Summaries for April 15, 2010

HENRY SIENKIEWICZ RUNS A RACE EVERYONE IS WATCHING
Henry Sienkiewicz is the go-to guy when it comes to the ins and outs of cloud computing in the federal government. As the Technical Program Director in the Computing Services Division at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), he has become a spokesman for RACE—DISA's celebrated cloud computing experiment. RACE stands for Rapid Access Computing Environment. One reason interest in RACE has been so high, of course, is that DISA's project launched just as the rest of the world started getting excited about cloud computing.   -> Read More

IRMCO ROUNDUP: A TRIO OF REVEALING SPEECHES
One of the great qualities of the IRMCO conference is that government attendees outnumber vendor attendees, which turns out to be better in some ways for both sides. The vendors have richer access to their potential customers, while the government can talk to itself more freely and not be proverbially chased into the restrooms by hopeful business development types. That might be why the government keynoters sound a bit more candid at IRMCO-type events than they do at so many of the conferences.   -> Read More

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IRMCO 2011
If you missed this year's IRMCO conference, plan now to attend IRMCO 2011 and celebrate IRMCO’s 50th Anniversary. IRMCO 2011 will take place from April 10-13 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay, Cambridge, Maryland. For details about IRMCO 2011, or to view presentations from IRMCO 2010, go to www.irmco.gov.

CONGRESS TURNS ATTENTION TO DOD BUYING REFORM
If it feels like the mid 1990s again, there's good reason. Profound procurement reform is in the air. And with legislation shaping up in the House, it looks as if Congress is willing to use both the stick and the carrot to fix what it sees as billions wasted through inefficient practices and insufficient oversight at the Defense Department.  -> Read More

HOW OPEN IS OPEN GOVERNMENT? IT'S GETTING THERE
By most measures, federal agencies snapped-to in response to the Obama administrations open government directive. All of the cabinet agencies met the April 7 deadline for submitting to the Office of Management and Budget their plans. The plans look to be an earnest attempt at meeting the mandate, based as they were on discussions conducted ostensibly with the public over the Ideascale platform.  -> Read More

• Henry Sienkiewicz Runs a RACE Everyone Is Watching

  Henry Sienkiewicz

  Henry Sienkiewicz is the go-to guy when it comes to the ins and outs of cloud computing in the federal government. As the Technical Program Director in the Computing Services Division at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), he has become a spokesman for RACE -- DISA's celebrated cloud computing experiment.

  RACE stands for Rapid Access Computing Environment. One reason interest in RACE has been so high, of course, is that DISA's project launched just as the rest of the world started getting excited about cloud computing. In the year since Federal CIO Vivek Kundra started pushing cloud computing, two major RFPs for general purpose cloud services -- one from the General Services Administration and one from NASA -- were pulled back so they could be updated to reflect changing market realities.

  In contrast, RACE is a specialized cloud, offering virtual software development and testing environments. At last week's IRMCO in Cambridge, Md., Sienkiewicz was candid about RACE, offering insights useful to any agency contemplating the development of a cloud capability.

  "Dealing with software developers is different. It took us a year of morphing our offerings to get them to what people wanted," he said. That extends even to payment for use of RACE services. Consistent with the idea of cloud computing offering rapid provisioning, DISA offers a government credit card payment option in addition to use of the Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests (MIPR) system. Of the several hundred users who've signed up, "we were shocked that only three used a credit card," Sienkiewicz said. The bulk of payments come through MIPR, he added, simply because developers themselves don't typically have government credit cards.

  The Army is a big user of RACE. Sienkiewicz cited the Apps for the Army as a model partnership, and potential users of RACE include Army Software Transition and the DOD Storefront, a planned initiative from the DOD Networks and Information Integration office modeled after the Apple App Store from which users download applications for iPhones.

  Sienkiewicz also talked about how the RACE experiment has yielded improvements and best practices for DISA itself. Because users of RACE want their virtual machines to be certified and accredited according to National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines, DISA has managed to cut a sometimes year-long C & A process to just 40 days within the RACE environment. Getting to that point involved making a distinction between the application development and testing domains, so that users operating in the development zone would be able to pull software objects from outside, something not allowed in the test zone.

  RACE also benefits from a change in the way DISA acquires hardware. Sienkiewicz said, rather than buy servers outright, "we acquire as capacity, not as machines. But vendors will ship and install them." DISA hosts RACE at a DECC, or Defense Enterprise Computing Center. This method of adding capacity has cut the acquisition timeline from six months to 30 days, Sienkiewicz said.

  In many ways, the RACE project knits together the many threads in Sienkiewicz's career. He has worked extensively both in government and in the private sector on outsourcing, software development and software services. I first met him when he was a signal officer at the former Ft. Ritchie, Md. where I gave an AFCEA luncheon talk and (he reminded me recently) he gave me a tour of the facility in his MG.

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• IRMCO Roundup: A Trio of Revealing Speeches

  One of the great qualities of the IRMCO conference is that government attendees outnumber vendor attendees, which turns out to be better in some ways for both sides. The vendors have richer access to their potential customers, while the government can talk to itself more freely and not be proverbially chased into the restrooms by hopeful business development types.

  That might be why the government keynoters sound just a bit more candid at an IRMCO-type event than they do at so many of the conferences. Not that what they say isn't vetted by public affairs—indeed, the General Services Administration's Administrator, Martha Johnson, never seemed to be too far away from her earnest young PAO. But still, the just-us-kids quality does give people a chance to be somewhat more open—at least to my ears after 18 years of various conferences.

  Johnson, just settled into her job as GSA Administrator, and John Berry, a year into his job as director of the Office of Personnel Management, both used their IRMCO keynotes to rally the troops. Johnson enthusiastically talked about "swarming" as the "new face of public service leadership." That is, bringing many minds from both inside and outside an agency to try and solve problems. She wants GSA to be a change agent for the entire government by offering contracts from which agencies will freely want to buy transformational products like green IT and cloud computing. She called sustainability and open government together GSA's "moon shot."  That's the kind of thing you don't hear at mostly-vendor audiences.

  Johnson also said that while it is necessary to have metrics to measure progress towards a goal, she expected her tenure to be remarkable, at least initially, for the metrics that are eliminated; metrics that might have been around for a long time but don't count or measure anything useful to the transformation effort. That especially applies to GSA's self-identified need to improve its customer service.

  John Berry's speech reflected a man almost giddy with the drive to improve the federal hiring process. He promised OPM would offload from agency human resources' shoulders the pre-screening of thousands of applications, delivering a pool from which agency hiring officials would be able to "interview and hire, interview and hire." Gone, he said,—"with God as my witness"—will be knowledge-skills-abilities (KSA) essays for all but the few finalists for a given position. He urged managers to hire the 900 Presidential Fellows available. If all are hired, he promised to double the number available for hire next year, and again the year after that when, he vowed, there would be 4,000 Fellows ripe for hiring.

  And, as he has been vociferously urging, Berry said that with a "laser-like focus on performance" the federal workplace can finally be wherever the person is, not the building. This echoed a theme Johnson has also been pursuing. As she has put it on several public occasions, work should be what you do, not where you do it.

  In his keynote, White House Cyber Security Coordinator Howard Schmidt took a decidedly different tack than Johnson and Berry. Whereas most circuit speeches on cyber security seem aimed at scaring the daylights out of people, Schmidt was calm and reassuring. He called for more collegiate level training and career paths in cyber security, and federal cyber scholarships in return for service. He called for better information sharing among federal agencies and with the private sector, for more research and development on ways to more thoroughly automate cyber intrusion detection and mitigation, and of the need to take cyber security responsibility out of the hands of hapless end users who merely want to get their work done.

  Yet for the man who is at the heart of federal cyber security policy, who is in daily contact with the White House National Security Advisor, and who knows the extent to what is really going on, Schmidt's tone was low key, almost reassuring. That seems to me to be the right tone for someone in Schmidt's role—informed and deliberate, but not panicked.

  All in all, IRMCO was a good place not only to hear the latest incremental thinking of federal leaders, but also to get a good look at the personalities of the leaders themselves.

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• Congress Turns Attention To DOD Buying Reform

  If it feels like the mid 1990s again, there's good reason. Profound procurement reform is in the air. And with legislation shaping up in the House, it looks as if Congress is willing to use both the stick and the carrot to fix what it sees as billions wasted through inefficient practices and insufficient oversight at the Defense Department.

  In the last issue of FedInsider, I covered the final report that came out from the House Armed Services Committee Panel on Defense Acquisition Reform. It didn't take long for the panel to turn its recommendations into the IMPROVE Acquisition Act , or H.R. 5013. The bill has cleared the committee unanimously and could be taken up by the full House next week.  Basically, the bill directs the Defense Department to set metrics for measuring these components of its contracting activities for items including weapons systems, but also specifically everything else the Pentagon contracts for (the bill specifically calls out IT):

  • Cost, quality, and delivery
  • Contractor performance
  • Workforce quality and program manager tenure.
  • Quality of market research.
  • Appropriate use of integrated testing.
  • Appropriate consideration of long-term sustainment.

  The Director of the Office of Performance Assessment and Root Cause Analysis—a new office—is responsible for the metrics and ensuring that each program is measured at least yearly. And the performance metrics themselves are subject to periodic audit, in a watch-the-watchers system similar to the anti-cheating controls in a casino. This is a very tough bill.

  It goes on further, by ordering direct linkages between the results of a performance assessment and these personnel-related items:

  • The size of the bonus pool available to the workforce of an element of the defense acquisition system.
  • Rates of promotion in the workforce.
  • Awards for acquisition excellence.
  • The scope of work assigned to an element of the defense acquisition system.

  This is a real eye-opener, considering the Pentagon is also in the midst of transitioning several hundred thousand managerial workers out of the defunct National Security Personnel System and back to the GS system, possibly en route to some other, yet-to-be-devised pay-for-performance system. H.R. 5013 would in effect impose a pay-for-performance system on the acquisition workforce for DOD. The bill goes on to require establishment of, in effect, a chief performance officer for DOD. And it has provisions to prevent what it calls "requirements creep"—a phenomenon well known to cause major acquisitions to go off the rails.

  Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) told GovExec that he would attach the bill to the 2011 Defense Authorization bill to ensure the Senate would also take it up.

  I believe the effect of this bill, should it eventually become law, would encompass contractors. In a worst-case application of the bill's provisions, DOD contracting officers and program managers would take a kick-the-dog approach, forcing programmatic shortcomings onto contractors. More likely, though, is that a new realism in the development of requirements would occur, under which everyone would agree to more limited, incremental project development. At least where software is concerned, this is a better approach, and one that the government at times seems immune to in its tendency towards the grand design approach.

  The danger is that metrics and auditing of performance against the metrics become the game in and of themselves, with the goal of fast, efficient acquisition to support warfighters getting lost in the implementation of a complex, if well-intentioned, law.

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• How Open Is Open Government? It's Getting There

  By most measures, federal agencies snapped-to in response to the Obama administrations open government directive. All of the cabinet agencies met the April 7 deadline for submitting to the Office of Management and Budget their plans (compiled here by GovLoop). The plans look to be an earnest attempt at meeting the mandate, based as they were on discussions conducted ostensibly with the public over the Ideascale platform.

  Now there is a veritable sub-industry of open government camp followers, parsing out each twist and turn in the open government effort. For example, the Open Gov Playbook and iSolon offer detailed blogs, summaries, podcasts and links to more information and analysis. You can get lost in exploring all of this, and maybe that's one of the benefits of the directive. It has inflamed, in a positive way, interest in open government.

  Many of these groups tend to be supporters of the Obama administration, and while its Open Government Directive, dating to December 2009, was a positive step, this or any administration is not absolved from constant measurement of how effectively its stated intentions are being carried out. A good example of reasoned criticism comes from this posting from the Sunlight Foundation. It analyzes coal mine safety data that is available from the Labor Department, showing that while bulk data is now online, it doesn't equate to ease of knowing what is really going on. The example is timely in light of the investigation of the recent mine explosion in West Virginia that killed 29 people.

  Interestingly, when I spoke during IRMCO to Marion Royal, the General Services Administration's man assigned to the building of Data.gov on behalf of OMB, where thousands of "bulk" datasets are available for downloading, the bulk question came up. Royal—who, to be clear, is not part of the open government policy apparatus but rather is a data and data quality expert—said that a planned improvement for data.gov is to make data available dynamically, and not just in bulk. That is, particular data fields at a fine grained level would be available to applications that interested parties are expected to build to use data.gov. This would position data.gov, the portal for open government data, to enable answers to more specific and detailed questions, such as posed in the Sunlight piece, but not require the downloading of the entire data set. (Hear my Federal News Radio interview with Royal here .)

  The ultimate test of open government is if a department, agency or administration voluntarily posts information that is embarrassing to it, shows the occasional ineptitude, or reveals policies made in contraindication of the facts because of politics. Every administration since George Washington has done this, and tried to cover it up. Should data flowing to publicly online sites occur despite this, the credibility of government would increase.

  With the open government initiative, the federal government now might be a step ahead of state and local governments, where there has always been plenty to hide. An eye-opening piece by J.H. Snider, the president of iSolon concerning Anne Arundel County, Md. shows that there's plenty of room for more openness at the non-federal level in this information age.

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