Summaries for August 15, 2009

SEMANTIC SEARCH GAINS GROUND ON TRADITIONAL KEYWORD
Few knowledge workers can imagine getting anything done nowadays without the assistance of online searching for information. The "information at your fingertips" concept articulated by Microsoft founder Bill Gates 15 years or so ago really has become a way of life.  But search technology itself is fluid.  Most searching today relies on Boolean logic and the use of key words, but it's not necessarily an efficient one in terms of getting results an individual wants.  Semantic technology can change that.  -> Read More

DEFENSE 2010 AND BEYOND IS A MIXED BAG
One reason health care reform and carbon tax bills may not get done this legislative session: The Senate, when it returns after Labor Day, still has eight of 12 appropriations bills to deal with, and then reconcile them with House versions. The House has finished its work on appropriations. Given the timetable, and limited Senate floor time, federal agency managers can expect a short period of operating on a continuing resolution.  -> Read More

                                                                            Advertisements

MUST YOU CHOOSE AMONG SPEED, ACCOUNTABILITY AND MISSION FIDELITY?
Two major spending avenues of the federal government make a fascinating study in contrasts. Stimulus dollars, practically smothered in rules and oversight, are entering the economy at such a leisurely pace that very little, if any, of the recent economic good news can be attributed to them. Iraq/Afghanistan contracting dollars have been spent at a gushing pace with scanty planning or oversight, even though they did ultimately support the military's mission in those countries. When it comes to spending federal dollars, must you choose among speed, accountability and mission fidelity?  -> Read More

FEDINSIDER ANALYSIS: GOVERNMENT IN THE NEWS CAN BE WANTING
Having spent nearly 20 years covering IT and government here in Washington, I make no claim to perfect expertise. Indeed, there is not a day that goes by that I don't learn some nuance or some brand new -- to me -- fact about the government. An enterprise with as many subdivisions populated by more than four million civilian employees alone, who can know everything there is to know about it?  -> Read More

• Semantic Search Gains Ground on Traditional Keyword

  Lewis Shepherd

  Few knowledge workers can imagine getting anything done nowadays without the assistance of online searching for information. The "information at your fingertips" concept articulated by Microsoft founder Bill Gates 15 years or so ago really has become a way of life.

  But search technology itself is fluid. Research dates back to before the ubiquity of the Internet, or even the Internet itself, existed. Most searching today relies on Boolean logic and the use of key words. And that's a powerful model. But not necessarily an efficient one in terms of getting results an individual wants. So of the 100,000, or ten million, returns from the typical Google search, nearly 100 percent is useless.

  One reason is that so much data available to search engines is unstructured, mostly text. That is, written language. Semantic technology, according to Lewis Shepherd, can in the long run add much more to people's ability to make sense of large volumes of unstructured data by freeing searchers from what he calls the "tyranny of the 10-word search window." Using a more detailed search statement in real language can help people extract relevant meaning from unstructured data sets too big to plumb otherwise, he said.

  Shepherd is Chief Technology Officer for the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Government. He spent four years as Senior Technology Officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he described as an "omnivorous consumer of raw text." Since most of the world's knowledge, and a great deal of the output of federal agencies, remains unstructured, proper tagging and application of semantic tools promise much greater yield from this information than pure keyword searches. That's why Microsoft and many other competitors are working on this technology. Even Google is adding semantic capabilities.

  Shepherd, who blogs on this topic at www.shepherdspi.com, explains semantic technology in broad terms. "Any technology that enables sense-making of text the way humans understand it, as well as technology techniques for making sense of the world of things is semantic technology."

  In practical terms, that can result in anything from smarter filtering of e-mail to the ability to search digitized versions of confiscated terrorist diaries and other documents for real meaning. It can mean searching for a concept, place or person and getting results free of, say, references from fiction that contain the words. It can mean conducting a search via a carefully worded sentence rather than several words strung together with + symbols between them.

  Shepherd said that in his intelligence days, the agency and indeed, the whole intelligence community was furiously scouring the technology world for tools that could automate the tagging necessary for semantic search technology to work.

  "We purchased licenses for every product that does it," he said of the early years of the Iraq/Afghanistan war.

  He added that government not only ingests unstructured data agencies must learn from, it also publishes massive amounts of text in the form of laws, regulations, and reports. 

  "Government still has a lot of work done by free text -- email, Word documents, web forms," and even within the cells of structured databases you'll find free text.

  With tagging and semantic search, ordinary citizens could make much more sense out of this information. Tagging might seem like an overwhelming task. But it can be helped, Shepherd said, by a new development: using the "crowd," or opening tagging to anyone who might have an interest in or an angle on the information. He said crowd-sourcing of tagging is common on web sites like Flickr, the photography site, where any viewer can tag a photo beyond the tagging first supplied by the person who first posted it. In this way, Shepherd said, larger communities of interest can add value to, and derive value from, information.

  Microsoft itself, by the way, is eating its own semantic dogfood, Shepherd said. Social tagging and other semantic search technologies are being added to Microsoft Office products one by one. This capability is intended to help people form ad hoc groups and collaborate, based on the meaning that they extract from documents to which they apply semantic searches.

  "Across all government disciplines there is great applicability for improved systems to make sense of data from entity identification, tagging and extraction" of meaning, Shepherd said. It's still an imperfect science, he said, but it's coming.

  Return to top

---

• Defense 2010 and Beyond Is A Mixed Bag

  One reason health care reform and carbon tax bills may not get done this legislative session: The Senate, when it returns after Labor Day, still has eight of 12 appropriations bills to deal with, and then reconcile them with House versions. The House has finished its work on appropriations. Given the timetable, and limited Senate floor time, federal agency managers can expect a short period of operating on a continuing resolution. Given the Obama administration's spending proclivities and its solid majority in Congress, any skirmishes are likely to be around the edges.

  Get set for relatively lean Defense appropriations when it comes to IT and other technology. On this, there is unanimity among President Obama, Congress and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. That is, among Democrats in Congress. The House Defense appropriations bill, HR 3326, passed with no Republican votes in favor.

  One fiscal improvement for 2010 is the inclusion of war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, at about $130 billion, into the regular appropriation. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the campaigns' costs have been appropriated as supplemental bills. The base budget is $538 billion, and most analysts think this will remain flat for the remainder of the Obama administration.

  The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) put together the following list that comprises the bulk $17 billion in savings Gates identified across 122 programs:

  • F-22 Raptor fighter, $2.9 billion
  • Contracted service support, $900 million
  • Recruiting and retention adjustments to maintain end strength, $793 million
  • Transformational Satellite Communications System, $768 million
  • VH-71 Presidential Helicopter, $750 million
  • Aircraft carrier replacement program, $727 million
  • Future Combat Systems ground vehicles, $633 million
  • Ground-based Midcourse Defense, $524 million
  • Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) alternate engine, $465 million
  • Multiple Kill Vehicle, $283 million
  • Airborne Laser, $214 million
  • Combat Search & Rescue Helicopter, $144 million
  • CG(X) next generation cruiser, $8 million
  • C-17 Globemaster, $91 million
  • LDP and Mobile Landing Platform transport ships, $247 million

  The cuts amount to less than 2 percent of the base budget, but they show the philosophical bent away from some new platforms and more emphasis on personnel. Just Friday, the administration asked Congress to reprogram $1 billion for 15,000 temporary additional Army troops, most of which will be funded from accounts currently designated for ground vehicles. I believe it is possible deeper cuts will come when the successor to Gates is named; Gates is presumed to be departing after the first Obama-era budget becomes law. Just as Obama has ceded law-writing specifics to the more liberal members of Congress, it is likely that the extreme doves will gain more leeway in slicing down Defense programs.

  But for 2010, CSBA notes, the budget stops a planned reduction in the size of the Navy and Air Force and supports the addition of 65,000 active, permanent personnel to the Army.

  When you throw in the costs of replacing or overhauling Army gear worn down by the long overseas deployments, it means IT programs are likely to be squeezed. The research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) budgets for systems development and demonstration, prototypes, advanced technologies, applied research, and management support will all be slightly down in 2010. And in procurement, which is up overall in 2010, communications and electronics will be down slightly. Over the next three years, as personnel costs rise through pay increases and boosts in health benefits expenditures, the squeeze will tighten on procurement.

  Shrewd contractors will focus on products that can serve the brigade unit of the Army, as the service transitions from a division orientation to the brigade combat teams (CBTs), which is smaller but more numerous. Gates has called the number of CBTs at 45. The elements of the former Future Combat Systems (FCS) the Army is retaining, such as robotic scouting and unmanned aerial surveillance devices, are being deployed not to just a few CBTs but to all of them under FCS's successor project, CBT Modernization.

  Meanwhile, report after report, such as this April piece from the Defense Science Board, has called for acquisition reform at DOD. The sometimes 15-year cycle of developing new aircraft and the like receives a lot of attention, but IT procurements aren't escaping attention. Even Vivek Kundra of the Office of Management and Budget last month weighed in, if a bit naively, on the IT procurement cycle in DOD. And keep in mind that DOD is operating under Congressionally mandated new positions specifically to put a stop to projects that are late and/or over budget. (The Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act became law in May; I described its major provisions in FedInsider #28.)

  This all means that there will be additional pressure to get things right when it comes to specifying and buying IT and IT services.

  Return to top

---

• Must You Choose Among Speed, Accountability and Mission Fidelity?

  Two major spending avenues of the federal government make a fascinating study in contrasts. Stimulus dollars, practically smothered in rules and oversight, are entering the economy at such a leisurely pace that very little, if any, of the recent economic good news can be attributed to them. Iraq/Afghanistan contracting dollars have been spent at a gushing pace with scanty planning or oversight, even though they did ultimately support the military's mission in those countries. 

  Let's look at the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) first. The stimulus bill was enacted in February and was supposed to put somewhere around $500 billion into the economy fast.

  But take a look at the latest estimates of how many dollars have been spent, not promised, obligated, committed or wished for. Spent. ProPublica is one site that tracks stimulus spending. I consider it authoritative, and as of Friday ProPublica estimated that about $73 billion had been spent. That leaves $124 billion in process and $384 billion still to spend. Roughly 12 percent of the available dollars have gone into the economy. Recovery.org -- not .gov -- pegged stimulus spending at $78 billion. George Mason University Professor Jerry Brito's stimuluswatch.org doesn't keep a running total for its very detailed tracking. Whichever number is more accurate, a lot of money will slosh over into fiscal 2010, which starts 43 days from now including Saturdays and Sundays.

  So far, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued approximately 250 pages of instructions to agencies for how they should handle the awarding of stimulus money. No federal manager wants to be caught down the line when some jobs-creating estimate is found to be in error, or an inspector general finds fault with a program funded with stimulus money. Whether federal spending or grants for state and county spending, it takes as long as it takes.

  Meanwhile, the Commission on Wartime Contracting has concluded two hearings on whether the big contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan operate business systems sufficient to properly account for their labor, purchasing and subcontracting costs. In a word, they do not -- an astonishing revelation for companies like DynCorp and KBR who have done billions and billions in federal contracting for many years. One finding of the commission is that in order to verify whether a contractor in fact had six people fulltime on a particular job, someone from the government would have to physically inspect the job site and count noses and watch times of coming and going. Earlier, the Commission, in its interim report, had found that there is a severe shortage of crucial contract officers' representatives on hand to just watch what is going on.

  And here's another exquisite contrast. In the case of the stimulus program, citizens have a dollar-by-dollar view of every contract thanks only indirectly to government data. While the administration's recovery.gov gets rebuilt for $18 million so that it can actually track spending in detail, a business development contractor, a college professor and a bunch of underpaid reporters are providing excellent online ARRA visibility on relative shoestrings. But in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, on which federal spending is approaching $1 trillion since 2001, there is no clear figure on how much of that has been spent on contractors. Commission spokesman Clark Irvin told FedInsider that the best estimate is between $100 billion and $150 billion. (See page 14 of the report, linked above, to see what a crude tool the Federal Procurement Data System still is.) And even if the commission staff could somehow calculate a precise number, they would be unable to separate the war-related activities from the routine.

  Must federal managers choose any two when it comes to speed, accountability and mission fidelity? One answer came last week in a lucid report from the CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government. Allan Burman, former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, outlined a no-nonsense way that an agency can award a stimulus or any contract in 2.5 days. It consists of using existing government-wide acquisition contracts, performance contracting, and a dedicated team effort.

  Unlike OMB guidance, Burman's prescription only takes eight pages.

  Return to top

---

• FedInsider Analysis: Government In the News Can Be Wanting

  Having spent nearly 20 years covering IT and government here in Washington, I make no claim to perfect expertise. Indeed, not a day goes by that I don't learn some nuance or some brand new -- to me -- fact about the government. An enterprise with as many subdivisions populated by more than four million civilian employees alone, who can know everything there is to know about it?

  I've noticed -- and so have friends who have also specialized in government coverage for a long time -- that in the last several years the amount of coverage of arcane, "inside baseball" details of government by the general media has increased noticeably. I found one example just the other day. The New York Times published a piece in its business section by Noam Cohen, about how the Army is opening up the writing of its field manuals to collaboration via wiki technology. Now that's deep in the weeds for a daily. And, I might add, none of the specialized government press had the story.

  For the most part, the general media government coverage is accurate not only in facts but also in interpretation and context. The Times story is a case in point.

  But not always. Here are some recent examples of stories that might mislead a general reader.

  • The Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow, no slouch when it comes to investigative pieces, had a long story about a strong personal relationship between an employee of the Army's Communications and Electronics Command and a contractor employee that appeared to end up in contracts being steered to the latter's company. The incident had been reported earlier by one of the trades in less detail, but O'Harrow's account was exhaustively researched, spinning an intriguing story. I read it beginning to end. But one statement early on is simply off the mark. "The tale of their four-year relationship is an allegory for the chronic problems afflicting the government's $532 billion procurement system. Reforms a decade ago, intended to make the system more efficient and entrepreneurial, had unintended consequences: insufficient oversight, conflicts of interest, unprecedented outsourcing and an endlessly revolving door that leads government officials into the offices of contractors."

  My issue with this interpretation is that nothing in the procurement reforms under the Clinton administration had as their consequences insufficient oversight, conflicts of interest and unprecedented outsourcing. In my understanding of procurement reform, the opportunity for those conditions, and for cozy personal relationships to influence source selection or to cause outright fraud, didn't change for better or worse. They've always been there. In his interpretation, O'Harrow is mashing up the story of two ethically-challenged people with the sort of news
  coming out of the Wartime Contracting Commission and other instances of waste, fraud and abuse.

  • Another story, this time in a noted blog, caused a blogging and Twittering buzz last week. Long time technology writer John Dvorak, famous from the glory days of the PC press, questioned in a blog OMB CIO Vivek Kundra's academic record and credentials. Dvorak asked, "Is US Chief Information Office Vivek Kundra a Phony?" Rough stuff, which the White House vigorously countered. But Dvorak showed his own lack of understanding of the federal IT market when he wrote Kundra "has no business being the USA CIO controlling billions and billions of dollars in government contracts."

  Well thankfully, no one person, neither Kundra nor anyone else in the federal government, has "control" over the approximately $75 billion IT dollars expended by the government each year. Dvorak is entitled to his opinion as to whether Kundra deserves the job, but his argument is weakened by -- and the techno blog readers might be misled by -- an assertion that the Administrator for E-government and IT, working under the Deputy Director for Management at OMB, controls billions and billions of dollars worth of contracts.

  • Then there was the flappette over the August 4 Associated Press story about the Marine Corps and how it supposedly banned use of social network tools. Nowadays, in some quarters, even questioning the propriety or utility of using so-called Web 2.0 technologies ranks up there in outrage quotient with, say, racial epithets. And so a predictable rash of consternation followed online. Bob Brewin of NextGov posted a blog on August 7 which clarified that the Marine Corps brass simply said that unless a Marine had a job that required it, the use of social media via the military's NIPRnet was off limits, but that individual Marines were permitted, even encouraged, to use their personal accounts to tell their stories, consistent with their responsibilities and obligations as Marines.

  The larger fact is that the military -- as evidenced in the Times wiki story -- is jumping enthusiastically into social media. The AP reporter simply didn't read, or read carefully enough, the Marine Corps order on social network sites and wound up causing a cyber sensation when 1,000 newspapers pasted up the story, as they do with countless AP stories every day.

  Return to top