Summaries for May 15, 2009

BEYOND COOP: DO YOU HAVE A RESILIENT ORGANIZATION?
The recent scare over "swine flu" prompted federal agencies to review their continuity of operations (COOP) plans. Telework, communications protocols, backup office and data center facilities - these are all elements in a plan to keep an agency running in the case of an emergency involving loss of facilities or the inability of large numbers of people to report for work. But COOP is just an element in a larger, new framework called organization resilience for assessing an agency's ability to respond. -> Read More

MAJOR DEFENSE ACQUISITION REFORM IS REALLY COMING
This is one of those years where you practically need a scorecard to keep track of pending legislation related to procurement, cyber security and IT. By the end of May, what could be termed landmark legislation about Defense acquisition will be enacted. HR 2101 and the companion Senate bill 454 both share the goal of preventing cost and schedule overruns, and have at their core the establishment of in-house oversight - but not the inspector general - to keep the reins on big acquisition programs. -> Read More

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2010 BUDGET RAISES IT SPENDING AND UPDATES TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES
When you look at the administration's 2010 budget plans - aided and abetted by a reasonably unstoppable majority in Congress - coupled to President Obama's proposed program cuts, a picture emerges of a morbidly obese person at a straining banquet table trying to lose weight by clipping his fingernails. What is that, two tenths of 1 percent? Analyzing $3.6 trillion is beyond the scope of this newsletter and, I suspect, of anyone. But a picture of healthy 7 percent growth in IT spending proposed in FY 2010 is emerging for the federal IT community. -> Read More

UPDATE: IS OBAMA GETTING PUSHBACK ON CYBER SECURITY PLAN?
In the last issue of FedInsider, we speculated about that widely anticipated cyber security strategy report from acting senior White House cyber security advisor Melissa Hathaway. She was expected to recommend what President Obama has wanted all along - a national coordinating role based at the White House. Yet, a month later, and the report is still not out. -> Read More

• Beyond COOP: Do You Have a Resilient Organization?

  Bernice Steinhardt

  The recent scare over “swine flu” prompted federal agencies to review their continuity of operations (COOP) plans. Telework, communications protocols, backup office and data center facilities – these are all elements in a plan to keep an agency running in the case of an emergency involving loss of facilities or the inability of large numbers of people to report for work.

  But COOP is just an element in a larger framework for assessing an agency’s ability to respond. The framework is new, and it has been used to measure only one agency so far, but it is likely to spread. The framework is organization resilience, and it was developed by a team at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Explaining organization resilience to FedInsider was Bernice Steinhardt, director of Governmentwide Management Issues in the Strategic Issues section at GAO. She credited Assistant Director Bill Doherty, Project Director for organizational resiliency.

  Steinhardt said resiliency is gained from five basic attributes:

  • Robust emergency planning. This is where COOP comes in.
  • Flexible organizational assets. It applies to both people and things, and it means “functions that can be performed elsewhere. Also, cross-training people who can do multiple jobs,” Steinhardt said. As an example, she cited the Internal Revenue Service. Its large seasonal workforce means it can pull in temporary workers at times other than tax season. Steinhardt said IRS was able to deploy 4,000 workers to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency during last year’s hurricane season.
  • Having distributed leadership capacity. Strong leadership at the top must have a counterpart in people at all levels who can take charge and make decisions in an emergency.
  • Having a committed and skilled workforce of people who feel attached to the organization’s mission.
  • Maintaining strong internal and external relationships. “You don’t want to be meeting people for the first time in an emergency,” Steinhardt said. Relationships should extend to include an agency’s suppliers and contractors, as well as other agencies with geographical or functional characteristics that could help during stress.

  “COOP is thought of as IT systems and key workers. But resilience goes beyond COOP,” Steinhardt said. “In an emergency, an organization needs to depend on everybody, especially to come back after some disruptive event.”

  As you might have guessed, GAO recently evaluated the resilience of IRS. It found the agency to be fairly resilient. The evaluation and the resiliency were prompted in part from the 2006 basement flooding of IRS headquarters on Constitution Ave. in Washington D.C. The flood affected 2,400 employees and took months to repair. Tax operations were unaffected because they are located at New Carrollton, Md., and because the IRS distributes its operations nationally.

  “IRS was a good focus for examination, since it is part of the critical infrastructure of the U.S. It’s important to the government and to the functioning of the economy,” Steinhardt said.

  The agency “benefited from good management and good fortune,” she added.

  Ironically, the GAO completed another report in February, “Influenza Pandemic: Sustaining Focus on the Nation's Planning and Preparedness Efforts,” before, Steinhardt notes, this was on anyone’s radar. The report emphasized the need for better coordination between the Health and Human Services and the Homeland Security Departments. In the first days of the federal response to the H1/N1 virus outbreak, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had not been confirmed, so DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was the initial federal face to the public.

  So how did the government do in terms of resiliency?

  “The government handled communications really well,” Steinhardt said. “Officials were out there from the start, and the tone was appropriate.”

  “But,” she added, “we were dealing with something relatively manageable. If it was a full-blown pandemic, the issues would have been significant.”

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• Major Defense Acquisition Reform Is Really Coming

  This is one of those years where you practically need a scorecard to keep track of pending legislation related to procurement, cyber security and IT. By the end of May, what could be termed landmark legislation about Defense acquisition will be enacted.

  HR 2101, whose principal sponsor is Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was introduced with 23 co-sponsors in April, and last week passed 420-0 in the House. The tortured title of the bill, to produce the acronym WASTE TKO, gives you an idea of what is animating lawmakers: Weapons Acquisition System reform Through Enhancing Technical Knowledge and Oversight.

  The companion Senate bill 454, sponsored by Carl Levin (D-Mich.) cleared passage 93-0 and was held at the desk of the Senate. The reconciliation was expected to be ready for the president’s signature before this Memorial Day weekend.

  There were some differences in the bills. But it is safe to say they share the goal of preventing the kinds of cost and schedule overruns that have bedeviled major programs ranging from the ground vehicle for the Army’s Future Combat Systems to the F-22 of the Air Force.

  However the final bill comes out, it will be the responsibility of the new Defense acquisition chief, Ashton Carter, to implement the provisions. Carter’s predecessor, John Young, in a farewell gathering with the media, warned against excessive regulation. Too late.

  Both versions have at their core the establishment of in-house oversight – but not the inspector general – to keep the reins on big acquisition programs. The Senate version would establish a director of independent cost assessment and a director of developmental test and evaluation reporting to the undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (currently Carter). And it includes a trigger canceling any program that runs above cost estimates by 50 percent.

  But it is much more. It requires the armed services to assess and report on how well staffed they are for setting solid requirements, engineering strategy, and talent (including whether it is rewarded properly).

  The House version emphasizes competition at both prime and subcontract levels for Department of Defense acquisitions, in addition to adding an independent overseer of other oversight officials who would be required to sit in on any discussions about cost estimates and resource needs. A third key provision is establishment of a special council within DOD to ensure that combatant commanders are consulted in development of requirements and programs.

  Critics wonder whether anyone inside the Pentagon would be capable of rendering objective oversight compared to the Government Accountability Office.

  While the final law will identify critical contracting, engineering and planning skills needed to improve DOD acquisition, it won’t directly address the sheer numbers of people DOD needs in the acquisition area. But in late April a House Armed Services Committee panel held a series of hearings on the personnel topic. And Defense Secretary Robert Gates said DOD would hire 20,000 more acquisition workforce people by 2015, bringing that group up to its 1998 level of 147,000.

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• 2010 Budget Raises IT Spending and Updates Technology Priorities

  When you look at the administration’s 2010 budget plans – aided and abetted by a reasonably unstoppable majority in Congress – coupled to President Obama’s proposed program cuts, a picture emerges of a morbidly obese person at a straining banquet table trying to lose weight by clipping his fingernails. What is that, two tenths of 1 percent? Analyzing $3.6 trillion is beyond the scope of this newsletter and, I suspect, of anyone.

  But a picture is emerging for the federal IT community. It is one of healthy, 7 percent growth in IT spending proposed in FY 2010 via, surprisingly, fewer ongoing projects, according to the Analytical Perspectives on the budget coming out of the Office of Management and Budget last week. Scroll down to section 9 (page 155) of the Crosscutting Programs section of the AP.

  For the first time, modernizing and improving delivery of government services is the second priority for IT investment. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Obama administration’s first priority for IT investment is “fulfilling the President’s pledge for a more transparent, participatory, and collaborate government through the adoption of innovative web 2.0 technologies.”

  Otherwise the plans don’t differ that much from the Bush administration. It emphasizes more forceful recruitment of project managers and development of the infrastructure for secure ID/access cards under the Bush-era Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. The Perspective promises to meld Federal Identity, Credential and Access Management (ICAM); Federal Public Key Infrastructure (PKI); and E-authentication together with HSPD-12 into what OMB calls a single program activity. SmartBuy lives on.

  The transparency imperative means revved-up development of the two-year-old USAspending.gov, the up-but-mainly-press-releases Recovery.gov and the nascent Data.gov.

  With respect to participation and collaboration, well, people like NASA Goddard CIO Linda Cureton have been making the speech circuit warning federal managers to snuggle up to interactive Web technologies. She was ahead of her time. Now the administration is saying “agencies will be called upon to take creative action in developing new approaches to citizen involvement, including the utilization of social and visual technology, such as Web 2.0 tools.”

  Also new is the emphasis on so-called cloud computing, or use of software and supporting resources of a large, shared resource via the Internet. There will be cloud computing pilot projects, as OMB’s administrator for E-Government and IT, Vivek Kundra, has promised. One pilot would be a 21st century version of seat management, that is, end-user computing. Another would test “secure virtualized data centers” for intra-government and government-to-contractor communications. Others would try out the cloud for a variety of computing tasks including data analytics, records management, and software as a service.

  The Analytical Perspectives does not specifically address the relationship between cloud computing and the Lines of Business initiative of the Bush administration. But the talk around town is that the data center services LOB will be cloud.

  Also new will be “work-at-a-distance,” an initiative to give federal workers real time access from remote locations. Sort of like telework-plus.

  To underscore the importance of cloud computing, the OMB states, “Cloud-computing and ‘work at a distance’ represent major new government-wide initiatives” that will be pushed by the CIO Council, Kundra’s office and the General Services Administration.

  And the dollars? OMB is projecting a 2010 IT spend of $75.8 billion, up from $70.7 billion in 2009.

  The number of major IT investment projects would decrease from 801 this year to 785 in 2010, but the total number of IT investments rises from 6,566 to 7,165.

  Individual projects still must be ferreted from an agency-by-agency examination of the budget, but you can find powerful clues in the departmental summaries at this Government Printing Office site. One example: Homeland Security, the president proposes, would get $355 million for beefing up public and private cyber infrastructure.

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• Update: Is Obama Getting Pushback On Cyber Security Plan?

  In the last issue of FedInsider, we speculated about that widely anticipated cyber security strategy report from acting senior White House cyber security advisor Melissa Hathaway. She was expected to recommend what President Obama has wanted all along – a national coordinating role based at the White House.

  Yet, two weeks later, and the report is still not out. One source told me there is a lot of debate within the administration about how high level – meaning how close to the president – the cyber security adviser will be. If it is a special advisor with direct reporting, that’s one thing. If it’s a coordinator somewhere within the National Security Council apparatus, that wouldn’t be much improvement, so insiders say, above the strategy of the Bush administration.

  But there are data points suggesting that the White House will not be the be-all and end-all for cyber. What this means is that agencies should continue to pursue in-place cyber security strategies. That is, don’t wait around for detailed guidance from the White House any time soon.

  Last week Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a reporter for the Washington Post that, with its $918 million 2010 budget request for the Office of Infrastructure Protection, Homeland Security Department will become the “locus” of civilian agency security efforts.

  That hardly sounds like the White House taking over what, under the Bush administration, DHS had been doing.

  And meanwhile the National Security Agency, which looks to become the host facility for the Defense Department’s proposed cyber command, is saying publicly it would like to help civilian agencies with their cyber security efforts.

  Thus the longer the administration dallies on releasing is policy, the more jockeying among rival organizations. But it all might be trumped pending legislation that would force a strong cyber chief office to be created at the White House.

  Each passing week produces more evidence of the need for a comprehensive policy. Certainly the need is more immediately compelling than the need for an energy tax. Latest example: China is developing hardened operating systems, presumably from which to launch attacks against the U.S. and other countries.

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