department of defense

The Department of Defense is taking a leadership role in leveraging mobile device technology to improve information sharing, collaboration and efficiencies. In a recent press release, Teri Takai, DoD’s chief information officer, said “As today’s DoD personnel become increasingly mobile, a wide variety of devices offer unprecedented opportunities to advance the operational effectiveness of the DoD workforce This strategy will allow mobile devices across the department to converge towards a common vision and approach.”

There are significant challenges that await agencies, like the DoD, that are looking to implement mobile strategies and “bring your own devices” (BYOD) policies – the most daunting being security. In order to overcome various security challenges, agencies must take several factors into consideration. The five tips found in this piece will outline crucial items for agencies to consider when adopting mobile practices for their employees: Keep reading →

I have been trying out the General Services Administration’s new portal for Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts, or GWACs.

There is a lot of useful information here, but the user experience remains uneven and in my experience, there are available tools that could improve the ability to analyze the data.

The new GSA web site says:

A Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) is a pre-competed, multiple-award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract that agencies can use to buy total IT solutions.

The GWAC program has taken their data to the next level by creating an interactive tool that allows GWAC stakeholders to view and segment GWAC information to make better decisions.

Users have the ability to:

  • Explore GWAC data by contract family, federal agency, and industry partner
  • Build customized reports and download them to your computer
The GWAC Dashboard is compatible with Internet Explorer 8 and 9 using Flash Player 14.4.X. If you are using any other version, you may experience usability issues.

The Users Guide contains the footnote:

The Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) Dashboards are intended for informational purposes. The data contained within may not be fully accurate.

The contacts page says:

Request for accessible dashboard content may be directed to herman.lyons@gsa.go.

That may be important to some users, since they, like I experienced, may not be able to download the complete data set. That’s what happened to me, so I contacted the GSA contact, but did not get a response so I downloaded each agency separately and merged them into one spreadsheet 19,168 rows and 18 rows. I also created a data dictionary spreadsheet.

Keep reading →


In tight fiscal times, federal agencies need to embrace changing technology, focus on attracting and retaining the next generation of workers and striking a balance between information sharing and security. To reach these goals, organizations need to foster a culture of trust and speed, a senior Defense Department official said.

David Wennergren, assistant deputy chief management officer for the Department of Defense, cited Stephen Covey’s book Speed Of Trust in his keynote speech at the Government Information and Analytics Summit in Washington D.C., this week. Keep reading →

The uncertainty of 2012 has many pondering how to plan their federal Architecture, Engineering and Construction pipeline for the coming year. By getting back to basics, companies can balance trends found in three sources – historic federal spending , budget requests, and what potential opportunities are to be released in the next 12 to 18 months – to develop a business development plan for 2013. Keep reading →

We’ve heard national security leaders at the highest levels say it repeatedly: we are not prepared for cyber war.

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, made it clear when he rated America’s readiness for addressing a catastrophic cyber attack “three on a scale of ten.” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has discussed the imminent threats of a breach that “shuts down part of the nation’s infrastructure in such a fashion that it results in a loss of life.” And Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has often been quoted saying that a large-scale attack on our critical infrastructure could wreak havoc on a scale “equivalent to Pearl Harbor.” Keep reading →

When the EADS and BAE announced merger plans earlier this year, it spurred a flurry of speculation about how the rest of the aerospace and defense industry would respond. Now in the aftermath of the merger being called off, speculation continues about the outlook of defense merger and acquisition (M&A) activity – and specifically what impact that will have on government and suppliers.

While the Department of Defense has indicated its reluctance to sanction M&As among the US primes (particularly when mergers lead to monopoly situations), at sub-tier levels, M&A activity has been occurring at a robust pace and promises to continue-at least in the near future. Keep reading →

Tax evasion or illegal drug smuggling are often not observable events for federal law enforcement officials. But to effectively manage federal law enforcement activities, officials and policy-makers in charge must have an idea of what is happening.

The challenge of how to measure the unobserved events is one faced by many federal leaders. But there are actually five methods that can assist government performance analysts in estimating basic information on unobserved events.
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This article originally appeared as part of a new report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, “Five Methods for Measuring Unobserved Events: A Case Study of Federal Law Enforcement,” by John Whitley.

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The Need for a Statistical Framework

Law enforcement can face tough measurement challenges, but the fields of statistics and econometrics have developed a framework for dealing with them and it is useful to begin this part with a brief overview of that framework. All violations of a federal law can be thought of as elements of a prospective data population.

The scope of the population can be defined in various ways — e.g., immigrants illegally entering the United States in a calendar year, or the illegal drugs smuggled across the southwest land border between the United States and Mexico.

To effectively manage their operations, federal law enforcement officials need insight into these unobserved violations; i.e., they need to know the properties or parameters of this population of data, such as its size and distribution

Law enforcement officials are generally able to observe subsets, or samples, of this population. The most obvious is the subset of violators apprehended or arrested. Detailed documentation of apprehensions or arrests is generally retained in administrative records. In addition, there may be other available sources of data, often partial and incomplete, that shed light on various aspects of the population, e.g., survey data on drug usage or the footprints in the desert of illegal border-crossers.

Actions can also be taken to increase the available data, such as increasing the size of the observable subset, drawing additional samples from the population, or generating a sample of new data that mimics the characteristics of the population of interest. The methods described here use such samples to make estimates of the total population.

When using a sample to estimate parameters of the underlying (unobserved) population, an important statistical property is whether the estimate is biased. Bias occurs when the estimate systematically diverges from the true value of the population parameter being estimated.

An unbiased and therefore preferred estimate does not systematically diverge from the true value. One primary cause of bias is a poor sample that is not randomly selected. A sample is random when every element of the population has an equal probability of being included. Examples of non-random samples may include:

Keep reading →

This is the first in a series of articles about innovation at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A collaborative effort to combine data previously scattered across multiple federal agencies has led to a single portal where veterans can access key benefits. Keep reading →

With sequestration looming, and 2013 federal IT spending requests having have dropped $1 billion over fiscal year 2012 levels, contracting dollars especially for IT are expected to come under intense scrutiny, and in many cases get shuffled to meet changing needs next year.

Those who follow federal IT spending are already aware that the fiscal 2013 federal IT budget request is approximately $78.9 billion, down from the prior year’s $79.7 billion. However, Congress’ continuing resolution and potential sequestration are likely to lower IT spending to between $73 to $74 billion. Keep reading →

Hey, you want Special Forces? The Army’s got your back. Want air defense? Missile defense? Communications? Intelligence? Logistical support? Joint Task Force headquarters? Go Army!

Just – just please, don’t cut our budget any more, okay? Keep reading →

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