Search results for: acquisition

What seemed like a simple objective, to develop and issue a standardized, electronically-verifiable identification card for civilian agency personnel, continues to encounter a barrage of technical and cultural challenges at a time when identification has become a critical component in the government’s efforts to embrace mobile and remote computing.

Despite the government’s aggressive push under the Identity, Credential and Access Management (ICAM) plan, only three departments are above minimum fielding levels and using the civilian personal identity verification (PIV) cards, said Paul Grant, director for cybersecurity policy in the Office of the DOD Chief Information Officer. And it remains unclear when the cards will be universally fielded across the civilian government. Keep reading →


Initially, when I started working for NASA, I can’t say that there was something that inspired me. I longed to return to my career field of procurement, and an opportunity became available at NASA. The inspiration came later, as I became more involved with the programs and projects I supported.

I began my career at NASA in 1998. While preparing to move to California, I applied for a contract specialist position at NASA Ames Research Center. Initially, there were conversations with Human Resources and Procurement management. However, many months went by without any contact. By this time, I assumed the job had been filled and applied for a job with the Department of Education in San Francisco. One day, I received a call from Ames’ Human Resources inquiring if I was still interested in a position with NASA. I was quite surprised to receive the telephone call, but very happy. They explained that shortly after our last conversation, a hiring freeze had been invoked. I expressed my continued interest, as I enjoyed procurement work and was eager to return to it. Within a month, I was hired as a contract specialist at Ames. I could not have been more thrilled. Shortly after, I resumed my role as a contracting officer in the Acquisition Division. I later served as the Acting Branch Chief for Business and Operations, and occasionally as the Acting Deputy Division Chief for Acquisition. Keep reading →


My father served in the Marine Corps, so we moved a lot during my childhood. Making friends and just fitting in were huge challenges because of my family’s transient lifestyle. I found solace in my schoolwork and excelled in math and science but never thought about working for NASA.

In the 1970’s, girls were encouraged to get married or pursue a career as a nurse or a teacher. My parents did not graduate from high school, so they were unable to provide career advice, and I wanted to go to college. I earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education but decided teaching was not the career for me.

I then decided to apply to a graduate school program in organizational behavior, but was rejected. This was a major disappointment as I did well in my behavioral classes and was even friends with the professor who had encouraged me to apply for graduate school. I was then encouraged to apply to the Masters of Business Administration program, but was rejected again, leaving me with a near zero self image. I was totally lost and unsure of what to do next.
I spoke to another graduate school official who recommended the Masters of Public Administration program, and figuring I had nothing to lose, I applied. Fortunately, I was accepted and later realized the MPA program was right for me.

In the last year of graduate school, I was selected for the Presidential Management Intern Program, a two-year internship with the federal government. I received interview requests from various agencies but was surprised when NASA called, since I was neither an engineer nor a scientist. They explained that NASA required all types of skills. I was honored and excited at this possibility.

I chose NASA and was assigned to the Office of the Chief Financial Officer at NASA Headquarters. I began in June, which is the peak of the budget process for the agency. My initial assignments were making copies, collating presentations and sitting through seemingly endless budget meetings.

My major responsibility was to coordinate the updating of the Chief Financial Officer’s budget book. The task was challenging since some of the analysts did not like to be reminded of the due dates! One analyst did not give me his budget book pages, and I was afraid to tell the boss that the book was not completed on time. My poor judgment resulted in him carefully explaining to me the importance of meeting deadlines. He explained that the due date was part of a larger integration process, and that even if the product is incomplete it should always be submitted on time with as much information as possible. I have always remembered this cardinal rule, and have taught this to the analysts I have trained.

After I completed my internship, I became a resource analyst in the International Space Station Freedom program office where I was responsible for specific Center budgets. I thoroughly enjoyed my job as I learned so much from working with the engineers. I gained knowledge of the engineering development cycle, participated in the formulation of an integrated master schedule and learned about the program office portion budget process.

When the space station office moved, I made a major career change by transferring to the Stennis Space Center to become their Resources Management Officer. Though I was only there for 18 months, I thoroughly enjoyed working with the employees and learning about the operations at a NASA center.

In 1993, I moved to the Dryden Flight Research Center to become its Chief Financial Officer. Since the office had just been created, I wrote position descriptions, hired my management team, developed processes and worked to form a cohesive team. These were challenging but rewarding times, and I was fortunate to work with very talented employees.

Since 2001, I have served as Dryden’s Associate Director for Management, recently renamed Director for Mission Support, responsible for mission support offices such as acquisition, finance, facilities, protective services and strategic communications, ensuring that these offices provide efficient and effective support for the programs. The most satisfying part of my job is solving problems and providing needed support to accomplish the center’s mission. My proudest achievement was establishing the mission support offices as a cohesive leadership team rather than a group of individual offices.

After working 28 years at NASA, I have learned some important life lessons, such as not giving up after experiencing failure and maintaining resilience. I found the courage to speak up, and asked questions or made statements that everyone else was thinking yet reluctant to share. I have strived to always do my best since my work is a reflection of not only myself but also of my organization. Most importantly, I have learned that as a team we can handle any challenge if we work together, which has given me the confidence that we as an agency will figure out what the next step in human spaceflight will be.

I have been lucky to work at NASA and have seen some pretty cool airplanes too, such as an SR-71 flyby while standing by the runway. I have also witnessed the record Mach 7 flight of the X-43 that made the Guinness Book of Records, and watched four space shuttle launches, two landings and the takeoff of the 747 shuttle carrier aircraft three times with space shuttles mounted atop. In May 2010, I saw the successful launch abort test of the Orion crew capsule. Recently, I observed the first open door flight of the SOFIA 747 aircraft and in my time at Dryden I have been fortunate to see numerous airplane flyovers – opportunities I could never have foreseen when I started with NASA.

For the next generation, I want young girls to know that there is a myriad of career opportunities available. I especially like to talk to children of color so they can see someone like themselves working for NASA, something I never experienced when I was growing up. I enjoy sharing my life story in hope that it shows the importance of an education as well as seizing upon life’s opportunities and persevering when disappointments happen.

It’s been a little more than a year since Admiral Thad Allen (USCG-Ret.) joined Booz Allen Hamilton as a senior vice president after a storied career with the U.S. Coast Guard, and serving as National Incident Commander for the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

Breaking Gov contributor Dan Verton sat down with Allen to discuss the importance of innovation and the challenges frontline federal government managers face when trying to implement new innovations. He also discussed some of the priorities for the future of homeland security outlined recently by Booz Allen Hamilton, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Breaking Gov: How important is the concept and practice of innovation to the Department of Homeland Security as we look toward the next 10 years of the homeland security mission?

Adm. Thad Allen: I don’t think there’s any doubt that innovation has been the key to the success of this country since our revolution. The ability to innovate, create new things and bring them to market progress the country along.

I think the real issue is how do you enable innovation in a government department or across the government? How quickly can you recognize technologies and bring them to bear on the problems you’re dealing with?

We have a whole host of regulations and federal acquisition regulations. We’re concerned about who we sell business to in the federal government. There are groups that we want to help and encourage, such as small business and the middle class. We need to figure out a better way to identify innovative capabilities that we can bring to bear in the homeland security area.

I don’t think right now the current acquisition procedures or requirements development procedures are mature to the point where we can move as rapidly as we need to.

Is it just the acquisition side of the equation, or is it the federal culture that does not encourage innovation from frontline managers?

Allen: The whole notion of innovation is a challenge across the government. What you have is a set of regulatory requirements that take time [and] they’re difficult to work through for new and challenging technologies. And then there’s a question of whether or not the people in government are technically qualified to understand those new technologies.

I think there’s a dual challenge. One is a process challenge. How do we make the process simpler? But there’s a content challenge. If you don’t understand the technology regarding cloud analytics [as an example] or what a cloud reference architecture can do, or what high performance computing can do, then you don’t make real good decisions about the acquisition of technology or make policy and budget decisions that enable that.

Are efforts such as the FedRAMP process helping agencies to innovate and adopt new technologies?

Allen: In the current budget environment, we can’t afford to have multiple stovepipe systems, multiple licensing fees, and multiple costs for software platforms. The downward force on funding is going to force the integration of software and data sets.

Then, once you get them in one place, it’s easier to make a fundamental change in how you actually manage the data. It’s something we’re going to have to do and it’s going to be required for mission execution.

More importantly, I don’t think we can operate the systems we’re operating right now and stovepipe them in proprietary systems in the current budget environment.

Our theory is, it takes a network to defeat a network.”

How do you see future of Homeland Security changing?

Allen: I believe terrorism is nothing more than political criminality; so you’re really dealing with a criminal organizations involved in criminal activity. The things all criminal organizations need to succeed is …they need to have a source of financing, they have to talk, they have to move, and they have to spend money to be successful. That is a network.

When you look at our law enforcement organizational structure and how we deal with terrorism, we tend to focus particular threat streams on particular agencies, and that’s how we employ them, like the Drug Enforcement Administration; (the Bureau of) Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the US Secret Service; Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Our theory is, it that takes a network to defeat a network. And if we’re going to do that properly, we’re going to have to break down the walls between those jurisdictions, particularly with regards to how we share information.

Read more from Thad Allen in an op-ed he wrote for Breaking Gov last year on the importance of separating the value of public service from the politics.

Cisco Chairman and Chief Executive John Chambers is expected to announce plans today for transitioning the networking giant into a company focused primarily on supplying data analysis systems and services to government and large businesses.

“The days of the boxes are over,” said Chambers in a just-published interview with The New York Times.

Cisco has successfully navigated numerous technology transitions with a steady strategy of acquisitions that have helped expand Cisco’s digital presence well beyond the router boxes that keep Internet traffic flowing.

Chambers, however, said that the global revolution in mobile devices and sensors, and the routing of massive volumes of data to centralized processing centers, is altering the landscape and the economic equations for leading technology companies, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Oracle, as well as for Cisco.

“Transitions are happening at a faster pace than ever before,” he told The New York Times.

Chambers has been a relentless champion for helping large organizations harness information technology to work more effectively, including his own.

But the commoditization and consumerization of IT has put pressure on Cisco to reorganize for the next wave of technology demands. Chambers is betting much of that demand will come from finding smarter ways of capturing and analyzing the data that rides on much of the equipment Cisco originally produced and installed.

As part of that strategy, Cisco is reorganizing with the goal of concentrating on helping government and large businesses handle projects such as designing and managing systems to handle traffic or clean water across entire cities more efficiently.

He also layed out a vision for working with government officials and civil engineering companies to create networks of sensors and data analysis systems that would help organizations set up more efficient mining, manufacturing and distribution systems.

How successful Cisco will be in shifting to a software-driven business model remains more than a casual question in light of the turmoil that IBM endured, and more recently HP continues to face following its $11 billion purchase of Autonomy.

Chambers responds to those and other concerns in the article, saying Cisco’s talent, product and corporate connections give them closer access to the needs of their customers. Read the original article here. Keep reading →


Now that usage of mobile apps has overtaken browsing on the desktop web, it’s starting to challenge television, the analytics firm Flurry says. The San Francisco-based mobile analytics startup says that consumers are spending 127 minutes per day in mobile apps, up 35% from 94 minutes a day in the same time last year. At the same time, desktop web usage actually declined slightly by 2.4 %from 72 to 70 minutes.

This means that U.S. consumers are spending nearly two times more time in mobile apps than on the web.

The dramatic growth carries a variety of implications for government agencies focused on improving citizen services, how citizens interact with government, and the adoption of mobile technology.

The growth also has implications for the television industry as a whole. The time spent on mobile apps is now starting to challenge time spent watching TV. Flurry estimates that the average U.S. consumer watches 168 minutes of television per day, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2010 and 2011.
__________________________________________________

This article was originally reported by Kim-Mai Cutler and our colleagues at TechCrunch. For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, like us on Facebook. Keep reading →

Healthcare is experiencing an unprecedented transformation.

Motivated by the need to meet new regulatory requirements in the U.S., including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and to receive incentives from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (ARRA’s) Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provision, many healthcare providers are investing to modernize their legacy IT infrastructure and clinical applications. In addition to meeting compliance issues, these early adopters are discovering numerous advantages from their investment in IT – not only in cost savings, but also in improved patient care, tightened information security, advanced collaboration, increased transparency and trackability, and ‘connected care.’ Keep reading →


Reps. Darrell Issa and Gerry Connolly say federal IT mismanagement has not only cost taxpayers billions, but has a dire effect on the economy.

The two congressmen with a history of butting heads agree sweeping federal IT reforms and giving CIOs budget authority would fix the problem. They talked about why on a stage in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. on Monday. Keep reading →

Management and program silos within agencies that so often stymie efforts to integrate information technology and security practices are also hindering efforts to institute smarter risk management strategies at agencies, according to senior government security officials.

“Risk is still being managed at most agencies in a stovepipe manner,” said Department of Energy Chief Information Officer Bob Brese (pictured at left) during a Government Technology Research Alliance conference on government security trends on Monday. Keep reading →

A top procurement official at the General Services Administration has posted a set of priorities on a GSA website that will guide the agency’s technology services arm as it plans out future procurement strategies.

Kevin Youel, acting assistant commissioner of GSA’s Integrated Technology Service (ITS), said that the principles emerged during a recent discussion with federal chief information and acquisition officers, along with agency deputies throughout the federal government.

The discussion, the agency’s second stakeholder roundtable, focused primarily on setting priorities for GSA’s next generation of network services portfolio and related procurement offerings.

“The discussion gave us guiding principles for the Network Services 2020 (NS2020) Strategy,” said Youel in a blog posted this week. But some of the principles “apply beyond IT, to any government acquisition,” he said.

Youel said GSA shared findings from GSA’s top-down review of previous and current telecommunications contracts, including FTS2001 and Networx, based on meetings with more than 100 stakeholders, and after reviewing market trends and other data analysis.

“Our past outreach shows that GSA needs to match portfolio structure to agency buying patterns,” he said. It also needs to be aligned as well as to industry market segments, he said.

While agencies “value the more than $700 million in savings achieved by Networx in FY12,” he said, GSA “must continue to achieve greater savings through strategic sourcing to keep us in line with the September 20 GAO report that concludes government should do more strategic sourcing.”

Youel summarized the top five principles that emerged from the discussions, which according to his blog post, called for:

1. Deeper government partnerships. Agencies want a spectrum of offerings ranging from complete solutions and managed services to commodity building blocks, with which to build their own solutions. They see value in GSA providing a portfolio of services based upon affinity clusters of services. Contract options brought to the table by other agencies also may be part of the mix.

2. Government and industry success. The more government makes our buys look like big corporate buys, the better we can tie into the market and existing industry capability. This means agency commitment, aggregated common requirements, and price visibility. There are benefits to aligning our portfolio with how industry works, and we need industry to weigh in and work with GSA to achieve this compatibility. Aligning offerings with industry practice and good industry partner communications will reduce transaction costs and benefit all. We discussed how to make incentives, instead of penalties, tied to contractor success, which could improve service to users and build upon the win-win.

3. Expand scope and delivery methods. We discussed the need and value of acquisition and operational efficiency. In developing this portfolio, GSA and agencies are looking broadly at how we aggregate requirements. A framework to weave related services and elements in an efficient way might include Software as a Service (SaaS), mobile applications, and other options. Some agencies are looking for turn-key solutions that offer hands-off management. Agencies are also looking for aggregated service and lower infrastructure costs through identifying common needs.

4. Continue commitment to innovation. We must continue to offer options to support continuous and convenient access to industry partner innovations. Looking at how we refresh technology and pricing could give us steady improvements with fewer heavy lifts. Many times, we can add innovation without developing new acquisitions.

5. Increase transition support and more. GSA can provide tailored customer support throughout the acquisition life cycle, including assistance with acquisition, fair opportunity, and transition processes. The systems and processes we have in place for consolidated and centralized billing have provided operational efficiencies. Enhancing these systems will further drive down government and industry operating costs.

“Our current program provides more than $1.8 billion of networking services to federal agencies,” he concluded. “We continue to enhance our existing portfolio as we plan for the future. An NS2020 Interagency Advisory Panel will guide the strategy work for NS2020 and bring the strategy to the Federal CIO Council, he said.

Keep reading →

Page 5 of 207123456789...207