Summaries for November 1, 2008

GSA'S JOHN JOHNSON IS OPTIMISTIC ON NETWORX, CLOUD COMPUTING
John Johnson has become one of General Services Administration's promoters of reduced-power-consumption computing. And the big news there is that GSA is working with a software developer to create a tool "to allow us to calculate energy consumption," Johnson said.  Read on to find out what steps GSA is taking to reduce power consumption and promote green computing. -> Read More

GET USED TO IT: PROCUREMENT RE-REFORM WILL SOON BE LAW OF THE LAND
The Western world economy may be collapsing and only days remain until a momentous presidential election - but the government IT industry is picking through provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2009. It's a worthwhile exercise because the bill has a lot to say about procurement, including section 805 which is aimed at the aerial refueling tanker project, several key initiatives, and the establishment of the contractor misconduct database. -> Read More

SOME PERENNIAL IT ISSUES, OPPORTUNITIES PERSIST INTO 2009
Although government has expended what seems like millions of man-hours of efforts on certain IT challenges, there are still some problems that remain unsolved. They therefore represent chances for the next class of political appointees to be heroes, and for the industry to apply fresh attempts at solutions.  From information sharing to getting enough skilled IT workers, there are many opportunities for improvement. -> Read More

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Early bird registration for IRMCO 2009 is now open!

Plan now to attend IRMCO 2009 on April 19-22, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland. Federal Travel Regulation; Conference Planning-Prepayment of Registration Fee, FTR Amendment 2006-02 allows for the reimbursement of the prepayment of early bird discounted registration fees to attend a conference, so take advantage of the IRMCO 2009 early bird rates. The 48th annual government-only gathering of agency career and political leaders is the premier place to network and discuss the government's challenges.

IRMCO, GSA's Interagency Resources Management Conference, has been produced by GSA since 1961 to serve the needs of the government's senior executives. The three-day retreat provides these leaders the opportunity for dialogue with experts in organizational change, peer-to-peer discussion of strategies to transform their agencies, and insightful keynotes from industry and government visionaries.

Bookmark www.irmco.gov to register early for government's management conference. To register call 202-237-0300.

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AFFIRM Luncheon - The Greening of Government: How Feds Will Lead the Way.

Attend the Association For Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) Luncheon on November 20 at George Washington University in Washington D.C. Hear from John C. Johnson, Assistant Commissioner, Integrated Technology Service, GSA Federal Acquisition Service, and Molly O'Neill, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Environmental Information, and Chief Information Officer, Environmental Protection Agency as they discuss the greening of the federal government. To register visit http://www.affirm.org/events/monthlyluncheons/nov08.

• GSA's John Johnson is Optimistic on Networx, Cloud Computing

  John C. Johnson

  John Johnson has become one of General Services Administration's promoters of reduced-power-consumption computing. And the big news there is that GSA is working with a software developer to create a tool "to allow us to calculate energy consumption; when investing in technologies, to be able to calculate benefits in terms of energy." This was made public at the recent Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, Va. Johnson, assistant commissioner,  Integrated Technology Services, GSA Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), said that beta testing will take place within the FAS itself, and in the meantime, will work out a system for distributing the tool to the rest of the government.

  "Everyone is looking at energy consumption," he said, "and reducing carbon dioxide emissions." So, GSA is combing through its contracts and seeing what sorts of programs can be put together to promote so-called green computing.

  He cites a study by Hewlett-Packard and Intel showing that the federal government spends $480 million per year on electricity to run its computers. (See separate study on green awareness in the federal government.)

  Johnson sees three steps agencies are taking to cut power in data centers:

  • Moving more services into the data center in the first place, and out of offices and closets.
  • Consolidating and virtualizing servers, to cut the 85% of servers that tend to sit idle most of the time.
  • Using inline cooling, meaning just cooling the racks with hot machines, and not the entire data center.

  GSA recently added to its SmartBUY program a power management software package from BigFix Inc. Johnson said that for $3 per year per desktop, the program can save $50 per year in electricity.

  Johnson is also keeping an eye on the burgeoning Networx program at GSA, which is supplying a new generation of telecommunications and networking services to the federal government. You can imagine Johnson smiling last week, when the latest Networx duck fell into line with the Veterans Affairs Department signing up AT&T Corp. and Qwest Government Services Inc. for $180 million in orders for voice and data services.

  Johnson has been the General Services Administration's point man for transforming the Networx program off the dime, although more recently Karl Krumbholz took over direct responsibility for the program as director of Network Services Programs.

  Conversion from FTS 2001 is happening faster, with VA as the latest example. Activity representing 50% of the volume of Networx business "is in the pipeline to be processed," Johnson said.

  In a way, Johnson told FedInsider, the measured pace of task orders coming from the agencies is a good thing in that it lets the Networx contractors - AT&T, Level 3 Communications Inc., Qwest, Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Business - create their responses in an orderly fashion.

  "We were concerned about service providers' ability to handle the responses," Johnson said. "The September 30 [2008] deadline caused near choking at providers with 20 statements of work simultaneously. We eased the throttle down," aided by a new switchover deadline that GSA has not yet named.

  GSA's pricing tool makes it possible for agencies to make sense of the thousands of contract line items, or CLINs, on the Networx contracts. Although agencies can order as if off a Chinese menu, Johnson said "there is a significant trend to managed network services based on service level agreements. We've processed 91 percent of large agencies' requirements [via] SLAs." Before ordering, though, agencies must create a transition plan, and there are tools to help with that too.

  Networx has two main components, Universal and Enterprise. Johnson said the activity is fairly evenly divided between them. Universal carries the entire set of 50 core services available under Networx, including international service, and is the vehicle best suited for continuity of service and adding new technologies, Johnson said. Enterprise "focuses on the nine mandatory services over IP but did not have to address legacy service," he said.

  Legacy service is available to agencies who still want phone plans over the traditional switched network.

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• Get Used To It: Procurement Re-reform, Sort Of, Will Soon Be Law Of The Land

  The Western world economy may be collapsing and only days remain until a momentous presidential election - but the government IT industry is picking through provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2009. It's a worthwhile exercise because the bill has a lot to say about procurement.

  Perhaps most fascinating is section 805, which permits " the source selection authority to consider impacts on the domestic industrial base as an evaluation factor during the source selection process" and requires the writing of new regulations to cover this factor. It extends beyond prime contractors to second and third tier subcontractors. Jobs creation and retention are part of the selection criteria. This is aimed at the aerial refueling tanker project and seems like a bid to tilt the competition in favor of Boeing. The Air Force had awarded the new tanker contract to Northrop Grumman, which had sourced its airframe from Boeing nemesis European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company. After a jingoistic uproar over a "foreign" airplane, joined and fanned by some members of Congress, the Defense Department eventually put the program on hold until the next administration.

  But nothing in the provision limits to aircraft the consideration of the industrial supply and labor base.

  Closer to home, lots of procurement reforms were inserted into the bill wholesale by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Among the key initiatives:

  • Beef up the acquisition work force and its skill levels over five years, using the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the Federal Acquisition Institute. Plus it would establish a Contingency Contracting Corps, a specialized drop-in group that knows how to handle fast, often large procurements in response to emergencies or disasters.
  • Require more competition in task order and GSA Multiple Awards Schedule awards, sharply curtail interagency contracts, and limit so-called tiering of subcontractors to cut the lines on the gravy train. With respect to interagency contracts, there is a provision to have the Office of Management and Budget add to the Federal Procurement Data System information on interagency contracting.
  • Trim use of cost-plus contracts in favor of fixed price, and limit non-competitive contracts to one year.

  Also in there is establishment of the dreaded contractor misconduct database. Only government procurement officials could see it, and it would list criminal, civil or administrative decision against contracts with fines more than $500,000.

  What is interesting is that these provisions don't exactly reverse the procurement reforms of the 1990s. Oral presentations and performance-based contracts don't go away, for example. But more competition on multiple-award contract task orders does reduce the ease of use of those vehicles.

  In the meantime, keep your eye out for final recommendations from the Multiple Awards Schedule advisory board for the General Services Administration. As reported in the previous issue of FedInsider, GSA's acting administrator, Jim Williams, will have final say. But the biggest change we've heard about so far is elimination of the price reduction clause.

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• Some Perennial IT Issues, Opportunities Persist Into 2009

  Although government has expended what seems like millions of man-hours of effort on certain IT challenges, there are still problems that remain unsolved. They therefore represent chances for the next class of political appointees to be heroes, and for the industry to apply fresh attempts at solutions.

  Information sharing is one such challenge. There have been successes, notably in the intelligence community with its wiki. Information sharing in emergency response and law enforcement between federal and state, county and municipal governments, well, that's another matter, as is sharing of information about contractor performance.

  Using another agency's past performance data is always risky, but the web site of alleged malfeasance that Congress has ordered into existence shows lawmakers' frustration with what they perceive as the ability of a contractor to get a job with Agency B no matter what happened at Agency A. There's little likelihood such a web site would be used to improve or predict performance, although it will prove a convenient cudgel for post-mortem blame games.

  A recent news story showed White House frustration with interagency information sharing. It told the Homeland Security Department to stop spending to develop the Homeland Security Information Network Next Generation, a data sharing environment that is supposed to reach all levels of government and also industry.

  Bottom line: The "nut" here is understanding the needs of non-federal first responders, other procurement officials, or anyone else with whom information is to be shared. Certainly the technology of building a portal can't be that daunting.

  Mining intelligence from unstructured data. This, too, often eludes the government, or else the tools to sift through text, images, video and sound files just aren't well-enough understood, or marketed.

  One recent example concerned the Interior Department, which was trying to read hundreds of thousands of comments on endangered species rules within a 32-hour period. Aside from the obvious question of why the management of rule making was exercised in such a way as to create a ridiculous bind, this seems like a perfect application of automated analysis of a mass of text data. Such tools exist. It is not the same as a human being reading all comments, but when thousands of comments are form letters, a tool can summarize that fact and the sense of the comments in seconds.

  Clearly, use of such tools would invite political criticism since human eyes didn't read each and every comment. Results presented could be whatever the department wanted them to be. The answer to that is to invite all sides of a question to see the tool and how it is applied, and then have humans randomly sample the unstructured data to do a gut check. Government managers' culture may leave them uncomfortable with such a process, but it beats trying to do a 32-hour cram.

  This all recalls Woody Allen's joke: "I took a speed reading course. I read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia ."

  Tracking material from source to shelf. The Food and Drug Administration is about to venture overseas, as it prepares to dispatch senior managers to China and other countries. Their job is to establish an inspection process for foods, drugs and ingredients originating in those countries. This is all prompted by scares over melamine in milk, lead in painted toys, and salmonella in peppers and tomatoes, to name a few in the last year.

  In the meantime, FDA is asking whether it is possible to trace a single tomato or any item from the store shelf back to the farm or pasture where it originated. The simple answer is, yes it is, if the entire supply chain is willing to make the investments. If every single piece of fruit can have a label, then each one can have a bar code. There is even technology to "tattoo" fruits and vegetables. The New York Times reported on it as early as 2005! (The fact that there are few later references doesn't bode well for the technology.)

  Regardless, this is a huge opportunity for the creative application of technology, whether barcode labeling or tattooing, or RFID tags on crates, to a persistent problem.

  The meat industry is further along in the ability to trace beef to its source. It shouldn't be so difficult for bananas.

  Getting enough skilled IT workers. Although different from the issues above, getting enough skilled human capital will continue to be a challenge for IT companies. The H1-B visa program is another itch that a lot of people want to scratch. There are basically two camps when it comes to the program for bringing in highly skilled foreign workers.

  The IT industry and some members of Congress want to expand the program. Right now the U.S. grants up to 85,000 H1-B visas annually. The upper limit applied to the current fiscal year. Before the 9/11 attacks, the upper limit was 195,000. Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) would raise the cap to as high as 180,000 depending on market conditions.

  On the other hand, unions and one unlikely ally, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would like to sharply limit the program. Grassley has called it ripe with fraud and abuse.

  The weak economy and persistent security fears will probably favor continued limits, so IT contractors should plan accordingly.

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