Summaries for September 1, 2009

NOAA'S JOE KLIMAVICZ CAPTAINS BIG SUPERCOMPUTING INVESTMENT
If money is the oxygen of federal agency projects, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is breathing easier these days thanks to a stimulus injection of $170 million for across-the-board upgrades of its high performance computing (HPC) capabilities. Overseeing this massive investment is CIO Joe Klimavicz. Klimavicz is using the money to speed up completion of a master plan that calls for modernizing and consolidating several HPC systems so they can better serve NOAA's missions and improve access to the data products they create.  -> Read More

GOVERNMENT IS QUICKENING ITS PACE OF INNOVATION
Innovation during a downturn? It's happening, and it is nothing new, according to three McKinsey & Company consultants. In McKinsey's What Matters online publication, Jacques Bughin, Angela Hung Byers and Michael Chui recently described the rapid acceleration of connectness-based innovation that is changing the way people work and collaborate.  -> Read More

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IRMCO 2010
If you missed this year's IRMCO conference, save the date for April 11-14, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay, Cambridge, Maryland. For details about IRMCO 2010, or to view presentations from IRMCO 2009, go to www.irmco.gov.

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AFFIRM Luncheon - 21st Century Management
AFFIRM kicks off it's 2009-2010 monthly luncheon series on September 22nd with the topic "21st Century Management". Join the AFFIRM board, members and moderator Jane Norris, Co-Host, "The Morning Drive", Federal News Radio, WFED, at George Washington University for a discussion on what successful 21st century management means. Topics include how to retain government knowledge in a changing workforce, recruit new qualified personnel into government, reach and manage Generation Y, insource jobs from the contractor base, and adopt telework to increase government productivity. Panelists include Sharie Bourbeau, Deputy Undersecretary for Management, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Jack Penkoske, Director of Manpower, Personnel, and Security, Defense Information Systems Agency, and Cindy Auten, General Manager, Telework Exchange.

To register visit http://www.affirm.org/events/monthlyluncheons/sep09.

WHY AGENCIES HURRY TO SPEND REMAINING Q4 IT DOLLARS
One month to go before the start of fiscal 2010. As noted in FedInsider #39, when Congress gets fully underway again next week, the Senate will have eight appropriations bills to deal with, which must then be reconciled with House versions before being sent to the president's desk for signing. In the immediate future -- like, this month -- lies the prospect of the spend-it-or-lose-it buying binge that popularly characterizes the end of the federal fiscal year. Exaggerated though this phenomenon might be, tales of it persist.  -> Read More

TRUST MUST BE RESTORED IN THE CONTRACTOR-GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIP
What is the federal IT community to make of the revelations coming out of the inspector general's office of the Veterans Affairs Department? One August report details the unethical conduct of former IT official Adair Martinez, who "misused her position, abused her authority, and engaged in prohibited personnel practices." She also "failed to provide proper contract oversight and did not properly fulfill her duties as a Contracting Officer's Technical Representative." What happened to trust in the contractor government relationship?   -> Read More

• NOAA's Joe Klimavicz Captains Big Supercomputing Investment

  Joe Klimavicz

  If money is the oxygen of federal agency projects, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is breathing easier these days thanks to a stimulus injection of $170 million for across-the-board upgrades of its high performance computing (HPC) capabilities. Overseeing this massive investment is CIO Joe Klimavicz. A 25-year veteran of federal service, Klimavicz is using the money to speed up completion of a master plan for which he received approval in 2008. The plan calls for modernizing and consolidating several HPC systems so they can better serve NOAA's missions and improve access to the data products they create.

  "In strategic plans, funding is a pacing mechanism. The funding allows us to accelerate our plan," he said.

  The purpose of the HPC complex is to support NOAA's wide ranging climate and weather research and modeling. "This is really critical for our nation," Klimavicz said.

  Products, whether patterns of weather in a local area, or a picture of long range trends over a wide part of the earth, have one thing in common. They require ever-growing super computer power to run algorithms applied to massive data sets. For example, two goals, Klimavicz said, are increasing the resolution of the climate and weather models and adding more functionality to the algorithms. Increasing resolution will give scientists a picture of, say, a hurricane in 1 kilometer square pixels instead of 9 km. Or the earth's climate can be studied in 50 square km pieces instead of 250 km. But each doubling of resolution calls for a 16-fold increase in super computing power. Similarly, adding complexity to equations the machines run has an exponential effect on processing requirements.

  Klimavicz said it all adds up to the need not just for high performance processors -- which are becoming the least expensive part of the infrastructure of HPC -- but also for accompanying storage and communications.

  And physical space, which is in short supply for NOAA. "Our existing facilities cannot house a leadership-class high performance computer," he said. So the General Services Administration is looking for facility space on behalf of NOAA. There is also an RFP out via FedBizOpps for NOAA to acquire systems integration services and support for its HPC activities. Plus, Klimavicz said, he recently signed an interagency agreement with the Energy Department for access to super computing services at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. NOAA also worked with the National Science Foundation supercomputers in developing and testing models for climate and weather.

  Klimavicz said that in building the next generation of HPC architecture and facilities, a key goal for his office is to keep future facilities flexible.

  "We don't want to be tied to any one technology," he said. "We don't want to get locked into IBM or Cray or Sun, where our code is optimized for one box. We need to be flexible and agile."

  The challenge comes from keeping code flexible as well. Klimavicz said, "It takes more of an upfront investment in software to take advantage of the relative decline in hardware prices." Coding is done by a combination of NOAA employees and contractors, working in locations throughout the country. Tools for building code that runs efficiently on different massively parallel architectures, yet does not require rewriting for each machine -- that is what Klimavicz said he would most like from industry. That, and tools for efficiently rewriting millions of existing lines of code optimized for earlier generations of super computing architectures.

  Klimavicz is a scientist by training, and that's where his heart is. He's worked at the CIA as an imagery scientist, and his specialties are geodesy, photogrammetry and imaging systems. "You can work IT anywhere. I love the science," he said.

  But as NOAA CIO, he has other responsibilities beyond the HPC capabilities devoted to climate and weather science. He's also in charge of NOAA's business systems, its continuity of operations plans, and of the Commerce Department's geospatial activities.

  How does he manage it all?

  "The key is our governance model and staffing," he said. The governance is supported by program management, enterprise management and super computing offices, and by an internal council of the CIOs of NOAA sub-activities such as the National Weather Service, Ocean Services and business IT operations. There is also an HPC board.

  Plus, Klimavicz said, he devotes considerable resources to staff development, from bringing in high school interns to helping employees earn their doctorate degrees. For the past two years, the CIO office has maintained a project management certificate program for agency managers.

  "I spend a third of my time on strategic issues, a third on the workforce, and a third on tactics," Klimavicz said, adding that managers can easily fall prey to tactical issues which will eat up all of their time.

  "NOAA's mission is extremely broad. But the CIO office is well positioned. I have a seat at every table," he added.

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• Government Is Quickening Its Pace of Innovation

  Innovation during a downturn? It's happening, and it is nothing new, according to three McKinsey & Company consultants. In McKinsey's What Matters online publication, Jacques Bughin, Angela Hung Byers and Michael Chui recently described the rapid acceleration of connectness-based (my word) innovation. It is changing the way people work and collaborate, mostly via the various social media, to form new and more efficient business relationships. And it is causing the world of physical objects to become more intelligent as discrete things are mated with sensors. The ubiquity of broadband connectivity is the underlying enabler of these innovations, the author's say. And, they note, in other recessions, technology innovation occurred--digital computers during the Depression, Ethernet in the 1970s oil crisis era, and the PC during a recession in the early 1980s.

  The government is, in perhaps a more plodding way than industry, starting to use broadband collaboration and communication in more sophisticated ways. In one example, the Veterans Affairs Department plans to deal with its growing and vexing backlog of disability claims by asking, well, anyone, but mainly VA employees themselves, to submit ideas to a yet-to-be-launched web site -- a practical application of crowd sourcing. In a Federal News Radio interview, Peter Levin, Chief Technology Officer of VA, and Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO out of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, point out that the real story is not the mere use of a collaboration or social media tool, but rather fundamentally changing the way the government approaches solving its problems.

  Who knows what the answer will be to the backlog problem, but it is unlikely to be an expensive systems integration contract or the brute force way of adding 1,000 or 10,000 employees to clear the backlogs. Not stated directly, but another fallout from this approach to innovation is that the whole idea of business process reengineering, which was turned by gurus into an immensely complex and time-consuming activity by itself, may give way to faster, more nimble solutions.

  Another notable -- and fascinating -- government innovation is a project called Peer to Patent, an experiment in opening up patent review to the public in the hopes of getting more accurate and viable patent reviews. The project was being performed in cooperation with the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), by the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School. Sadly, it may not continue. The June 2009 annual report said PTO had suspended the project while federal officials figure out if it helped. Perhaps that question itself, whether the quality of patent reviews has improved, could itself be answered collaboratively. Certainly the patent backlog and the problem of patent trolls has been resistant to PTOs attempts at improvement. (Curiously, in the two years of this project's existence, none of the federal IT trade press have mentioned it as far as I can tell--check out the projects press listings.)

  In some ways, these approaches to innovation resemble standards development methods going back many years, where a community of interest works across time and space to develop a product. A new National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) award to EnerNex, an energy research company, to develop smart grid technology standards will use collaboration.

  What's new is the combination of broadband and web tools to speed up and enhance the collaboration, and the extension of the peer and crowd process to areas heretofore off limits to every Joe.

  To be sure, a growing roster of federal agencies are using the new communications sites in fairly standard ways. The FBI, IRS and Small Business Administration, for example, have joined the YouTube generation, although the results for the second two are not exciting. The most popular site at the SBA's YouTube channel had received fewer than 400 views as of the middle of last week. By contrast, a video of Miss Universe being crowned had received more than a million views. Videos of immense ridiculousness register multi-millions of hits. Eventually this might engage the public in a meaningful way. FBI has had better success, with thousands friending it on Facebook. But the use of new media sites too often falls into the "check off this box" category.

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• Why Agencies Hurry To Spend Remaining Q4 IT Dollars

  One month to go before the start of fiscal 2010. As I noted in FedInsider #39, when Congress gets fully underway again next week, the Senate will have eight appropriations bills to deal with, which must then be reconciled with House versions before being sent to the president's desk for signing. In the immediate future -- like, this month -- lies the prospect of the spend-it-or-lose-it buying binge that popularly characterizes the end of the federal fiscal year. Exaggerated though this phenomenon might be, tales of it persist.

  Back in my print publishing days, we'd comb the spending data and come up with graphs showing that quarterly spending for IT by federal agencies was fairly even. Only a small bump occurred in Q4 ending September 30. Our motive was simply to convince advertisers -- IT manufacturers and resellers -- that they should spend their marketing dollars steadily throughout the year. Yet it always seemed as if the vendors worked at a frenzied pace to make their numbers. It still seems that way. The 4th quarter governs the year's results.

  The phenomenon is simple. Spending is even quarter by quarter. But in the 4th quarter, agency spenders this year seem to have procrastinated a bit. Thus an estimate by Shawn McCarthy of DC Government Insights a couple of weeks ago that agencies on average still have somewhere between 15 percent and 20 percent of their IT dollars left to spend. Since a perfectly even quarterly spend rate would see 25 percent of dollars going out each quarter, McCarthy's estimate means not a quarterly bump but rather a last minute one.

  Skeptics might interpret this to mean agencies are overbudgeted for IT by 20 percent. If they are able to spend steadily until that last 20 percent, they must be scratching around for ways to get rid of the money. But, as reported by Gautham Nagesh in NextGov, McCarthy said a spending rush right now would mark a different pattern from recent years, in which spending was in fact more steady through Q4.

  So what has changed this year? Probably two things:

  • Stimulus money flowing to agencies, starting after the February 2009 passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), hit about midway through the fiscal. The stimulus projects themselves, and the enormous bureaucratic effort they engendered, pulled agency managers off course a bit from their planned activities, leaving more to do at the end of the year.
  • An inevitable pause in forward momentum occurred after the election. No one could precisely predict the policy ramifications from the switchover to Obama from Bush. But people could confidently predict the changes would be big. And that had a slowdown effect on agency initiatives, including IT, leaving a bubble for the end of the fiscal. The sudden surge of interest in cloud computing, for example, would cause at least some managers to rethink their infrastructure spending plans. But now here we are, at the end of the fiscal. With cloud options still lying mostly in the future, agencies have dollars to spend.

  From the vendor standpoint, 2010 ought to look particularly exciting. On the stimulus front, most of the money still hasn't been spent. Congress won't cancel ARRA, so the money is still there. A great example is found in the interview with Joe Klimavicz above: NOAA's $170 million supercomputing upgrade program is a work in progress. Ditto for The Social Security Administration's new data center and the Commerce Department's digital map of the nation's broadband coverage. Add to that the regular appropriations for IT in 2010 that will also rise, and you've got the makings of a very busy year.

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• Trust Must Be Restored in the Contractor-Government Relationship

  What is the federal IT community to make of the revelations coming out of the inspector general's office of the Veterans Affairs Department? One August report details the unethical conduct of former IT official Adair Martinez, who "misused her position, abused her authority, and engaged in prohibited personnel practices." She also "failed to provide proper contract oversight and did not properly fulfill her duties as a Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative."

  Then there is the latest report giving details about the star-crossed Replacement Scheduling Application project, which, by the time the IG report published, had already been suspended by Roger Baker, VA's new CIO.

  In one case there is personal malfeasance and betrayal of trust. In another there is plain old lack of planning, oversight, and staffing necessary to get a complex software project done right. "Absent defined requirements, a defined IT architecture, and a properly executed acquisition plan, the RSA program was at significant risk for failure from the very beginning from both a technical and contractual standpoint." That doesn't leave much out, and the problems spanned not months but years.

  VA is just one example of what has become government by a dreary combination of lurid revelation, heavy-handed oversight, clumsy reform effort, and generalized mistrust. Add these details to the findings of the Commission on Wartime Contracting (parts of which were detailed in FedInsider #35), allegations of contract rigging by SAIC, improper relationships between a BearingPoint and an Army employee, and follies over the Air Force aerial refueling tanker procurement, why it's no wonder some members of Congress are calling for a rollback of the 1990s procurement reforms.

  Two questions must be asked:

  1. Is the procurement system really broken or is the government experiencing a flurry of failures that in aggregate look bad but don't indicate fundamental unsoundness of the system. To make an analogy, over the past year several domestic plane crashes have made it look as if the air transport system was breaking down when in fact the long term record is one of increasing safety.
  2. Assuming the system is functioning properly in most cases, what is the best way to react to the instances, dire as they might be, of where things go wrong? "Yes, this is bad, but since overall things are not bad, let's not get exercised over these one or two instances"--that's never the correct response. That's because in complex systems, over time the pursuit of perfection eliminates first the big causes of disasters, then increasingly smaller and more subtle ones that nevertheless produce disastrous results.

  Using the aviation example, an early 1950s passenger jet had an unfortunate propensity to break apart. Investigators traced the problem to metal fatigue accelerated by the shape of the windows and the riveting techniques used to construct the plane. The answer was not a return to old fashioned propeller planes, but rather to fix the specific problem.

  My feeling is that sweeping reform in the form of strict new rules would be less effective than renewed emphasis on the basics. For example, of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, of how people should conduct themselves with contractors and other government employees ethically, and of how to do project management. All of the reforms contemplated from one end of the Capitol to the other could be enacted tomorrow, and it would not repair or improve the procurement system. You just can't legislate morality, only the consequences of immorality. My hunch is that the grassroots sorts of reforms from the agencies themselves, such as the VA's new system for suspending projects earlier when they start to go off the rails, will keep people on their toes and help ensure greater objectivity in decision-making. Then there's a chance trust in the system can start to bloom again.

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