee and on the floor, yet go out to dinner that night and have some laughs.”

  He is equally concerned with the growth in contracting personnel doing what government workers used to do. This is based in part on his experience setting up TSA.

  Mineta explains that passenger screening had been an airline responsibility before 9/11. But DOT found repeated violations of the rules by contractors, who were fined only to commit the same errors in another city.

  “They'd just write a check,” Mineta says. “From that experience I decided we really ought to go with government employees.”

  He notes that contractors resisted, but side-by-side comparisons showed more consistency in performance city-to-city from feds than from contractor workers.

  Lots of career feds are concerned about transition to a new administration, and Mineta empathizes with their worries.

  “It's a perilous time” for programs, he says. “It someone wants to attack, now is the time. Agencies don't have people in place except SESers. They really have to be on their toes, to maintain the integrity of the programs.”

  And the danger doesn't stop on Inauguration Day, Mineta says. That's because it takes an administration at least six months to fill the political jobs throughout the agencies.

  “The SES has to be a very important and critical role in keeping government in place through the political transition,” Mineta says. And he says, those currently in political positions should not pull any shenanigans to sabotage their successors. He notes the missing W keys from computers, ostensibly taken by Clinton staff members on their way out the door.

  Mineta believes career feds and political appointees can work together productively if they respect one another.

  “When putting your solutions together,” he recalls saying to DOT people, “I said, I want your best solutions. If I have to round off your ideas for the politicals, we'll do that on the 11 th floor,” at the time the location of the secretary's office.

  To the politicals, he said, “You guys get together with the career people and put forth the best solutions, your most substantive recommendations. Don't ask yourself, I wonder if the secretary would like this or that.”
  
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• Developments In Acquisition Are Not Always Welcome

  Remember those halcyon days of the first Clinton administration, when procurement reform was in the air? While it may be true that everything looks rosier in misty hindsight, the current technology procurement landscape seems particularly hellish.

  Two recent protests demonstrate how ugly things can be, and the variety of factors that can make them that way.

  Consider the Alliant program, the General Services Administration's ambitious effort to create a menu of IT services providers. GSA pegged the value of the program at $50 billion over 10 years.

  Briefly, more than 60 companies bid. Last month, 28 were selected. And eight non-winners protested. Earlier this month Judge Francis Allegra of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims upheld the protests, and drove his pitchfork in deep by halting any action on the awards. As reported in GovExec.com , the judge criticized GSA's methodology for picking winners on a point scale, saying GSA attached “talismanic significance to technical calculations that suffer from false precision.” And he hurled The Phrase: GSA had been “arbitrary and capricious.”

  Ouch.

  So does GSA just give awards to the eight protesters? Then what about the next eight down the scale? Or perhaps it could start over, delaying the program for another year, with predecessor contracts about to expire.

  There is a curious dynamic affecting government wide acquisition contracts. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy, vendors, and some of the associations say there are too many of them. Yet vendors, while conceding that a berth on a GWAC is merely what they term a hunting license, take them seriously, and spend a lot of energy deciding which ones to go after. It is difficult to predict which ones will be popular and which will fizzle. GSA has had its share of both.

  Now this protest has added a new element of uncertainty, centered on the rating systems agencies use when making GWAC awards. Keep an eye on the lessons learned in this one.

  Meantime, there is Boeing's protest of the Air Force's award to Northrop Grumman for new refueling tankers. It wasn't Northrop that Boeing is making a stink about, it is Northrop's subcontractor--European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, or EADS, dreaded builder of the Airbus line of not-Boeing airliners. The resulting planes, though assembled in Alabama and modified into tankers by Northrop, will have a distinctly European pedigree.

  Boeing's protest centers on what it calls flaws in the procurement process and selection criteria. But no doubt it is fueling the buy-American hysteria coming from a few members of Congress who prefer that corporate welfare and politics join the source selection committee table. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, has threatened to withhold funds for the tanker program.

  The arguments of Murtha and others against the Northrop award are mostly jingoistic nonsense. Northrop is no slouch on the K St.-Hill corridor and can probably take care of itself. I'd bet the vigorous defense is has launched was mapped out in advance just in case. But still, direct congressional tinkering in a competitive procurement is not a precedent that career officials welcome.
  
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• Even Little Procurement Changes Can Mean Big Pain

  Congress' helpful attempts to fix what it sees as problems in contracting can be, well, not so helpful. A case in point is a trio of reforms now winding their way through the Hill.

  Read the Contractors and Federal Spending Accountability Act, HR 3033. It is co-sponsored by Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) Towns is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization and Procurement. First introduced last year, the bill would:

  • Require GSA to build a publicly accessible database of civil, criminal and administrative proceedings against federal contractors
  • Strengthen the government's hand in debarring bad actors by forcing contractors to disclose basically the information that's in the database

  Industry doesn't think the database would help contracting officers evaluate offerors. The unstated hook in this legislation is how much reporting every agency will have to do to populate the GSA's database.

  Another bill, which if enacted, would also, it's safe to say, not be welcomed by contractors. And that is HR 3928, the Government Contractor Accountability Act, also from 2007. That gem, sponsored by Rep. Christopher Murphy (D-Conn.) would require “certain large government contractors that receive more than 80 percent of their annual gross revenue from Federal contracts to disclose the names and salaries of their most highly compensated officers.” Murphy thinks, erroneously, that such disclosure would reveal how profitable a company is and therefore whether it is ripping off the government.

  Then there is Sen. Hillary Clinton's gambit to bar private security contractors from doing State Department security work outside of the U.S.—a shot aimed at Blackwater. The bill's title, “Stop Outsourcing Security Act” has the unreal sound of something from Atlas Shrugged.

  All of this procurement legislation—and there are other bills as well—stem from Congress' frustration with scandals that have plagued contracting in Iraq, which even the war's most ardent supporters must acknowledge. But the answer to that is a larger and better-trained military acquisition work force. The Army has responded to this need with the establishment of its new Contracting Command , to be headed by a two-star general.
  
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• Are CIOs Losing Seat They Never Really Had?

  Check out the latest report on burrs under federal CIOs' saddles. It's from this year's survey conducted by the Information Technology Association of America. Forty-six feds were interviewed (and this required 127 contractor folks to do the interviewing—everyone wants face time).

  One finding in this, the 18th annual survey, is that CIOs feel like they don't really have a seat at the secretary's or agency head's so-called table, as envisioned by the original law mandating CIOs at the department level. In the 2004 survey, nearly 70 percent of the respondents said they report to the secretary, but only 42 percent this year. About 25 percent say they report to the dreaded chief financial officer. Still, most of the CIOs feel they are part of the executive management team.

  What are we to make of this? For one thing, CIOs are still largely seen as techies. It may be unfair or inaccurate, but that's how they are seen. And secretaries don't think about IT much, except when something bad happens, such as a publicly humiliating security breach.

  Another reason for the not-quite-at-the-top status of CIOs is that many don't have budgetary authority, like CFOs. And, a higher percentage of CFOs are political appointees than CIOs.
  
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• 6 Reasons To Sign Up And Attend IRMCO

  Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff.

  What? You haven't signed up yet for IRMCO? Better get a move on because it is filling up fast. If you are still on the fence, here is why Fed Insider thinks you should attend.

  1. IRMCO, uniquely among IT conferences, is a government conference. Sponsors may send only a limited number of guests, and the sessions are government-developed only. Your colleagues set the advisory board and agenda.
  2. Great agenda, covering topics high on the minds of government IT professionals and program managers—because that's who developed the agenda.
  3. Wide-ranging speakers, from former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to working CIOs and chief technology officers.
  4. Early advice on transition planning. IRMCO will be among the earliest conferences to delve into the topic of how to manage through the change of presidential administration.
  5. Rich networking opportunities. Late-night IRMCO is famous for informal but in-depth talking with colleagues and form new relationships.
  6. Great environment. IRMCO takes place in a comfortable but business-equipped setting in Easton, Md.

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• Requirements Should Be Like Your Thermostat

  Set ‘em and leave ‘em. That's how government program managers should treat requirements. The more complicated the project, the tighter the grip on requirements should be. Every acquisition consultant will tell you, rummage through the junk pile of a failed program and at the bottom of the heap you'll find fuzzy or bloated requirements.

  Sometimes the government can't quite settle on requirements for relatively simple things, like getting a piece of structured data from Point A to Point B. Our lesson today, class, comes from the technology for the 2010 census. The Census Bureau wants to equip each of its 500,000 enumerators with a hand-held, global positioning system equipped, biometrically secured, wireless device. Instead of using paper forms, the enumerators would use the devices, to be supplied by Harris Corp., for collecting and sending in data about people who failed to send in their census forms.

  Now, such devices are fairly prosaic. They certainly need less software than, say, an iPhone. And the forms that would be loaded into them aren't all that complicated. Yet now, in mid-March 20008, the Census Bureau isn't even ready to conduct a live test of the devices. Why? Because communication is so poor between the bureau and the contractor that the requirements aren't even fully baked. That's not my opinion, it's the findings of the General Accountability Office, which has placed the constitutionally mandated 2010 census on its high risk list.

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