The promise of cloud computing as a cost saving effort hasn’t materialized like many expected over the past seven years. Sure, there are instances, particularly with email, where agencies are paying less for the same sets of services, or paying the same but getting more functionality.

But overall, few experts these days say the reason to move applications and systems to the cloud is only for the savings.

“We are not seeing huge cost savings in the immediate future because the only way we can save money immediately is to stop running legacy systems, shut down data centers or reduce their footprints,” said John Hale, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s chief of the cloud portfolio, at the May 3 FCW Cloud Summit in Washington.

. “We are not seeing huge cost savings. The reason why cloud got in the room was the potential cost savings, but now it’s because you get more agile, more functional capabilities.”

Hale said if DISA, for example, moves 990 out of 1,000 apps to the cloud, it would still have to support those 10 other apps in their own data center. And the cost to support those 10 apps, while maybe not as high as supporting 1,000 apps, still requires significant resources.

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The secret weapon to this IT modernization conundrum that the federal community has been talking about for much of the last decade may come in the fiscal 2019 budget development process.

The usually eye-glazing-over, policy-wonk concepts of capital planning and investment control (CPIC) and enterprise architecture (EA) actually hold the keys for agencies to move off legacy systems in a strategic fashion.

“We are very well aware that agencies have to deal with their legacy burden. And it’s a shame when you are handcuffed to spend three-fourths or more of every IT dollar in your budget on legacy systems,” said Scott Bernard, the federal chief architect at the Office of Management and Budget. “We are looking for the future state plans to reflect what the priority of the agency is, and what the best state of IT enablement is for the agency. We are looking for the timeline for doing those things. This isn’t a change, but there is more interest given the OMB memo that talks of implementing the executive order on the workforce and reorganization.”

OMB estimated agencies have a bill of more than $7.5 billion in outdated or soon-to-be expired technology coming due in the next three years.

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As Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, gets closer to introducing a bill to begin a major organization at the Homeland Security Department, the agency is undertaking an internal review.

McCaul said at the CTIA Cybersecurity Summit on April 27 in Washington, D.C. that he received comments on the draft bill from the White House and is about ready to introduce the legislation to create a new cyber agency within DHS.

“It was a technical response. Generally, they were very supportive,” McCaul said after his speech. “It was more of the tweaks, which was a good sign that they are generally supportive of developing that mission within DHS.”

In the meantime, DHS has just begun an effort to look at its current set of capabilities and what it will need in the future.

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Two high-profile federal procurements continue to suffer delays because of bid protests.

The General Services Administration’s $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) telecommunications contract is back under a pre-award protest.

Windstream is the latest unhappy vendor, submitting a protest to the Government Accountability Office on April 17.

Meanwhile, the Homeland Security Department’s multiple-award contract for agile services known as FLASH is back under protest.

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When former Defense Department Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen talked about moving on from the Common Access Card (CAC) as the main approach to network authentication, many observers scoffed at the idea.

Halvorsen, who recently joined Samsung as an executive vice president focusing on mobile enterprise strategies and helping to navigate government and regulatory business affairs, envisioned and set as a goal last June for the next authentication technology to be more agile and less costly.

It looks as though the Defense Information Systems Agency is starting the process to make Halvorsen’s vision a reality.

Alfred Rivera, DISA’s director of the Development and Business Center, said during a panel sponsored by AFCEA Northern Virginia that they are moving toward multi-factor authentication, including biometrics and other “patterns of life” type of technologies.

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By bringing in a baker’s dozen of current and former federal IT experts, the Government Accountability Office’s Dave Powner likely knew what he was getting into. There would be no shortage of passion and strong opinions about what’s going right and wrong with the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA).

Let me put it this way: With the likes of Karen Evans, Vivek Kundra, both former federal chief information officers — I know Karen never officially held that title, but work with me here — Roger Baker, Dave McClure, Dan Chenok, Richard Spires and Tom Davis, the former Virginia congressman who wrote the first major cyber bill update in the early 2000s, the room didn’t include any shrinking violets.

Amazingly, however, the FITARA party didn’t turn into a complain-fest of what one administration did or didn’t do, or why Congress failed this time. Rather, this motley group gave GAO quite a cogent and cohesive earful, which hopefully will lead to an improved FITARA scorecard and, more importantly, a more effective implementation of the law.

GAO’s forum and report highlight a series of recommendations from the experts on how to further improve FITARA and make sure it’s implemented to the greatest extent possible.

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The General Services Administration and the Homeland Security Department’s industry day on April 17 was the beginning of the future of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program.

The few hundred participants in-person and on the phone gathered a few more details about where the governmentwide cybersecurity program is heading over the next year.

The discussions about the new special item number (SIN) under Schedule 70, as well as the current status of the CDM program across the government, are helping to set the scene for a busy summer.

But the meeting also left some participants with more questions than answers, particularly around the process for obtaining the SIN.

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Tucked into the Office of Management and Budget’s ambitious plan to reorganize and restructure the government is a significant and generally overlooked section on organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

But it’s this portion of the April 12 memo focusing on the mundane ideas of alternative delivery models, streamlining mission-support functions and leveraging existing solutions for common requirements that includes some of the most realistic and achievable goals. Ideas such as shared services, insourcing and outsourcing and all-but-mandating the use of existing multiple-award contracts instead of developing new ones are the types of initiatives that have the real potential to change and transform agencies and their mission areas.

“The memo was clearly written by knowledgeable insiders,” said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council, an industry association. “The use of best-in-class contracts drawn from a prior version of the Circular on category management, the call for shared services and other examples are from people who know what they are talking about.”

Chvotkin said the memo also sends a specific message to agencies about how the Trump administration is starting to develop its management agenda.

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When President Donald Trump announced the new Office of American Innovation a few weeks back, the first thought that came to mind was about how this sounded similar to an Obama administration initiative called the President’s Management Advisory Board.

The goal of both organizations is the same: Bring in private-sector experts to help the government improve its back-office and mission-critical processes.

So was this just a case of the Trump folks putting a new name on an existing idea, as is the custom when a new administration comes in? Or was there something more here that would set this apart?

It’s hard to tell based on the short memo. The only inkling of what OAI will do comes from Section 2 of the memo:

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Give the General Services Administration credit for not shying away from the harsh criticism of the Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) program.

Industry associations and government contracting experts have bluntly told their clients not to take part in the program. Or as Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners and a long-time GSA expert, wrote in a recent blog post that Federal News Radio put our website, “Run, don’t walk, from GSA’s TDR.”

First, let me give you a little background about the Transactional Data Rule program. It’s a new requirement GSA finalized in June that lets government contractors submit information about transactions through the schedule contracts and those governmentwide acquisition contracts run by the agency, instead of having to follow two clauses that most vendors dread — the Price Reduction Clause (PRC) and the Commercial Services Practices (CSP) provision.

Over the last decade or more, vendors have complained about the requirement to submit to the PRC and send in CSP data. The Commercial Sales Practices regulation requires contractors to disclose to GSA details of any discounts vendors offer to commercial customers for similar products and services. The Price Reduction Clause requires contractors to monitor their pricing over the life of the contract and provide the government with the same price reductions that they give to commercial customers. The PRC has been at the center of most of the government-contracting-based False Claims Act whistleblower cases and settlements over the past decade. Vendors have called on GSA to change the PRC because it doesn’t match up with how agencies buy or how contractors sell these days.

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