“Reporter’s Notebook” is a weekly dispatch of news tidbits, strongly-sourced buzz, and other items of interest happening in the federal IT and acquisition communities.
Submit ideas, suggestions and news tips to Jason via email.
The federal acquisition community is mourning the loss of Bob Welch, a retired 30-year-plus government employee and a current executive with ASI Government.
During his federal service, Welch served as the senior procurement executive for the departments of Commerce and Treasury, chief of the procurement policy division at the Department of Agriculture and as a contracting officer for the Department of the Navy.
Welch died March 31 after being on a ventilator for the past four months.
After retiring from government in 2000, Welch joined Acquisition Solutions Inc. as a partner and continued to be an active member of the federal community.
The Homeland Security Department’s continuous diagnostics and mitigation (CDM) program had a quiet fall and winter, but seems to be ramping up for the spring.
DHS is ready for its second major buy of tools and sensors under the CDM program focused on managing people. At the same time, DHS also is getting industry feedback on the capabilities under phase 3 of the CDM program.
After spending about $60 million on a first set of tools under phase 1 of the initiative, DHS and the General Services Administration, which is acting as the procurement arm of the CDM program, is awaiting bids from the 17 contractors for phase 2 tools intended to monitor and manage people-based accounts and services.
DHS and GSA issued the request for quote in February and bids across the four functional areas are due March 30.
NASA’s cybersecurity challenges continue to bubble up. About a week after my month-long investigative report into major shortcoming with the space agency’s approach to patching software, a private sector non-profit is calling NASA out for not moving fast enough on a potential cybersecurity breakthrough.
The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) is calling on NASA to unleash Gryphon X in a bulletin it published on March 23.
“Gryphon X was one of those proposals we’ve been waiting since the summer to hear more about,” said James Scott, ICIT’s co-founder and senior fellow. “We have good relationships with the C-level people at Ames Research Center, and we were on the Hill with NASA in the Senate in the fall, and it keeps coming up. There are several questions about what’s being done to secure technology, the Internet of Things connectivity of the critical infrastructure. We said, ‘Why not talk about Gryphon X?” and so we did. We didn’t think the proposal would be placed on ice for this long.”
Scott said Gryphon X is a concept that could change the cybersecurity game, and a little friendly push to NASA would help drum up more interest.
The continued inability of agencies to provide truly educational debriefings to contractors when they lose out on a contract is one of the biggest problems with federal procurement. Time and again, I’ve written about debriefings as the one outstanding issue for how agencies could easily avoid bid protests and help industry down a continuous improvement path.
Well, there might just be some light at the end of this contracting tunnel. Anne Rung, the administrator in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said at the recent Acquisition Excellence conference that she’s working with the Chief Acquisition Officer’s Council to share some debriefing best practices governmentwide.
“Industry communications ranges from the informal to the formal and so we are looking across the whole range on things we can do better and to identify those best practices,” Rung said. “From the informal, it’s even events like this. It’s sitting down with the leaderships of the companies to get their input to the more formal channels like Acquisition 360, where we are asking for specific input on specific IT acquisitions or through the series with ACT-IAC. I think we are trying to identify some of those best practices and put them out as a second generation Mythbusters.”
The Homeland Security Department seems to be on a never-ending find-and-replace mission when it comes to cybersecurity experts.
The latest edition of this expedition brings us to Danny Toler, who is moving to be the career deputy assistant secretary in the Cybersecurity and Communications Office after serving as the head of network security deployment for the last 16 months, according to a March 18 email from Suzanne Spaulding, undersecretary of the National Programs and Protection Directorate at DHS, which Federal News Radio obtained.
“Over the course of almost four years at CS&C, Danny has become a widely respected and trusted leader who epitomizes professionalism and integrity,” Spaulding wrote in her email to staff.
In my previous notebook, I asked for comments on whether the federal community needs to rethink the term and concept of a “Rock Star chief information officer.”
I received several interesting on-the-record and background comments I wanted to share.
First, Roger Baker, the former CIO of the Commerce and Veterans Affairs departments, sent me this comment:
“I’ve always found the term ‘Rock Star CIO’ to be a bit humorous. Rock Star from whose perspective? It seems to be applied mostly to those getting the most positive press, yet from my experience there is little correlation between bad or good press and the quality of job a CIO is doing. Each CIO job is so complex, so demanding, and subject to such different constraints that it is impossible for those outside an agency to get an objective view. Do you know what instructions the CIO was given by the secretary? Do you understand the political realities inside the agency? Did he or she inherit a pot of gold, or a POS (pot of stuff)? Does he or she get the most out of their team, or do they berate, belittle, and behead?”
The Office of Management and Budget’s latest attempt to tame federal data centers is receiving rave reviews from industry and government alike. But maybe more importantly, White House officials recognize changing the federal approach to data centers is no longer just a savings exercise — no matter what Congress and the Government Accountability Office say.
Instead the draft policy recognizes the data center consolidation and optimization initiative must fold in several ongoing priorities — from infrastructure and systems modernization, to cybersecurity, cloud first, and the greening of the government — to be more effective.
“This draft policy is a half-step forward because it’s more aggressive than Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). It gets agencies out of the square feet discussion and it now says if you have a server, it’s a data center,” said Keith Trippie, who helped lead the FDCCI strategy and implementation in 2010 and now is president and CEO of the Trippie Group. “Part of the challenge for agencies is to go back and recount what constitutes a data center. It’s more work for agencies just to get a baseline of data centers. There are plenty of broom closets that have servers that are connected to Internet that need to be counted and weren’t five years ago.”
OMB released the draft policy on March 2 and so far, the guidance received six comments.
Industry says bid protests are a problem and some vendors are preparing to file a complaint at the same time they are developing a bid.
Government officials contend bid protests aren’t a problem, and the outcomes of the process are exactly as intended — acting like a check and balance for the system.
Both sides are correct, and both sides are simplifying the issue and adding to a growing challenge across government.
If you only look at bid protests by the numbers, a very small percentage of federal procurements actually are brought before the Government Accountability Office or the Court of Federal Claims.
GAO reported in December that vendors submitted 2,639 protests in fiscal 2015 — up 3 percent over 2014 and an increase of only 286 since 2011 — out of tens of millions of transactions worth about $440 billion.
But at the same time, as vendors see more multiple-award, high-dollar contracts, and the continued shrinking of the federal procurement pie, they are more apt to protest those high-dollar, long-term and high-profile programs, thus creating the current perception that there are too many protests.
What we have here is a case of perception is reality, and the issue is on a path to get worse before it gets better.
The General Services Administration is looking for someone new to run one of its most important programs — the IT schedule.
But, for once, it’s not because someone left or retired. Rather, Mary Davie, the assistant commissioner of the Integrated Technology Services at the Federal Acquisition Service in GSA, promoted Kay Ely about a month ago to be the new deputy assistant commissioner of ITS.
“Kay’s leadership and focus on the acquisition community, driving efficiencies and savings for the federal government, and increasing innovation has taken Schedule 70 to new heights, and I’m excited for her to bring that energy and expertise to her new role,” Davie wrote in an email to staff.
GSA’s Kay Ely speaking during an interview at Federal News Radio.
Davie said Ely will continue to serve as acting director of schedule 70 until a new person is hired.
GSA posted the schedule 70 job March 3 and it remains open until March 31.
The position includes eight specific responsibilities, including planning, developing, implementing, directing and/or administering all contracting functions/acquisition programs for IT Schedules, as well as being responsible for policy implementation and management oversight of all IT Schedule programs.
Well golly gee and tickle my fancy, the General Services Administration may just get me off of one of my soapboxes after all.
Sorry to report it’s not my seemingly never-ending quest for GSA and all other agencies to make task orders publicly viewable even if you can’t bid on them — Mr. Sharpe: Tear Down This Wall.
Instead, GSA, thankfully, has started the process to modernize the FedBizOpps.gov portal, what many say is one of the worst websites in government.
GSA issued a request for quotes through the Alliant Small Business governmentwide acquisition contract back in the December time frame and bids were due sometime in January or February — it’s all unclear because GSA released the RFQ behind the “firewall” of Alliant, meaning (going back to my initial soapbox) the public can’t see any details of the procurement despite this being taxpayer money and transparency being a major goal of the Obama administration.
A GSA spokeswoman confirmed bids on the RFQ are closed and the agency is evaluating offers. To their credit, GSA also provided me with a copy of the RFQ, instead of what usually happens, which is for me to have to go to industry to get a copy.
Why is this a monumental moment?
The FedBizOpps portal is stuck in the 2000s. The website is hard to use, includes few noticeable upgrades in the last decade and, maybe most annoying, when you do a search, click on a result, and then want to go back to the search results, it requires you to “reload” the page, rendering the “back” button useless. Come on GSA, this isn’t that hard of an upgrade.
“Reporter’s Notebook” is a weekly dispatch of news tidbits, strongly-sourced buzz, and other items of interest happening in the federal IT and acquisition communities.