Government Executive - Authors - Anne Laurent

So Many Innovation Hubs, So Hard to Find Them

Anne Laurent — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 13:13:05 -0400

I recently met a vice president from a hot artificial intelligence startup that found its way into a deal with a U.S. intelligence community agency. The company’s product uses AI to enable the rapid identification of elements on video, so you can imagine why the IC agency was interested.

But the story the young executive told me about how this vital capability eventually got into the hands of the IC should give us pause.

Like so many startups with great new capabilities and not much experience selling to government, the AI company was increasingly frustrated at its inability to break in at the IC agency. The staff either didn’t know about or was unable to tap the vaunted and rapidly expanding ecosystem of government innovation brokerages created by the Pentagon, IC and civilian agencies. These innovation hubs came into existence precisely to ease the way into the government market for nontraditional suppliers with bleeding-edge products and services.

Instead, the AI firm’s VP took an old-fashioned, circuitous route.

He went to an alumni event at his college hoping to snag a few minutes with an IC leader who was speaking to the group. He polished his elevator speech, jammed business cards in his pocket and muscled his way into the line of alumni awaiting a word with the speaker after the speech.

And he scored.

The IC leader connected him with an internal innovator at the agency. That fellow sent the startup guy to the agency's Silicon Valley tech scouting organization. Folks there helped the company break into the target agency, and finally, the firm hit pay dirt.

Potholes and Detours

Though it ended well for this small firm, the story points up potholes and detours in government efforts to pave a superhighway for innovators directly into the government market. In predictable bureaucratic fashion, would-be federal innovator sherpas have inadvertently become a convoluted, siloed maze.

The new buying methods these brokers employ truly are easier and faster and designed to attract firms that heretofore eschewed government’s rule-laden, slow, intellectual-property-endangering, and expensive procurement process. Congress has provided remarkable new authority for the Defense Department and other agencies to waive procurement rules, test before buying, and get innovation fielded quickly. National security agencies are bristling with tech scouting organizations attempting to broker connections between the makers of edgy technology and a government badly in need of an edge on near-peer U.S. adversaries who are catching up with and even exceeding our capabilities.

Yet, the startups, emerging tech companies, inventors and other nontraditional government suppliers for whom the new authorities and brokerages were created now must navigate a labyrinth. The welter of types, shapes and approaches is becoming nearly as daunting as the Federal Acquisition Regulation-laden, slow-twitch system that tech trailblazers rejected in the first place.

I know how overwhelming the ecosystem appears to outsiders because to understand it, I’ve begun mapping it. I am identifying government innovation brokers and the sponsors that fund them and charting the interest areas for which they seek innovators. So far, I’ve found 25 currently active other transaction (OT) authority consortia, 16 Partnership Intermediary Agreement (PIA) organizations, and nearly 100 government innovation support agencies, ranging from the Marine Corps Rapid Capabilities Office to the Army Applications Laboratory to the National Geospatial Information Agency’s GEOworks, with many in between.

All of them are in one way or another reaching out to the commercial market in search of innovators and innovations, often to address the same problems. For example, searching my map for the interest area “artificial intelligence,” brings up nearly 20 widely differing organizations.

Among them are:

Other transaction authority consortia
An office devoted to running prize challenges
A federally funded research and development center
A website communicating IC needs to innovators
Technology scouting outposts
Several Defense Department research and rapid response procurement offices
Small business innovation and research (SBIR) programs
An office that evaluates, tests and develops emerging technology for federal agencies
A university-affiliated research center

Searching “cyber” calls up another 20 organizations, while “sensor” and “unmanned” each net almost as many. Each type of broker operates differently and serves different programs within the military services and defense and civilian agencies. So, for innovators from outside the government market, and even for some within, it's tough to divine what each variety of brokerage seeks on whose behalf, how they work, and how to interact with them.

This isn’t to say no overlap should exist among innovation hubs or that a single office should be put in place to dictate innovation swim lanes or cap participants in the ecosystem, as the Congressional Research Service appears to favor for Defense. Innovation is messy and relies on unpredictable, serendipitous collisions among ideas, inventors, practitioners, and experts. Sometimes, utterly unexpected folks make conjectures about combining unconnected innovations that result in unimagined new capabilities.

Nonetheless, millions are being spent. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are employed. Dozens of new organizations have sprung up, joining dozens more already in existence. All of it to make sure that every startup with a great product that might have a national security application gets hooked up with government. Yet many still remain undiscovered or too overwhelmed to bite.

Certainly, there is outreach. Some brokers hold design sprints and meetups at conferences and events. Some scour LinkedIn and other social media and websites and conferences where product and service pioneers congregate. Others tail venture capitalists or run hackathons, demo days, prize competitions and the like to draw in makers, tinkerers and masterminds. But getting to and into events costs time and money that lean young companies often don't have. And hearing about them still is more by happenstance than design.

Each OTA consortium charges a fee for membership, and most only show paid members the solicitations their sponsors issue. So, if the best solver hasn’t paid up to join, the best solution goes wanting.

No 411 for Government, Either

Just as there's not a directory where emerging companies can look up matching government innovation hubs, there’s no 411 for government to find them all either. This means not only that innovators who want into the ecosystem struggle, but defense and civilian agencies also are in the dark about each other’s innovation brokers.

A promising prototype funded by one broker’s sponsor might, with a tweak or two, be perfect for another’s. But because neither knows the other exists, the opportunity for collaboration and savings is lost.

Many within the ecosystem believe innovation effervescence will subside and consolidation will reduce the size and complexity of the broker playing field. But with 2019 Defense OTA spending already exceeding last year’s record and set to nearly double to more than $7 billion this year, the froth doesn’t appear to be evaporating yet. More than half of last year’s OTA spending went through consortia, and a new one, the Naval Aviation Systems Consortium, was born this summer. In addition, a Blue Force Tracking Consortium is due soon from the Army Futures Command’s C5ISR Center. PIAs, incubators, accelerators, pitch days, and rapid capabilities organizations continue sprouting as well.

The challenge now is to get a handle on the innovation ecosystem without throttling it. That requires making it easier for innovators and innovation brokers to find one another and ensuring that government programs know about each other’s innovation support organizations and their activities so collaboration and piggybacking become common.

As the solution emerges, I’ll continue mapping—highlighting the highways, byways, scenic routes and can’t-miss attractions across the network. Watch this space!

Anne Laurent publishes the Acquisition Innovators Weekly from The Acquisition Innovators Hub, LLC and provides federal market thought leadership consulting at The Agile Mind. She formerly served as executive editor of Government Executive Magazine.

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Defense Dominates Experiment in Streamlined Bidding for Innovation

Anne Laurent — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 12:50:22 -0500

Streamlined solicitations for innovative commercial products and services, known as commercial solutions openings are beginning to take off in the Defense Department. Even the General Services Administration’s CSO service, which is open to all agencies for a fee, so far has been dominated by Defense users.

CSOs aren’t as well known or broadly used as their procurement-innovation cousin, other transaction authority, which gives agencies the ability to strike contracts outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation for research, prototypes and production to obtain technology from nontraditional defense contractors. Eleven agencies including Defense have OT authority.

GSA’s CSO holds the potential to bring civilian agencies, most of which don’t have OT authority, the ability to reach out to and select suppliers unencumbered by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. So far, civilian agencies haven’t been biting, but Pentagon organizations are, even though they have their own CSO provider.

The very first GSA CSO customer was none other than the Defense Innovation Unit, a once-experimental buying organization that invented CSOs. Originally designed to lure emerging companies to work for the Pentagon by easing the pain of federal procurement processes, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, lost the X last summer, when it was designated a permanent outpost for testing defense buying boundaries.

The Defense Innovation Unit uses CSOs for all of its deals on behalf of department programs in order to strike OT agreements to buy technology prototypes to improve military mission effectiveness. Lacking OT authority, GSA uses CSOs on its own or others’ behalf to ease the way for FAR-based contracts for new commercial items, new adaptations of existing commercial products or items in the “production/commercialization phase but not yet in broad use in government.”

In the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, legislators created a pilot program allowing the Defense and Homeland Security departments and GSA to test CSOs through 2022. GSA and Homeland Security CSO contracts are limited to $10 million, while the Pentagon’s limit is $100 million.

The OT agreements the Defense Innovation Unit strikes for its customers permit a direct, sole-source award of a follow-on full-production contract to a successful prototype award winner. But even prototypes not slated immediately for follow-on production have utility. So DIU is creating an e-commerce portal for those not immediately picked up. To find a portal-builder, in 2018, DIU became GSA’s first CSO customer and engaged Apttus, maker of business-to-business e-commerce portals.

The Air Force edged out DIU in taking a GSA CSO all the way to award. Thus was born the Air Force Accelerator Powered by Techstars, which opened in January 2018. The accelerator, based in Boston, focuses on early-stage startups making technology with both commercial and government applications. Examples include anti-collision radar for drones from OmniPreSense and anti-counterfeiting laser-activated ink to secure aviation parts from SecureMarking, both among the 10 companies in the first accelerator class.

Original accelerator sponsor AFWERX, an Air Force technology incubator, has been joined by BAE Systems FAST Labs, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Education and Training Command and the MD5 Defense technology accelerator in supporting the 2019 class of 10 startups, including one that makes drones that can be thrown and bounce off floors and walls, and another that identifies and reports hostile drone swarms.

In January, AFWERX teamed with ARFL and Space and Missile Systems Center on another CSO for a development and operations platform, where the Joint Force Space Command operations center can develop software, integrate data, perform machine learning activities and more.

Meanwhile, other Defense programs also are striking out on their own in using CSO authority.

This March 29 through April 11, Space and Naval Warfare Systems will conduct the 21st Century Combined Arms Advanced Naval Technology Exercise (ANTX) West. Sailors and Marines will help test more than 96 technology prototypes in information warfare, strike capability, and counter intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. The ANTX will constitute the live demonstration of solutions solicited under a CSO issued in August.

A second ANTX, is slated for April to test technologies for command and control, force protection, tactical diction within littorals, operational distribution to the littoral, cross-domain mobility, signature management and deception, logistical support, and medical applications. The two exercises are part of the Fight the Naval Force Forward campaign exploring amphibious and sea multi-domain operations combining cyber, space and electromagnetic spectrum operations on land and at sea.

Renovating After Protest Loss

In November, the Defense Innovation Unit issued its second overarching five-year CSO, setting revised procedures for soliciting solutions in an array of areas of interest, including autonomy, artificial intelligence, human systems, information technology and space.

DIU altered the new CSO to prominently address concerns raised by an adverse May 2018 Government Accountability Office bid protest ruling on a DIU-run CSO-OTA. GAO ruled against the Army on an Oracle America protest of a nearly $1 billion OT production agreement for cloud migration and operation services. GAO found that the service failed to apprise bidders on the original CSO solicitation that the winner could receive a sole source, noncompetitive follow-on production award. GAO also ruled that the production work was awarded before the initial prototype had been judged to be successful.

DIU’s new CSO has a section spelling out follow-on production notice requirements—CSO areas of interest and prototype OT agreements will explicitly identify that a follow-on production award is a potential outcome of successful prototyping.

Another section defines what successful prototype completion looks like—the project met the technical requirements, satisfied success metrics in the OT agreement, or had a “particularly favorable or unexpected result that justifies the transition to production.” Successful completion can occur prior to the conclusion of a prototype project so any aspect with utility can move into production even as other aspects remain to be finished.

The new CSO also amps up the section on in-person or virtual solution pitches that may follow five-page or 15-slide solution briefs. Solution briefs and pitches will be evaluated for technical merit and uniqueness and innovation against the area of interest they address, as well as viability, both of the company and its proposal.

The Defense Innovation Unit’s CSO renovations aren’t directly applicable to GSA’s version because DIU has OT authority and GSA doesn’t, said Chris Hamm, director of the Federal Systems Integration Management Center, which runs the program for GSA. Nonetheless, GSA can provide extra contracting expertise DOD organizations need. Hamm points out that freedom from FAR-imposed terms and conditions can make CSOs more difficult to conduct than standard solicitations and awards because there is so much more open to negotiation.

Anne Laurent, former executive editor of Government Executive magazine, runs The Agile Mind Thought Leadership Consulting and The Acquisition Innovators Hub, a procurement innovation intelligence collector.

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Government’s Fast-Buying Service Takes Shape With First Customer

Anne Laurent — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 11:48:15 -0400

Agencies that have been excluded from using streamlined procurement tools proliferating across the Defense Department now have more insight into a new purchasing option that will soon open up the innovation fast-lane to all government buyers.

An unnamed Defense Department organization has issued the first-ever solicitation under the General Services Administration’s new service providing high-speed contracting outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation for innovative commercial items and processes.

But GSA isn’t opening the floodgates yet. It plans a gradual rollout of the new offering to test sales to other agencies and shape the service.

The Defense solicitation seeks to buy an innovative, commercial web-based marketplace, where government buyers can quickly and easily navigate, search and initiate orders for products, services and bundles of configured offerings. (It has no connection to the government-wide commercial e-commerce platform GSA is working on with the Office of Management and Budget under the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, said Chris Hamm, director of GSA’s Federal Systems Integration and Management Center.)

Hamm emphasized that GSA’s Assisted Acquisition Service, which is handling the new service, “doesn’t have a ton of excess capacity,” so the new service will expand slowly. The news no doubt will disappoint agencies eager to entice nontraditional government suppliers to sell them innovative services and products.

GSA is offering the new service—known as a commercial solutions opening—under the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which permitted Defense, the Homeland Security Department and GSA to test CSOs as a way of making the federal market more attractive to new entrants, including entrepreneurs, as well as traditional government contractors selling emerging or innovative goods and services.

GSA and Homeland Security CSO contracts are limited to $10 million, and the pilot programs end on Sept. 30, 2022. The capability is available to all GSA organizations, in addition to the Assisted Acquisition Service selling it governmentwide. Besides the Defense solicitation, Hamm said, GSA will announce a second CSO for a GSA organization in two to three weeks. But AAS probably will do no more than three or four CSOs for other agencies in fiscal 2018, he said.

A Malleable Solution

Vendors interested in the Defense marketplace solicitation have until June 26 to submit briefs describing their marketplaces and companies, and how their solutions “push the state of the art.” Hamm said the Defense client is looking for a malleable solution that can handle basic, fixed-unit-pricing items, but also those that require a calculation to determine the price. The client would like to be able to upload those calculations into the marketplace platform, he said.

If a solution is accepted and contracted for, it will be hosted on Cloud.gov, which is provided by GSA’s Technology Transformation Services office. This should eliminate issues surrounding cloud authority since Cloud.gov is up and running and any agency can use it, Hamm said.

The FBO announcement of the Defense CSO also unveiled a new Part 571 in the GSA acquisition manual for the Innovative Commercial Items Pilot Program. Part 571 defines innovative commercial items as a new technology, or new application or adaptation of a technology, process or method, including those not yet in widespread government or commercial use.

CSO use must be approved by an agency acquisition innovation advocate, of which GSA has two, FEDSIM Director Hamm and Public Buildings Service Acquisition Management Director Mike Wolff, according to the Advocates Council website. Only contracting officers with federal acquisition certification in contracting (FAC-C) Level III can award CSO contracts, according to Part 571.

GSA has created a Procurement Innovation Resource Center to implement the CSO procedure and other procurement tools promoting innovation. The center website emphasizes that CSO is not a form of other transaction authority (OTA), which covers legally binding agreements for research and prototype projects.

The site also links to a new PIRC CSO Guide and solicitation template.

CSOs function somewhat similarly to traditional requests for information and market research in that they solicit information about what is available in a given market and attract companies, especially nontraditional government contractors, to respond to programs’ statements of need.

The PIRC CSO guide directs acquisition planning teams preparing CSO solicitations to “research the appropriate commercial marketplace and publicize the project in a venue (e.g. GitHub) typically used by that commercial marketplace.”

GSA chose to make its CSO compliant with the Competition in Contracting Act, Hamm said. This includes announcing CSO solicitations on the Federal Business Opportunities website, publishing them on websites used by the targeted vendor audiences (e.g. GitHub, DIUx.mil, 18f.gsa.gov, express.gsa.gov, order.gsa.gov) and performing direct vendor outreach.

Because restrictive government intellectual property terms have driven many companies and entrepreneurs away from working with federal agencies, CSOs allow contracting officers to negotiate those terms more liberally and to ensure vendors retain as much of their core intellectual property as possible. Contracting officers should involve legal counsel early.

If a program overestimates the intellectual property rights it needs, for example, it may end up paying for unused rights and dissuade new businesses from entering into a contract. But if contracting officers underestimate the rights needed, they might not acquire sufficient rights for the item’s full life cycle, which includes operations, maintenance, and follow-on procurements.

The CSO offers wide latitude in evaluating proposals. The acquisition team can evaluate solution briefs against one another or opt to simply evaluate them against the criteria in the solicitation. More than one solution brief may be accepted. The GSA acquisition team will keep the offeror updated on its status and whether additional information is needed.

Pressed to innovate, agencies are facing the same procurement hurdles the Pentagon is trying to surmount with a host of rapid acquisition tools. GSA’s CSO is a route potentially open to all of government, so here’s hoping the Assisted Acquisition Service learns fast and opens it broadly as soon as possible.

Anne Laurent, former executive editor of Government Executive magazine, runs The Acquisition Innovators Hub, a procurement innovation intelligence collector. Brian Friel, co-founder of BD Squared LLC, a federal business development firm, contributed to this report.

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All Agencies Can Now Buy Innovative Tech at Shark-Tank Speed

Anne Laurent — Thu, 24 May 2018 07:00:00 -0400

Have you been watching enviously as the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), the Homeland Security Department’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program and various other exceptional entities have been able to snap up new technological wonders from Silicon Valley and elsewhere? Using what’s known as “other transaction agreements,” a blessed few government agencies have been able to circumvent onerous acquisition rules to quickly purchase innovative technologies.

Well, envy no longer.

The General Services Administration’s new AAS Express Program just opened fast-buying capability to all agencies. Express offers high-speed, streamlined source-selection for innovative commercial items and processes—for a fee, of course. But the opportunity—known as a commercial solutions opening, or CSO—to lay hands on fast-evolving, mission-critical new tech and processes in as little as three months or less may be well worth the money. Especially if your department or agency doesn’t already have OT authority.

In the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, enacted Dec. 23, 2016, legislators permitted Defense, Homeland Security and GSA to test CSOs as a new way of making the federal market at least tolerable, if not inviting, for advanced technology companies and entrepreneurs. GSA seized the opening to offer the option governmentwide.

While the GSA AAS Express website still features a “Coming Soon” notice on its CSO website, according to a May 22 FedBizOpps notice, it has begun “seeking proposals for innovative, commercial items, technologies and services.” Express will post open solicitations for such projects on its site on behalf of other agencies. So far, no CSO areas of interest or solicitations are live.

Express will work with agencies to solicit white papers from suppliers about solutions that meet their needs. If Express and the agency are interested in a paper, Express will invite the supplier to submit more information or come in for an oral presentation. If there’s a match with the client agency’s needs, Express will invite the provider to submit a full proposal, the first step in negotiating all the terms and conditions of a proposed contract.

Express promises that its average procurement action lead time is between 30 and 120 days due to its streamlined, customized workflow process. It also pledges that client agencies will determine the requirements for and manage their own projects. For this, Express will charge a flat fee of 3.5 percent of the acquisition value.

The CSO pilot program is “to be implemented outside the normal FAR requirements to engage traditional and nontraditional government contractors,” but Express notes that the GSA CSO is different from OT authority, which GSA does not have.

Innovation Defined

While some may grouse about GSA’s exclusive ability to offer sought-after buying speed beyond the 11 agencies with OT authority, its CSO likely will be welcomed by left-out organizations seeking a rapid route to innovation. The more creative among them no doubt will note that the word “innovation” is defined broadly enough to permit a huge number of uses, as long as they observe the $10 million per transaction limit imposed by the law creating the CSO pilot projects.

For the Express CSO, innovation means any “new or new application or adaptation of an existing technology, process, or method as of the date of submission of a proposal.” And it isn’t limited to emerging technology from startups. Innovation “includes existing items within the production/commercialization phase (i.e. after design or development, and before widespread government adoption) as well as adaptations of existing commercial products,” according to Express.

DOD’s CSO pilot is bigger than the one granted GSA and DHS. DOD’s is good for up to $100 million per transaction, and military organizations already have been testing it through the DIUx, which began applying its CSO simultaneously with development of the 2017 NDAA provisions.

DIUx opened its CSO in June 2016 and its initial CSO award took just 31 days from first contact with a supplier to award. From June 2016 to February 2017, DIUx awarded 18 OTAs worth $42 million using CSO, averaging 96 days.

Spurred to the Cutting Edge

DOD has been spurred to rapidly acquire innovation and invention by the alarming build-up in technology acumen by Russia and China.

But other agencies also feel the need for speed to the cutting edge. For example, the uptake of blockchain and robotic process automation and artificial intelligence in industry is leaving federal financial and other regulatory agencies outgunned. And government needs those capabilities to modernize its information technology, as the white House has ordered, and to make services digital, as Americans increasingly demand.

The problem is that no one can keep up with the pace of industry innovation anymore, perhaps least of all federal agencies. So how can the government know even what’s available, let alone what the best new solutions for its specific needs might be?

OT authority allows 11 agencies and departments to craft OT agreements with nontraditional suppliers outside many of the requirements of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, enabling them to quickly tap U.S. innovation centers like Silicon Valley. DOD even has come up with a special model under which more than 20 consortia have been awarded OTAs to help defense organizations attract an array of small, new providers, along with traditional contractors, to propose solutions that best fit programs’ specific areas of need.

But until GSA opened its CSO, buyers thirsty for novel solutions at agencies without OT authority were mostly out of luck.

Every Program Manager an In-Q-Tel

The Defense, Homeland Security and GSA CSO pilots run until 2022 and essentially allow program managers to “adopt the role of In-Q-Tel,” said Victor Deal, a former analyst with the office of Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy, during a May 2017 Defense Acquisition University program on CSO.

In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture catalyst, seeks out early-stage technologies, vets them against a set of challenging intelligence community mission requirements, and then invests in the best fits to ensure that the IC’s needs get built into the commercial products.

Similarly, with CSOs, “for those companies developing something that don’t care for DOD because they have a 98 percent commercial market, the program manager can tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, we have a way to do business with you,’” said Deal, who is credited with developing the CSO model.

Using CSOs this way puts the onus on program managers to get out of the office to learn and interact with the markets to find capabilities of interest. “The [traditional] government source selection process is linear,” Deal said, “we only get what industry submits. Our market research is point-to-point versus having multiple endpoints.”

“With CSO, source selection no longer is a linear process in which, if a provider missed the solicitation, they’ve missed out on winning a government contract.” CSOs can remain open for proposals for years,” said Deal, now contracts director for the Universities Space Research Association, a nonprofit corporation chartered by the government to advance space-related science.

CSO is not synonymous with sole source, Deal explained. Instead, it is a process for selecting merit-based solutions, based on a review of proposals by scientific, technological, or other subject matter experts. It keeps continuous competitive pressure on awardees because the government can easily cancel an award if it finds a better supplier of a capability or a provider that offers an improvement to or a replacement for that commercial solution.

Traditional contract termination requirements don’t apply under CSO, nor can suppliers protest. The government must negotiate its termination expectations, Deal said, because either party can walk away from a deal, so agencies cannot force performance, though providers aren’t paid unless they deliver.

Unlike many existing rapid acquisition processes, CSOs are aimed not just at early-stage companies and emerging technologies, but primarily at innovations—new uses for or adaptations of existing technologies or commercial products already in production or broad use. With imagination, this could apply to almost any tweak of a commercially aimed or sold item.

These innovations are not to be evaluated in comparison with others, but rather based on their individual merits. That moves CSO out of the world of best value and tradeoffs, according to Deal. Price can be evaluated, but given that these are novel products and processes or adaptations of existing ones, pricing can a challenge. DIUx suggests using published price lists, previous contracts, parametric or cost estimation, comparison with similar items, expert analysis, subject matter expertise or anticipated return on investment.

CSOs Don’t Dictate Contract Types

“You have to really do your own homework,” Deal said, “and not rely on the resources that have traditionally been available to a contracting officer, which is ‘I have commodity I need, so I will buy it from whoever has the lowest price.’” CSO users will have to be able to identify fads that may be interesting today but not have the outcome they will want in the future, he said.

Deal also emphasized that CSO is a source selection mechanism, so it does not dictate what type of contract or agreement a program uses to buy an innovative product or process.

Now that GSA has opened CSOs to all, the “DIUx Commercial Solutions Opening How-To Guide” likely will move up on the government bestseller list. As it should for many reasons, including readability. It exhorts program managers and procurement professionals to be bold and use the freedoms they’ve been given.

“While it is important to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, we must also be careful not to sacrifice project results and incur opportunity costs for the sake of removing all project risk via involved process,” it says. Government “must move at the pace of commercial innovation or risk being left behind not only by the commercial marketplace, but by our adversaries as well.”

Anne Laurent, former Executive Editor of Government Executive magazine, runs The Acquisition Innovators Hub, a procurement innovation intelligence collector. Brian Friel, co-founder of BD Squared LLC, a federal business development firm, contributed to this report. The Acquisition Innovators Hub and BD Squared will deliver a webinar on OTAs and CSOs on June 21.

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The Real Problem With Acquisition Training

Anne Laurent and Kymm McCabe — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 12:36:17 -0400

The decades-old debate about proper training for the federal acquisition corps is threatening to erupt in a donnybrook. Lines are being drawn over whom or what to blame for the perceived lack of critical thinking, business and technical knowledge, negotiation skills and creativity among procurement professionals.

Acquisition training institutions have come under fire for failing to renovate their curricula to reflect the predominance of service contracting, the growing need to attract new vendors with innovative techniques and products, the disruptive influence of technology on acquisition and the workforce, and government adoption of commercial models such as data analytics, strategic sourcing, category management and agile procurement.

A recent ASI Government analysis shows there’s a growing gap between the perception of workforce skills held by acquisition leaders and the self-assessment of the professionals they manage. Members of the acquisition workforce have a much more positive view than their leaders.

This perception gap takes on critical importance in light of the fact that the workforce’s view of its weaknesses is used in part to set the training agenda, at least for civilian agencies. So the skills that leaders believe are vitally important and in short supply may not be seen as educational priorities.

The Professional Services Council, an industry trade association, conducts biennial surveys of acquisition leaders and young professionals assessing the procurement corps.

In PSC’s 2014 Acquisition Policy Survey, the majority of acquisition leaders rated the workforce as less than highly competent in skills such as selecting appropriate contract types, business acumen and negotiation. PSC surveyed senior acquisition executives, front-line contracting professionals, congressional staff, oversight community members, young acquisition staffers and industry representatives. The council has conducted the biennial survey for 12 years and similar results have been found throughout that time.

In contrast to the PSC survey, acquisition employees rated themselves highly on choosing contracts and business acumen and only a bit below average on negotiation in the 2014 Acquisition Workforce Competency Survey.

In response to the long-standing trends and heated debate about the acquisition workforce, Stan Soloway, PSC’s president and chief executive officer, is leading a call for “immediate, basic, sweeping and sustained change” in acquisition workforce development.

A new generation of acquisition professionals is “being acculturated and trained in much the same mode as always” leaving development gaps and “a potentially vastly different future” unaddressed, Soloway wrote in the December issue of Contract Management.

He ascribed these failings in part to training “bound to traditional models and assumptions far more relevant to a hardware-dominated, single-customer market of limited commerciality.” Equally to blame, he wrote, is that new recruits to the acquisition corps are inducted with “some form of a Federal Acquisition Regulation ‘boot camp,’” which “tamps down critical thinking and feeds rigidity and risk aversion.”

Soloway’s article ignited an impassioned response from 40-year federal contracting veteran and acquisition expert Vern Edwards. “It is absurd to say that rules stifle critical thinking and creativity,” he wrote in the February 2015 issue of Contract Management. “Knowledge of the rules is the power to solve problems . . . people who are confident in their knowledge of the rules rarely say ‘No’ or ‘It can’t be done.’ They tend to find a way or they make one.”

And so the examination was once again taken off track by calls to overlook the genuine impact of the FAR on culture, innovation and development, distracting readers from the central question: What must we do to prepare an acquisition workforce for the future?

Fortunately, some leaders of the Federal Acquisition Institute and other procurement training organizations are alert to this new era and have begun efforts to transform their curricula accordingly.

FAI board member Jeffrey Koses has given some thought to the challenges of training and retaining millennials, for example, noting that they tend to stay in jobs for only two to three years, while fully developing an acquisition professional takes five to 10 years. Koses, who is senior procurement executive at the General Services Administration, recommends rethinking training to match the way these digital natives are accustomed to receiving and consuming information.

Melissa Starinsky, chancellor of the Veterans Affairs Department Acquisition Academy, says her organization is responding to the new generation by putting many courses online. Enabling distance learning also meets the Office of Management and Budget mandate to reduce travel expenditures, she noted in an October 2014 interview with Federal News Radio.

Koses also wants to use more gaming and simulation in training, in part as a response to the nearly unanimous call from all quarters to increase critical thinking skills. “I prefer training that emphasizes how to think through the challenge, and how to communicate the result, rather than simply providing the technical answers,” he told Contract Management.

Koses is pushing FAI and the Defense Acquisition University to focus on “content that is better focused on how people actually buy, including more courses on task order contracting, rolling out acquisition learning seminars.” He is challenging FAI to adopt just-in-time training by offering “knowledge nuggets,” 20-minute to 30-minute training segments through FAI.gov on such topics as industry engagement, market research, verbal presentations, and acquisition initiatives.

At the VA, Starinsky noted a 2014 spike in requests for just-in-time project acceleration workshops, which allow acquisition offices to call the Acquisition Academy to get quick diagnoses of particular challenges, along with tools to get those projects back on track.

Both Koses and Starinsky are considering ways to make university classes count toward acquisition professional certification requirements to get young people into the workforce faster. And both are convinced that the acquisition workforce must be just as strong in the soft skills and business acumen as in knowledge of the FAR.

Koses is a strong advocate of communication, facilitation and team-building, which he says are characteristic of the strongest contracting officers. The VA academy now offers interdisciplinary training for acquisition teams to learn together. Classes range from lean acquisition management to critical thinking and market intelligence—in other words, “talking to industry well before any requirement turns up,” Starinsky says.

To further those communications Starinsky is testing an education-with-industry program in partnership with the Air Force to allow acquisition professionals to spend 10 months in industry “to get a better idea of where vendors are coming from and so industry will develop a better understanding of what things look like on the government side.”

At GSA, Koses is trying to build an acquisition workforce whose knowledge is deep, rather than wide, to match the agency’s rapid movement into category management. He believes that subject matter expertise is critical, which puts him squarely in the opposite camp from those who argue that a good contracting specialist is one who is trained to buy any product or service. GSA is looking to become a clearinghouse, he says, acquiring and using knowledgeable experience.

Although those who monitor and teach the acquisition workforce don’t yet agree on a common solution for what ails it, they appear to be closing ranks on the need to build a corps of professionals using technology and methods that go well beyond current classrooms and the FAR.

This is critical if government hopes to attract millennials with their energy and unique skills, meet citizens’ expectations, and most importantly, deliver missions necessary to keep the nation strong, safe, financially secure, and in a position of global leadership.

Kymm McCabe is president and CEO of ValueStorm Growth Partners, a lifecycle growth service company that helps government contractors grow their business. Anne Laurent is director of strategic solutions at ASI Government, which provides acquisition and program management support to federal acquisition professionals.

(Image via Andrej Vodolazhskyi/Shutterstock.com)

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Hurricane tracker debuts in time to study Gustav

Anne Laurent — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

MSNBC fortuitously debuted an interactive hurricane tracker last weekend, just as Hurricane Gustav began menacing the Louisiana coast. The tracker was created by Stamen, a San Francisco design firm dedicated to bringing data collections alive in beautiful and informative ways.

Watching Gustav's birth, growth and demise is gripping. You can see the storm slow as it passes over Haiti, dealing the island nation a horrible punch, and then speed up and gather force as it pounds northward toward the Gulf Coast.

This kind of data visualization is growing more common on the Web and is becoming a vital tool for federal officials as they seek insight about everything from storm paths and damage to the spread of epidemics to the effect of policy changes.

For example, Hans Rosling, a Swedish public health expert, created a nonprofit, Gapminder, solely to better visualize the effects of public health policy. His Trendalyzer (purchased by Google and made publicly available in March) is a wonderfully elegant tool that allows users to plug in an X axis and a Y axis and a variety of elements with different values and then play them over time to see change in the chosen areas of investigation -- say, fertility rate (number of children per woman) and life expectancy. Running the numbers for all the countries of the world from 1950 (or whenever they began keeping good statistics) until 2003, quickly explodes the myth that large families and short lives still define the large swath of countries we once knew as the Third World.

Watching Bangladesh suddenly spurt into the small family/high life expectancy portion of the graph as mothers promote family planning in the 1980s is heartening, exciting and mind-bending all at once. Watching the African countries plummet out of the worldwide trend toward longer lives as the AIDS crisis hits in the 1990s is sobering and tragic.

The Brookings Institute is using yet another data visualization tool to model the effects of different policy options on a hypothetical influenza epidemic.

Data visualization also is a way to use technology to amplify human intelligence. Using the Trendalyzer, Stamen's hurricane tracker and other visualizations, anyone can choose the variables and play out history. Armed with information, government officials and citizens can make better decisions. Armed with visualized statistics, government can ensure that many who were closed out of the discussion by their inaptitude for reading statistics can have the same insights as the statistically fluent.

What had been inscrutable ciphers in columns has become palpable and real. More important, data has become manipulable, enabling policymakers, emergency planners, military strategists, public health officials and politicians to better understand the consequences of their decisions or failure to take action.

State of the USA, a nascent nonprofit, seeks to use data visualization not only to explain and predict, but to enable Americans to hold politicians and policymakers accountable by letting them see over time the effect of governmental interventions. The group seeks no less than to generate a report card on the health of the country by assembling visualizations of the data on education, the economy, the environment, health, employment, national security and a number of other issues. It's not hard to imagine such a report becoming a, or even the, key touch point for political campaigns.

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Collaborative Internet tools making inroads into intel agencies

Anne Laurent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A top official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said on Tuesday that the intelligence community was moving inexorably toward embracing online collaboration tools, known as Web 2.0 applications, which hold the promise of improving U.S. intelligence efforts.

"The last frontier used to be the acquisition of information," said Michael Wertheimer, ODNI assistant deputy director for analysis. Now "the last frontier is collaboration. We're not getting incremental gains [in intelligence] on the amount of information we collect. It is the degree we can link up people and collaborate."

Before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in 2004, the president's daily intelligence briefing was produced solely by the CIA. Now, it is a collaborative product of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. State Department employees once sent vital information about foreign governments back to headquarters via cables and then later by e-mail, both of which were visible only within the agency. Now, those messages are published online so intelligence agencies also can view them, which greatly increases situational awareness, said Wertheimer, a vocal advocate for cross-agency communication and cooperation. He calls such steps toward greater collaboration "big wins."

Wertheimer, who spoke at the Web 2.0 and the Future of Government conference sponsored by consulting firm Deloitte and the National Academy of Public Administration on Tuesday in Washington, also outlined other efforts that analysts once viewed with suspicion. For example, all 16 intelligence agencies have agreed to follow standards of tradecraft that require alternative views, and the sources and logic that led to them must be codified and included in all intelligence assessments.

Last summer's hard problem session, a monthlong off-site gathering where analysts worked on especially difficult intelligence challenges, for the first time included state and local law enforcement officers, private specialists, psychologists, biologists and others along with intelligence community participants. They met to study how terrorist activities overseas might become a domestic law enforcement problem and how to handle them.

Wertheimer and others often argue that intelligence agencies have no choice but to become more open, collaborate and adopt Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, now that 60 percent of their analysts have been hired within the last five years and are relatively young. The growth of the internal intelligence wiki, Intellipedia, which allows analysts across the community to post and edit each others' findings, has been phenomenal, he said.

But the zeal of some early adopters of such tools concerns him. "The bloggers worry less about the mission than about getting more bloggers. Intellipedia is more interested in getting more users than in contributing to the mission," Wertheimer said. "We're not yet nudging the early adopters to tinker with the iPhone to see how the adversary will use it to subvert the intelligence community."

Wertheimer also said many analysts still are skeptical about new technology and Web 2.0. Analysts distrust technology staffs, believing they deliver only tools and toys rather than greater capability. His answer to the problem, of course, is collaboration. "We need courses [that include] both of them," he said. "We need to integrate tools. . . . Neurons need to talk to other neurons."

In addition, fear and distrust are impediments on the agency level, he said, noting that ODNI's efforts to convince agencies to share information and people often founder on the ambiguous legislative authority with which the office was created. Each agency is content to discuss other agencies' problems with ODNI officials, but unwilling to examine its own problems, he said. And few willingly follow actions recommended by the director's office for fear that cooperation will lead to more requests for change. "There isn't a sense of common purpose," Wertheimer added.

Countercollaborative skirmishing will diminish, he said, "when we deliver the goods as multiple agencies and people notice."

Wertheimer is excited about this year's hard problem session, where analysts will familiarize themselves with virtual worlds and his boss, Thomas Fingar, deputy director of National Intelligence.

To allay the fears of denizens of synthetic worlds, Wertheimer said the ODNI legal and civil liberties protection offices are working through questions such as whether intelligence analysts can join Second Life or other worlds "just to play," and whether, if they do, they must identify themselves as federal employees.

Wertheimer said of the upcoming gathering, "We're going to have fun. We need to have more fun. It's fun to break codes. An analytic coup is fun. When you make things fun, people want to do more."

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From NextGov.com: NAPA launches collaboration Web site

Anne Laurent — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Read the full story from Nextgov.com.

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Software allows agencies to model disease, disaster response

Anne Laurent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Thanks to a new computer model of the entire U.S. population, agencies soon will be able to test the various strategies, policies and programs for combating epidemics, responding to disasters, improving health habits and more.

The model is big enough to almost encompass the current world population of 6.7 billion (it can house 6 billion individuals, or so-called agents), offering the possibility of testing responses to global pandemics, to worldwide effects of alterations in trade or monetary policy, and the human cost of natural and political disasters, among other global events.

The Large-Scale Agent Model, which resides at the Brookings Institution's Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, hosts 350 million agents that simulate the U.S. population. The model takes into account the age and gender of each agent as it actually occurs in the United States and how those individuals are distributed within the country's 31,255 ZIP codes. These virtual Americans move among ZIP code areas daily, which allows the center to model and track through time and space the progression of, say, an infectious disease outbreak such as pandemic influenza.

The ability to grow artificial societies allows government policy-makers and officials to watch how social, economic, biological and civil events develop based on demographics, and then to see the effects of specific interventions from government or other organizations on the outcomes. Such agent-based modeling took hold in the social and biological sciences and economics in the early 1990s. But only now have they become big enough and flexible enough to model and predict human behavior on a large scale.

The LSAM resides on eight computers at the Brookings Institution's center. It was developed under the auspices of the Homeland Security Department's National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response at Johns Hopkins University.

The large-scale model creates easily understandable visual representations of vast events and takes into account the vagaries of human behavior. Programming into the model the release of a pandemic flu bug in Los Angeles and modeling the rate of infection based on a set variable of interactions that people have with family, work colleagues and schoolmates, produces a spreading scarlet stain across the map of the continental United States as ZIP code area after ZIP code area turns red, signifying that more than 5 percent of the population has become infected.

The model also can take into account a panoply of human responses. Some agents may refuse to be vaccinated, for example, as would a significant portion of the U.S. population in the event of a true epidemic. Adding such realism helps improve the model's predictive power and its depiction of real-world outcomes.

Other variables, such as reducing the interactions between people, can help policy-makers decide what to do in case of a real outbreak. In the LA-based flu scenario, the model showed that reducing interactions among agents by 75 percent for one month prevented the outbreak from becoming an epidemic. Reducing interactions caused the outbreak to fizzle for lack of carriers.

In real life, a government proscription against attending school, going to work, shopping -- what is known as a nonpharmaceutical intervention called "social distancing" -- would seem draconian and be difficult if not impossible to carry out. So what about a 50 percent reduction over six months? Well, many more people die, but the longer period buys time to develop a vaccine.

It's easy to imagine how such modeling could improve policy-makers' understanding of the dynamics of epidemics and therefore help them develop better preventive strategies.

Adding information to the model can make the predictions better. Brookings plans to add the location and the patient capacity for every hospital and emergency room in the United States. It then can test if the resources are distributed properly in case of an outbreak. Ultimately, the plan is to model the global population.

Combining agent-based and other computer models produces richer depictions. Brookings has collaborated with Bharat Soni of the University of Alabama at Birmingham mechanical engineering department to examine transportation options in response to chemical contaminant releases in cities. Their model shows how a toxic plume from a river barge would spread across New Orleans and how people in the city's buildings would react. As the simulation runs, it's immediately obvious that numerous deaths would result simply because people, as they exit buildings by the thousands to escape, would become stuck in the congested streets under the toxic cloud.

The outcome suggests any number of government interventions, including a simple requirement that those in harm's way remain in a building. But the simulation also will model human behavior during disasters, including resistance both to evacuation and remaining in a shelter, the desire to locate and join family members, concern for property and the belief that authorities are unreliable.

The hybrid model, combining a toxic release and the response of cyber-people, is wholly novel, according to Joshua Epstein, director of the Brookings center, who also heads up global epidemic modeling for the National Institutes of Health Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study. "As far as we're concerned, agent-based modeling is an all-terrain vehicle applicable to all sorts of scenarios," he said during a March 12 press event at Brookings.

But Epstein, a pioneer in applying agent-based models in the social studies, says the university center of excellence is autonomous and retains the right to choose what it studies so the model could not be commandeered by a federal agency. For example, "if the government wanted to use it to figure out better means for urban warfare, Brookings could refuse," he said.

On March 11, the Brookings center received the 2008 Modeling and Simulation Award for Outstanding Achievement in Analysis from the National Training and Simulation Association for their computational feat in creating such a large model suited for many research projects and diseases. Written in the programming language JAVA, the model can be rapidly developed and run on computers using different operating systems.

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Virtual training companies offer products to military

Anne Laurent — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The exhibit hall booms and cracks with the sounds of virtual bombs hitting targets and rifles firing. A number of booths are staffed with small villages of people in Middle Eastern garb, arguing, haggling and keening as they enact market scenes and arrests.

In the lecture halls, the interactions are more serious. Air Force Gen. William R. Looney opened the conference on Tuesday by noting that "today, our airmen are trained in the same structure that we trained in in 1942. A class shows up, is billeted and begins class with an instructor in a classroom." That format, he said, simply won't work for new recruits. "The young men and women joining our services are used to doing things on their own time. They don't want to wait until 0800 on Tuesday morning. They want to work at it on their PDA at 2 a.m. They prefer to take the test when they're ready, not when it's scheduled."

Retired Air Force Gen. Larry Welch, president of the Institute for Defense Analysis, reinforced the need for change. "We are asking soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to fight in cities among multiple cultures with different motives, affiliations, incentives [that] we never expected soldiers or Marines to have to deal with on a daily basis. It has created the strategic company commander, the strategic platoon sergeant, the strategic squad leader." How can the services prepare these new players? "Simulation is going to play a major part. We badly need those immersive simulations so they can experience the environment before they are in it."

And so it went all day -- flag officers, active and retired, admitting they are leading a generation of service members whose learning styles and needs are utterly at odds with military teaching tradition. Members of the generation known as the millennials "are coming into a Navy whose physical, program and policy structure was built for [baby] boomers," said Vice Admiral John C. Harvey, chief of naval personnel. "But we are on our way out." Boomers make up only 3 percent of the military. More than 40 percent of service members were born after 1985.

"It's digital immigrants versus digital natives, and soldiers today are natives. They are very comfortable with gaming, and it allows them to get more done in less time," said Maj. Gen. James W. Parker, who heads the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

So what exactly are the services looking for from companies in the simulation, virtual worlds and high-tech training arena?

For starters, help in leveraging network-centric -- or better, infocentric -- operations, says Welch. And training for service members in how to manage the flood of information now available to them in theaters of operations. "We have to face up to the fact that while we are in a world of explosive access to new knowledge, the ability of the human to retain the information is clearly limited," he said. "To prepare people for what we are going to ask, we need repetitive, tailored, highly accessible distributed training. . . . We need to teach people how to discover what they need to know when they need to know it."

Language and cultural training is critical, said Paul Mayberry, deputy undersecretary of Defense for readiness. People from all over government need training in working together in small teams on nation-building and training foreign nationals, he said. Several speakers at the conference had high praise for Tactical Iraqi, a game produced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Mayberry also said there's a need for simulators to help the services find ways to train, especially with live fire and sonar, in ways that limit environmental damage and harm to animals. Whatever companies come up with must be interoperable, he stressed. "If companies develop products based on proprietary information, data or systems, it is a nonstarter from the very beginning."

For the Navy, especially, companies also must devise ways of delivering computerized training to a force that is routinely at sea. "How will we deliver it in a dispersed, expeditionary force without T1 lines trailing it?" Harvey asked.

Officers suggested that the proliferation of improvised explosive devices soon will be every bit the threat that nuclear proliferation has been. So IED detection is a vital need. Parker would like to find a way to tag and track soldiers involved in civil operations, and to get help in assessing which candidates will make the best Special Forces members.

To create the strategic leaders in the lower ranks required in war with an adaptive enemy, officers are seeking a way to better teach rapid decision-making in ambiguous environments, discrimination in the application of fire, and intelligence fusion. They also want better portrayals of terrain in simulation and simulated players with better artificial intelligence to react to service members in training scenarios.

With all the emphasis on digital natives and computerized training, you'd think it was a slam dunk that most soldiers are avid gamers. But according to a couple of recent studies, that might not be true. According to James Belanich of the Army's Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, only 30 percent to 40 percent of soldiers have video game experience. He and several other researchers surveyed 777 West Point cadets and found 60 percent had no or limited experience with video games. A second project showed that of 10,000 soldiers surveyed, fewer than 32 percent play video games weekly. While suggesting further study, Belanich said his results indicate that the wholesale embrace of game-based training could leave some soldiers offline.

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Making sensors more sensitive nets Army engineer top civilian award

Anne Laurent — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

That's no doubt why Joshua Fairley, an engineer and program manager with the near-surface phenomenology program at the Army Corps of Engineers' Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss., recently won the Defense Department David O. Cooke Excellence in Public Administration award. This is only the third time the award has been given out.

Working in Countermine Phenomenology, Joint Antiterrorism-Force Protection and Anti-Terrorist Barrier programs, Fairley used a CrayXT3, the second-largest Defense Department supercomputer, to create a simulated virtual environment to find out what affects the accuracy of sensors. With that data, Fairley developed a mathematical formula to improve the detection of mines and improvised explosive devices and to reduce false negatives -- boosting sensor accuracy, at least in the virtual world, by 75 percent.

Essentially, Fairley was able to mathematically model how specific sensors the military uses "see" what's around them and how they pick out the specific heat signatures of explosives and other threats in the cacophony of a rural environment. The "noise" is created by everything from soil to terrain. Fairley's accomplishment was to replicate a geotypical rural environment in minute detail right down to the weeds. He can't say exactly which environment, but a good guess might be, say, Iraq or Afghanistan.

While it might seem odd that an Army Corps of Engineers military engineering laboratory would be working on detecting mines, the Corps is a natural home for experiments in modeling geography, given its long history with massive civil works projects to redirect rivers and move earth.

Denizens of online virtual worlds, be they massively multiplayer games or communities, are accustomed to moving about in re-created environments, and branches of the military already are training in replicas of a number of locales in Iraq, so the extent of Fairley's accomplishment might not be immediately apparent. What's impressive is the level of detail he has achieved not in creating an artist's rendering of terrain, but in visually modeling the actual attributes down to dirt and leaves and in virtualizing the amounts and types of heat they give off.

When this achievement is applied to sensors in theater, service members will be better able to pinpoint and defuse explosives, saving limbs and lives.

In addition to his sensor work, Fairley also developed a testing apparatus for "an anti-terrorist barrier system with unusual dimensions and high load requirements, later validated with full-scale crash tests," according to the press release about his award. The presumably large, strong and oddly shaped protective structures now are in military and civilian use.

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Virtually There

Anne Laurent — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Fortunately, he's only an avatar, a digital representation of David Bartlett, director of marketing and business development for the national security division of Forterra Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., company that creates private online virtual worlds for companies and government agencies.

For four years, Bartlett the man bought flight simulators for the Marines. The last four years of his Marine career were spent as chief of operations for the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office. He also worked for Silicon Graphics, the high-end computing firm out of Sunnyvale, Calif., and as senior director of modeling, simulation and analysis in the federal division of Arlington, Va.-based contractor CACI.

Bart and I weren't in Baghdad, by the way, but in a virtual replica of a part of the Green Zone. In Forterra's Baghdad, the buildings are geospecific -- they are where they really are on the streets, but they aren't exact replicas; instead, they are geotypical, Bartlett says.

Virtual Baghdad is part of the Asymmetric Warfare-Virtual Training Technology, a platform Forterra is building under contract to the Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command. The training ground will host unconventional warfare operations.

It's still eerie riding shotgun in the SUV on the empty, desolate streets of the infamous Iraqi city. Across the Euphrates, the other side of town is visible. The dun-colored buildings and occasional wreckage mirror so many news photos. Enter a sheik's home and there he is, speaking Arabic and gesturing angrily at any slight by the culturally maladroit Americans. The discomfort is intentional; it's a learning game, after all, and the more immersed the players, the better.

"The National Training Center has 300 role players and whole Iraqi villages set up. It's cheaper for them to just jump into a virtual world," Bartlett says.

His company isn't creating worlds as backgrounds for first-person shooter games; its worlds host soldiers, medical personnel, first responders or corporate staffers. The goal isn't to tote up kills and avoid being killed. Instead, Forterra creates sandboxes where people learn to interact, be they members of a military squad, a public health care team or firefighters and police officers.

Go to the on-screen teleporting dropdown menu and choose "hospital," for example, and your avatar is transported to the entrance of a replica of Stanford Medical Center in California. No one's around just now, but inside, taped to the exact-copy walls, are the handwritten signs directing emergency teams to triage locations for various degrees of wounds. They're leftovers from a recent disaster recovery exercise held in-world.

They offer distributed learning -- trainees can sit at any laptop or PC with Internet access, and connect with others anywhere else to train. They are collaborative, based on many years of experience with multiplayer video games.

"You can jump in-world after you've practiced a mission," he says. "You can bring in guys just back from Iraq and plug in localized sites. The worlds can be set up based on where wars are."

The enemies aren't powered by artificial intelligence; they are real people, and you share a cockpit, Humvee, convoy or seize a piece of Baghdad with your real buddies. In fact, Forterra was built in 1998 from a popular social networking site called There.

Today, the best known such world is Linden Labs' Second Life; many organizations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, have virtual islands in Second Life. The National Defense University is trying to set up a consortium to establish a larger federal presence there. But Second Life increasingly has been troubled by anarchists and malcontents disrupting virtual press conferences, defacing virtual buildings and setting off virtual bombs.

"Enterprises may be better served by taking advantage of custom, private 'closed' worlds to fill specific requirements," Gartner advised. "Such systems are already used by the U.S. military and other commercial enterprises. Companies such as Forterra Systems have developed customized immersive environments for a wide range of uses," the report says.

Indeed, Forterra is in talks with intelligence agencies and recently struck a $1.4 million deal with the CIA's technology incubator, In-Q-Tel.

There's also an engagement with the Homeland Security Department in the works. With intelligence agencies, Forterra is working to let analysts collaborate using digital mapping and online communications so they can "be with the data in a virtual environment," Bartlett says.

The company also is working with others on the Holy Grail, networking the different virtual world simulations of all the military services.

"In the future, your tank simulation is in a virtual world. Your avatar jumps in, and you look to the left and your pal's avatar is driving. You see what your avatar sees," he says. "It's Web-enabled, so you can download 3-D maps of cities, and take a battalion and network it with a group already in, say, Korea and train up and drive around key areas together.

"It's about your training requirement. If you need to train with the British, you can do it with real aircraft in a virtual world," says Bartlett. "It's about the human unpredictability. I can beat the artificial intelligence, but I don't know what the human is going to do."

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Virtually There

Anne Laurent — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, any place anywhere can be modeled and used for training online.

Bart Bartlett, a military officer, drives me past a dead dog on a Baghdad street. "Is there an IED in that dog?" I ask. "Let's see," he says, parking the white SUV and hopping out. Almost immediately, there is an explosion. Black smoke obscures the view. Bartlett is knocked to the ground, probably dead.

Bart Bartlett resembles David right down to the moustache because he was created from a scan of the real man, a former Marine officer who spent 23 years in aviation and program management for the Marine Corps and the Defense Department. For four years, Bartlett the man bought flight simulators for the Marines. The last four years of his Marine career were spent as chief of operations for the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office. He also worked for Silicon Graphics, the high-end computing firm out of Sunnyvale, Calif., and as senior director of modeling, simulation and analysis in the federal division of Arlington, Va.-based contractor CACI.

Bart and I weren't in Baghdad, by the way, but in a virtual replica of a part of the Green Zone. In Forterra's Baghdad, the buildings are geospecific-they are where they really are on the streets, but they aren't exact replicas; instead, they are geotypical, Bartlett says. Virtual Baghdad is part of the Asymmetric Warfare-Virtual Training Technology, a platform Forterra is building under contract to the Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command. The training ground will host unconventional warfare operations.

That's where the actors come in. Forterra hires them from around the world to be on call to "play" avatars during exercises because it's when the checkpoint goes live in the virtual Green Zone that the real engagement begins. "The National Training Center has 300 role players and whole Iraqi villages set up. It's cheaper for them to just jump into a virtual world," Bartlett says. His company isn't creating worlds as backgrounds for first-person shooter games; its worlds host soldiers, medical personnel, first responders or corporate staffers. The goal isn't to tote up kills and avoid being killed. Instead, Forterra creates sandboxes where people learn to interact, be they members of a military squad, a public health care team or firefighters and police officers.

Bartlett, an old hand in the world of weapons system simulators, explains the allure of virtual exercises. They are affordable, he says, much cheaper than elaborate flight or vehicle simulators, vastly cheaper than destroying real equipment or firing live ammunition on ranges. They offer distributed learning-trainees can sit at any laptop or PC with Internet access, and connect with others anywhere else to train. They are collaborative, based on many years of experience with multiplayer video games. "You can jump in-world after you've practiced a mission," he says.

"You can bring in guys just back from Iraq and plug in localized sites. The worlds can be set up based on where wars are." The enemies aren't powered by artificial intelligence; they are real people, and you share a cockpit, Humvee, convoy or seize a piece of Baghdad with your real buddies. In fact, Forterra was built in 1998 from a popular social networking site called There.

Gartner, the well-regarded information technology consulting firm headquartered in Stamford, Conn., released a report in April predicting that 80 percent of Internet users and Fortune 500 enterprises will be participating in virtual worlds by 2011. Today, the best known such world is Linden Labs' Second Life; many organizations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, have virtual islands in Second Life. The National Defense University is trying to set up a consortium to establish a larger federal presence there. But Second Life increasingly has been troubled by anarchists and malcontents disrupting virtual press conferences, defacing virtual buildings and setting off virtual bombs.

Indeed, Forterra is in talks with intelligence agencies and recently struck a $1.4 million deal with the CIA's technology incubator, In-Q-Tel.

The company also is working with others on the Holy Grail, networking the different virtual world simulations of all the military services. "In the future, your tank simulation is in a virtual world. Your avatar jumps in, and you look to the left and your pal's avatar is driving. You see what your avatar sees," he says. "It's Web-enabled, so you can download 3-D maps of cities, and take a battalion and network it with a group already in, say, Korea and train up and drive around key areas together.

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Masterminds

Anne Laurent — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Behind the scenes, C-title executives run the show.

As our cover connotes, this issue is about the people who pull the strings behind the scenes in departments and agencies. The chiefs of finance, information, information security, human capital and acquisition aren't as widely known as Cabinet secretaries and agency heads. They often aren't quoted in the media-outside of Government Executive, that is. They don't head up large, well-known organizations such as the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Postal Service, Social Security Administration or Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

But they set policies for and run the backbone services that make or break government.

Chief human capital officers orchestrate the hiring and management of employees with the right skills to get astronauts to the moon and Mars, rescue and reconstruct during and after disasters, move supplies to soldiers in Iraq, build the most powerful and complex computer systems in the world, collect more than $2 trillion in taxes annually, prevent an unknown number of terrorist acts each year, and more.

Chief information officers surf the rapids of technological change, steady the rudder when firewalls are breached or data is lost, and keep watch for innovations that will enhance agency operations. Along with chief information security officers, they keep watch to secure networks and to sound the alarm so the crew stays alert and ready to repel attackers.

Chief finance officers work their magic on agencies' books, cleaning, ordering and taming huge flows of funds into and out of some of the biggest "businesses" in America. Their yea or nay can open or close the spigot on investments in gigantic IT projects, added services, new organizations and other big purchases. They have brought down improper payments by federal entities by $8.8 billion since 2004 and found and disposed of $4.5 billion in excess property in the past two years.

Chief acquisition officers oversee purchases of goods and services that totaled $425 billion in 2006. CAOs set policies to guide that massive buying effort and to buttress and develop the staff of experts who handle procurements. Acquisition chiefs are especially focused on rebuilding the buying corps after it was gutted in the 1990s. They point to short staffing as the root of many, even most, procurement scandals and improprieties cropping up so regularly in recent years. The value of purchases has doubled or more at many agencies, while the acquisition workforce has flat-lined.

The chiefs are wizards, guardians, gatekeepers, conductors and navigators as our terrific artist, Chris Sickels of Red Nose Studio, has rendered them. But more than that, they are the masters of an increasingly complicated and interconnected set of crucial services. Through this directory, our chief-focused breakfast series and our ongoing coverage, we remain dedicated to illuminating their challenges and achievements.

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Burned Out

Anne Laurent — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Equipment shortages and budget gaps leave states vulnerable to wildfires.

Firefighters battled blazes in Los Angeles and New Jersey in May, against a backdrop of serious shortages of equipment among National Guard units across the country, an ongoing lack of firefighting aircraft, concern about covering the cost of battling blazes and predictions of a long hot summer.

As of May 29, 35,593 fires had scorched nearly 1.3 million acres across the United States. Last year, 96,385 fires burned 9.9 million acres. Efforts to suppress fires on federal land cost the Forest Service nearly $2 billion in 2006; its firefighting budget is based on the 10-year average of firefighting costs, and increasingly, that number is proving too small. For fiscal 2008, the Bush administration requested $911 million for Forest Service firefighting. Three years ago, Congress set aside $1 billion for federal agencies to tap after their fire budgets were spent-the fund was emptied last year.

Americans' desire to live near nature is sparking the increases in the cost of suppressing fire. More than 8 million houses have been built on the edge of wilderness since 1999, forcing firefighters to protect new structures.

Meanwhile, much of the nation's aerial firefighting fleet remains grounded. After three plane crashes in 2002, all the World War II-era large tanker planes were pulled from the skies for safety checks. Only 16 of 40 are back flying. As a result, Alaska has adopted a policy of letting wilderness homes burn to preserve resources to fight fires in cities and towns. California and Minnesota have built their own fleets, and other states have begun relying on them for help.

Partly, that's because states no longer are certain their National Guard units can be counted on. Though guard spokespeople in many states assure that they are ready, the Guard's national chief, Lt. Gen. H. Stephen Blum, has been stoking the fears of governors and Congress members about equipment shortages. Today, the guard is equipped at only 50 percent of its needs, Blum told legislators in May. He was pushing the Defense Department's request for $22 billion in equipment spending over the coming five years.

Guard units increasingly are leaving their equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan to outfit their replacements. That leaves stateside units short for training and for disaster recovery. Many states rely on the Guard for Humvees and other vehicles to distribute disaster aid and for planes and helicopters to help fight fires and perform rescues. "Those 40-year-old trucks are here in the U.S. because they are not good enough to go to the war. But someone thinks they are good enough to be used to save American lives," Blum said.

The outlook for wildland fires through August is higher than normal this year for most of the country. Drought is expanding in the West and Southeast. Lower snowfall, warmer than predicted weather and early snow melt has dried out timber and brought an early onset of the fire season in the West. Abundant new grass also is expected to cure early, bringing the threat of more active and prolonged grassland fires in the West.

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Army launches video pitch for futuristic weapons program

Anne Laurent — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

For example, "Safehouse," a video released on the Army's FCS Web site in October 2006, promotes FCS not only as the ultimate in network-centric warfare, but as a lifesaver, too.

It opens with an Army sergeant working in a clinic in a Southeast Asian village. A woman rushes in carrying her unconscious daughter. The sergeant slaps sensors on the child and, using a laptop, gets a fast meningitis diagnosis from the United States. The video continues as soldiers using unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, sensors and high-tech communications gear track and capture Salandeo, a narcoterrorist.

See the video below:

On another front, Future Force Company Commander (known as "F2C2") a video game developed and paid for by FCS integrator SAIC can be downloaded for free from the Army Web site. Players command a mounted combat team in 2015.

Regen Wilson, SAIC spokesman, says the game was de-signed to let troops have a taste of what FCS will be like. SAIC has handed out more than 24,000 copies of the game.

Also on the FCS Web site is a debunking section called Myths and Realities. "The problem is not that the Army or FCS is too expensive; it is that some in our country seem to balk at what is historically imperative for our national defense," it warns.

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It's the Training Gain, Not the Game

Anne Laurent — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Soldiers go online to stay alive in Iraq.

The National Training Center at Fort Irwin, northeast of Barstow, Calif., is the pre-eminent place other than war to learn what combat, urban fighting, ambushes and, increasingly, counterinsurgency are like. But relatively few of the Army's units get to spend much time there-it's time-consuming and expensive in terms of travel, wear and tear on equipment, and paying for role-players and experts. NTC is being transformed by lessons learned in Iraq, but it's still hard for training to keep up with the daily changes in insurgents' techniques.

So what if the Army could somehow package NTC training, or at least key parts of it, and send it along with deploying troops as software playable on a PC or laptop? That's the notion behind the DARWARS program to accelerate the development and deployment of next-generation training systems at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARWARS manager Ralph Chatham has fathered a family of 80 percent solutions to immediate training challenges across the military.

Like other DARPA managers, Chatham can't force his products on the services; instead, he distributes via diffusion. He relies on the "cool" factor of his products to entice users. "I use the press, word of mouth. Units say, 'I want it,' and force their administrative units to buy it," he says. Diffusion is behind the viral spread of DARWARS' two most successful tools: "Tactical Iraqi" and "DARWARS Ambush!"

"Tactical Iraqi" is designed to impart basic proficiency in Baghdad Arabic and Iraqi culture in just two weeks to soldiers and Marines whose duties have expanded from being expert riflemen to acting as mayors and negotiators and civil works managers in Iraq. "We wanted to make sure no one would have to ride a horse into a culture blind like the first Special Forces into Afghanistan," Chatham says.

An early lesson in the video game shows the student's avatar (an on-screen image, in this case, of a soldier), on a street in Iraq with another uniformed trooper. Assigned to find out who and where the town's leader is, the soldiers approach several men sitting outside a café. The interchange goes better if the avatar removes his sunglasses, says hello and introduces his companion before asking questions. On his first try, Chatham, who admits to being linguistically challenged, got the leader's name and location. But the situation turned ugly because he failed to say thank you. "You didn't say thank you, you son of a bitch!" one of the men shouted at the departing soldiers. "My own intellectual vision cursed me in Arabic," Chatham ruefully recalls.

"DARWARS Ambush!" started with a challenge from DARPA Director Anthony J. Tether in 2003: What can you do to mitigate the damage to our forces from ambushes? Chatham sought "to train the voice in the back of the head of every soldier" how to identify an ambush, what to do during one, how to avoid them and what to do after one."

The squad-level, multiplayer PC program built on the commercial game "Operation Flashpoint" was developed and delivered to Iraq in six months. It originally was intended to simulate ambushes on convoys. It isn't designed to teach soldiers how to drive in Iraq, but how to mentally prepare for attacks. Soldiers play both the American convoy and the insurgents.

Chatham couldn't have predicted what they would do with his game. "We built it on "Flashpoint" because it had a powerful set of user-friendly authoring tools. . . . It morphed into soldier-authoring-a soldier can put his own scenario in, in less than a day," he says.

"We sent two sets with a Stryker brigade to Iraq and left a set behind at Fort Lewis in Washington. A year later they had 64 computers training 400 soldiers a week in scenarios to match what they needed," Chatham says. "In the summer of 2005, 800 cadets practiced infantry operations in what I thought were convoy trainers."

At Fort Polk, La., a soldier used "Ambush!" to create a replica of the populous area of the base that houses headquarters buildings and the exchange. To convert the game for a disaster relief exercise, he rolled virtual tanks over a swath of the scenario to simulate tornado damage. "They flew the relief coordinator over in a virtual helicopter," Chatham says.

Precisely because of successes like this, DARWARS is closing up shop. "DARPA is the [attention deficit disorder] poster child for developmental research: We quit when we've proven the point," Chatham says. "We have shown people who think training remotely is a bunch of Web pages and a single user that you can manage multiple users and can find out in experiential learning how people perform."

Chatham has learned a few lessons about training games: They aren't trainerless-they work much better embedded in an organization, so soldiers are encouraged to practice together. They don't automatically train for what you're after. They are relatively cheap, until you paste training on top of them. And most of all, it's the training gain, not the game, that counts.

Even as it fades, DARWARS lives on in a new DARPA project, "RealWorld," a game-based trainer that takes "Ambush!" a step further by adding geospecific landscapes. The goal is for soldiers to be able to build replicas of the site of an operation in a day or two and then practice there in advance of their mission. The first set of usable tools is slated to appear in 2008.

Chatham can't explain exactly why video games work so well for training, but he knows one thing: "A key element is user authoring. It makes users want to try it because they can make it do what they want."

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Study forecasts downturn in IT spending

Anne Laurent — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The report, "Government 2.0," also predicted double-digit growth in dollars going to companies that will directly support or even take over government programs. It was published by Government Futures, a strategy and consulting company founded by a team led by federal market insider Bruce McConnell, and is based in part on a survey of 130 executives in federal agencies and firms selling to government, academics and other observers.

McConnell ran IT technology policy for the Clinton administration and in 2000 formed McConnell International, a Washington-based consultancy advising companies selling to the government.

In the next 36 months, federal buying power is likely to move away from technologists into the hands of program managers, the report stated. It said changes in federal demand will result in a shift away from firms providing IT services such as seat management, software maintenance, hosting and IT staff, and toward companies that manage grants and loans, finances and personnel; answer client queries; handle logistics and investigations; and collect debts and do land management.

"The increase in mission support services will more than make up for the decline in traditional IT spending, but new companies will be in," McConnell said.

Continued pressure from the federal budget deficit and the need to sustain military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing complexity of federal operations, agencies' increasingly commercial approaches to technology and the drive for measurable results coupled with risk aversion among program managers are among factors driving the market to evolve, McConnell said.

Government Futures aims to be "a predictions company" rather than a traditional consulting firm, he said, by using Internet tools to tap the collective wisdom of buyers and sellers in the federal market and informed observers to prognosticate about events and trends three or more years out. It will involve market players through blogs, focus group surveys and even futures markets, in which participants essentially will bet on the likelihood of future occurrences.

"We're trying to be edgy," McConnell said. "We want the story behind the story."

For example, more than half of those surveyed for "Government 2.0" expect that 30 percent of civil servants will be working in virtual offices by 2008. More than 60 percent think the transition to the upgraded network known as Internet Protocol version 6 is unlikely to be easy. Less than a third believe the Office of Management and Budget's lines of business initiative encouraging agencies to consolidate back-end systems in areas including financial management and human resources will have disappeared by 2010.

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Doomed

Anne Laurent — Mon, 10 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Stampeded by fear of what it perceives to be the public's impatience for action-any action-to forestall repetition of the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress has been clamoring for a new Cabinet-level homeland security department for months. The Bush administration caught the fever when revelations about missed signals before 9/11 began threatening its nearly unassailable post-9/11 popularity. Thus, as with the creation of the Transportation Security Administration in November, the Hill and the White House are sure to quickly close ranks around an insufficient plan. The TSA has been begging for more money and risks missing its Dec. 31 deadline for screening all luggage destined for commercial airliners.

The latest post-9/11 reshuffling of government's organizational chart is just sleight of hand. The administration hopes to cause a huge commotion around the edges to distract a worried public from noticing the hole at the core of its domestic response to terrorism. For what this grand plan glaringly and startlingly lacks is a carefully crafted strategy, with goals and measures for success. No one in this administration has adequately or comprehensively defined what "homeland security" is going to mean in this country. Nor are there signs in this plan that the drafters soberly weighed the best means for achieving it.

Instead, months apparently were spent studying prescient reports of yore about our terrorism vulnerabilities only to ignore their most important messages. Take for example, the January 2001 report of the bipartisan Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, headed by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. Its first and most important recommendation is that the president develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent, protect against and, if all else fails, respond to attacks on the homeland. Only later does it propose a reorganization, one nowhere near the scale of what's on the table today.

Taking account of myriad reports about the catastrophic management effects of the dual missions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service-border control and enforcement vs. immigration facilitation-Hart-Rudman recommends splitting off the Border Patrol and putting it in a new homeland security agency. But the Bush administration ignores INS' duality and fails to muster the political courage to champion a new, more realistic policy to heal our national ambivalence about immigration. Instead, the president dumps the INS, well-documented problems and all, into a massive and unwieldy new department. This after first ordering an administrative reorganization of the agency in November and then signing on to a House-passed bill splitting it in two. Apparently it's reorganization über alles for Mr. Bush and company.

The administration similarly punts on the Customs Service, so afflicted by its competing missions-to speed people and goods in and out of the country while at the same time aggressively inspecting them for contraband-that the common plaint of its inspectors is, "Just tell me what you want me to do!" Just 7,200 Customs inspectors nationwide screen more than 11 million trucks, 5 million cargo containers, 2 million rail cars, 800,000 commercial aircraft and hundreds of thousands of private aircraft, vessels, vehicles and passengers entering the United States every year. And the volume of trade is expected to double by 2020.

The president apparently believes that simply focusing those inspectors more closely on homeland security will clear up the mission conflict-largely in favor of enforcement, one presumes-and the resource problem. The "how" isn't exactly clear, especially since the new department is to be created without increasing staffing or funding beyond that currently allotted to its constituent agencies: 170,000 employees and $37 billion, not even as many or as much as the Veterans Affairs Department. Lauded as the first "corporate" presidency, the Bush team no doubt will find a Superman or -woman to name as Homeland Security Secretary and hold accountable for solving its pesky management problems on the cheap.

Those worriers on the Hart-Rudman Commission sought to forestall just such an outcome: "Steps must also be taken to strengthen these three organizations themselves," the commissioners wrote, referring to Customs, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard. Along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, those three formed the core of the new agency the commission proposed. All three are "on the verge of being overwhelmed by the mismatch between their growing duties and their mostly static resources," the commission found.

Unlike Customs and INS, the Coast Guard distinguishes itself by dint of amazing efficiency at juggling a set of widely disparate missions-law enforcement, maritime safety, marine environmental protection and national security-while its resources have stagnated. Only three fleets of ships in the world are older than the Coast Guard's; its staff isn't much larger than it was in 1967. Government Executive's Federal Performance Project gave the Coast Guard an A for management ability in 2001, in contrast to Customs' C in 1999 and the INS's D this year and C- in 1999.

But even the can-do Coasties have begun crying "uncle" recently, courageously telling politicians they no longer can take on new missions without reducing performance in the old ones. While the Coast Guard arguably is one of the best-suited components for a new homeland security organization, moving it there without attending at once to its resource shortages, as the Bush plan does, is sheer folly.

FEMA, too, is a logical player on any homeland security team. It won a high B from the performance project in 1999 and has been unceasingly lauded for its complete management makeover under the leadership of Clinton-era Administrator James Lee Witt. The Hart-Rudman Commission envisioned FEMA as the homeland security team leader, however, while the Bush plan assigns it lesser "central component" status. That's a shame because the real work of responding to attacks, and in many cases of preventing them, falls not on federal agencies, but on state and local government employees. Respecting, supporting, emboldening and assisting those "first-responders" has become FEMA's forte.

At least the Bush plan notes this and pledges to continue FEMA's practices. Nevertheless, it's hard to see how a FEMA-like focus on devolution and public-private cooperation possibly could come to characterize what will become government's third-largest entity if Congress assents.

Despite its size and intimidating sweep of authority, the new department glaringly omits some agencies and curiously includes others or assigns them puzzling responsibilities. For example, as a recent letter writer to Government Executive notes, for 30 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has responded to hazardous materials and oil spill incidents through its 200 on-scene coordinators. Coordinators were on the ground in New York and Washington handling the attack sites on Sept. 11 and in Florida when anthrax appeared there. Hopefully the department will take advantage of EPA's expertise even though it's not included.

And let's pray relations are good between the Homeland Security Department's Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Countermeasures division and the Public Health Service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which remain in the Health and Human Services Department. The Agriculture Department was tapped to donate its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to the new department. With all due respect to the inspection abilities of APHIS' eager beagles, why not the Food Safety and Inspection Service or the Food and Drug Administration?

And why should we expect those responsible for analyzing information at the new department-presumably an amalgam of employees currently at Customs, INS, the Coast Guard and within the cybersecurity agencies slated for absorption-will be better able to sort information than the intelligence agencies currently on the job? It takes many years to groom intelligence analysts for specific areas of inquiry and it's not clear they can easily or quickly be shifted to new ones. Odd, too, that the FBI, whose foibles apparently helped goose the new department into being, remains apart and thereby potentially as aloof as ever.

What's particularly galling about the absence of a strong, broad and deep strategic rationale for the new department is that there could have been one. The agencies that have handled all the missions now planned for the Department of Homeland Security for years have learned plenty doing it. That expertise was there for the asking. In addition, the administration could have drawn advice and counsel from the ranks of former leaders, academics, think tanks and companies that have wrestled for years with the problems of homeland security and government organization.

Consulting a number of them on the eve of George W. Bush's ascendancy for our "Memo to the President" in January 2001 provoked surprising unanimity on one priority: reorganization. From the liberal Brookings Institution to the conservative Heritage Foundation, thoughtful commentators agreed that Bush ought to use the bully pulpit to mount a campaign to revisit and revise decades-old departments and agencies created based on the needs, resources and demographics of times gone by. But what they envisioned was a re-examination of the federal government's role, a careful sorting of priorities and reordering of functions, and the shaping of new entities built for 21st century performance.

The proposed Department of Homeland Security meets none of those criteria. Instead, like the Transportation Security Administration before it, it smacks of cynicism about Americans' ability to distinguish progress from mere motion. And like the TSA, it is being set up to fail.

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Raising The Ante

Anne Laurent — Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Venture capitalists are helping government buy its way back into the emerging technology market.

omputer gamer Gilman Louie now plays for keeps.

Former chief of online projects at toy maker Hasbro, inventor of the popular Falcon F-16 flight simulator and importer of the hypnotic Soviet computer puzzle Tetris, Louie now ferrets out emerging technologies and invests in them for the CIA. He is the most visible of a new breed of government buyers. They're using venture capital to lure technology innovators into the federal market they once shunned. Louie runs In-Q-Tel, a 3-year-old nonprofit "venture catalyst" created and funded by the CIA to place bets on technologies likely to succeed at the agency-as well as in the commercial market.

Louie's at the leading edge of a desperate push to speed the latest, greatest gizmos, gadgets and software into the hands of federal users. Especially since Sept. 11, legislators and the Bush administration are intent on driving high-impact technology into government-especially the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. If that means powering over, past or through traditional contractors, procurement methods and people, so be it.

The Defense Department has taken to pleading publicly for anti-terrorist technology. The first such call, in October, netted more than 12,000 proposals. A second was issued in March. This year's $159 million Defense Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations program is larded with homeland security and counterterrorism measures. The 7-year-old program seeks to bypass the acquisition process, quickly prototyping developing technology and getting it into use. In December, Defense launched a dozen rapid improvement projects to test ways to implant new technology within 18 months.

Outside Defense, the White House Office of Homeland Security dedicated four staffers to meet with industry and weigh technology proposals. Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., announced in February his plan for a national test bed to evaluate new technologies for the war on terrorism. In April, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., announced he wants to create a program at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy to help take advantage of homeland defense and anti-terror technology innovations.

Well before Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies realized they had fallen behind the technology curve. It was a difficult, embarrassing admission for the folks responsible for intelligence satellites, the U-2 spy plane, the SR-171 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft and a host of other groundbreaking gear. But times had changed. The Soviet Union's collapse in the early 1990s removed the overwhelming rationale for spending any amount to gain a technological edge. That time also saw the rise of the World Wide Web, the beginning of the information onslaught, and the start of an era in which industry vastly outspends government on research and development, especially in information technology.

"The Russians were a simple threat. It was easy to come up with focused, targeted solutions," says Michael Crow, executive vice provost at Columbia University and In-Q-Tel board member. "When you are looking at an enemy that can vaporize your civilization in an instant and somebody says, 'I need a handmade satellite and I'll pay anything,' well, the world doesn't work that way any more. Now, [enemies] have an advantage: They're using the same technologies the market is using and the Agency is not accessing the market. In certain areas of technology, the private sector is bigger than the government and can move faster." Crow was named Arizona State University president on March 29.

Intelligence visionaries saw that the speed of technological development, industry's spending lead, and the loss to downsizing of considerable tech talent, meant government had little choice but to try to harness the innovative energy of private firms. One of those seers, Ruth David, had come from Energy Department research partner Sandia National Laboratories to run the CIA's science and technology directorate in 1995. She found the situation dire. "I had to ask for Internet access on my desktop," David says. "Not tying the Internet to the internal network, I agree with, but not having it available on an independent network? People in the intelligence business need to live in the world of information."

David, now chief executive officer at Anser, a nonprofit research institute in Arlington, Va., found the Agency's technology team isolated and far too reliant on a handful of large, CIA-savvy contractors. "If their job is to infuse the best technology to enable the mission, then they need to have access to it, and that comes in communications with the people developing the technology," she says. "The traditional contractors are not the hotbed of innovative IT."

Elsewhere in the intelligence world, the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the U.S. spy satellite network, already had begun moving beyond traditional buying methods and suppliers. "There was a small [NRO] group that realized in the late 1980s that government was not driving technology, but had become just another customer," says Mark Lister, senior vice president for government operations of Sarnoff Corp., a Princeton, N.J., research and development firm, and managing director of Rosettex Technology and Ventures Group. "To capitalize on industry investment, they realized, government would have to become a player. NRO had to. . . form relationships with companies in the commercial world."

In 1987, struggling with the magnetic tape it used to store a huge volume of images and other data, NRO reached beyond its contractor comfort zone, bringing in 3M, then a leading recording technology firm with little government experience. 3M solved the problem and NRO got the firm to lead a consortium of corporate and academic partners in creating the National Media Laboratory to take further advantage of commercial advances in information storage and retrieval. Three years later, NRO created a National Information Display Laboratory, hosted by Sarnoff, to help solve problems related to sharing and displaying images and data. In 1992, the labs were folded into the National Technology Alliance, which is dedicated to finding and developing commercial IT products for use by Defense and intelligence agencies.

In February, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, executive agent for the alliance, abandoned the labs and awarded Rosettex Technology and Ventures Group a contract worth up to $200 million over five years to be the National Technology Alliance's In-Q-Tel. The company is charged with leading a team of experts sniffing out best-of-class technology in imagery, cartography, digital processing and analysis, and digital infrastructure. Rosettex is a joint venture of Sarnoff and SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif. Both firms license technologies, and they've created 26 new companies between them, according to Lister. Rosettex will invest profits from the technology alliance contract in a venture fund, which, like In-Q-Tel, is intended to support technologies useful to government and the commercial market.

SURFING SILICON VALLEY

Venture funds are today's hot and trendy answer to a problem government has tried to tackle before. Agencies have tried many ways to cut nontraditional deals for commercial R&D and infant technologies. For example, agencies can use the "other transactions" contracting category, which expressly permits agencies all sorts of flexibility in intellectual property rights, cost sharing, government oversight and business arrangements. The Defense Department's dual-use science and technology program also helps fund commercial R&D on products with military applications. And the department runs programs to fund small businesses to do military research. But none of these efforts has widened the supplier base much beyond the usual suspects.

The government's procurement culture is just too suspicious of business needs and practices to embrace flexibility. Business, especially the fast, high-rolling technology sector, distrusts government's contracting methods and finds its oversight onerous. What's more, when Ruth David went technology prospecting in California, high-tech startups bluntly told her the CIA's market share just wasn't big enough to bother with. "The government still has not come to terms with not being a big player in a market it helped to create," she says. As David sought ways to marry the Agency and the Valley, control of the CIA passed in 1997 to George Tenet, who brought along investment banker A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, first as his counselor and later as executive director. A tough-talking former Marine infantry officer with the polish of Princeton, Krongard had been CEO of Alex Brown Inc., the seventh-largest bank in the country and an early investor in Microsoft and AOL. Krongard and Tenet embraced David's effort.

"I immediately saw the attractiveness of the idea," Krongard says. "Alex Brown had the reputation of being the No. 1 technology bankers in the country. Consequently, we had met, interfaced, romanced, cajoled, begged for business-whatever-a lot of different people. Their attitude was such that they were not gonna put up with the typical government approach to doing business, and yet [that was] where the cutting-edge stuff was being performed."

Tenet decreed the CIA had to "swim in the Valley," and a new relationship between the Agency and tech firms was born.

Jeffrey Smith, In-Q-Tel's legal counsel at Washington law firm Arnold & Porter and formerly CIA general counsel, worked with Krongard to build a board of outsiders to fill in the outlines of David's vision. "The CIA didn't quite know what it wanted-it wasn't a federally funded research and development center, it wasn't procurement, it wasn't in-house," says Louie. "So they went to Norm Augustine, not as [former] Lockheed CEO, but as a maverick, and said, 'Help us put together an all-star, killer board of directors to wrestle with the problem and create a model.'"

That model mimicked venture capital firms, right down to their equity investments in startups and new technologies. "From the beginning, we knew equity drove the IT market," Smith says. "Equity was the genius, the energy. It was the only thing that would give us credibility in the open rating system of Silicon Valley."

But investments were to be just one tool at the organization's disposal, a tool to be used sparingly-most venture firms are funded at $100 million or more, more than three times In-Q-Tel's annual budget. So In-Q-Tel invests cautiously; the board must approve any investment of more than $250,000. To allay legislators' and the CIA's fears that they might lose control of In-Q-Tel if investments really paid off, all proceeds must be reinvested in further technology research and acquisition. "Our goal is not to collect a bunch of stock," says Louie. "We're using the approach to get products and services that are going to make a difference to the world of intelligence. What happens to the equity is a byproduct of the style with which we engage the company."

Investments buy the CIA access to technologies still in the womb. In-Q-Tel's board saw that "if the CIA could be involved at the beginning as a technology was being developed for commercial applications, the company could be modifying it so it would be useful to both industry and the CIA," Smith says. "As soon as it hit the market, the CIA could buy and use it and be as current as anybody in the world."

As the board developed a model, agency insiders canvassed the CIA's technology needs. The board then shopped the list, or "problem set," among research organizations, academics and tech companies, asking, "'You got anything? This interest you? We've got $30 million and the CIA as a potential customer,'" Smith says. Annually updated problem sets now determine In-Q-Tel's direction.

As for choosing a CEO for the new organization, the board "wanted a 30-year-old with a ponytail," Smith recalls. Board member John Seely Brown, who had run Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center, recommended hiring a computer gamer. Some of the very best talent in the Valley was in gaming, he said, because gamers have to push technology to its limits.

At the time, Louie, who had created his first computer game company while in college and had just sold his latest company, MicroProse, to Hasbro, was having a blast in the toymaking business. He recalls thinking, "It's the movie 'Big' for me. I'm Tom Hanks." Invited by a business magazine to participate in a mock dogfight put on by an Atlanta flight school, Louie was "shot down" by corporate headhunter Randy Jayne, who was working for In-Q-Tel's board. Jayne gave Louie a concept paper about the CIA's plans and pressed him to interview for the CEO slot. But Louie was reluctant to leave Toyland. "My father was a Navy planner and estimator for construction projects, a loyal government employee," says Louie. "I always was interested in government, but it didn't pay, and I believed you couldn't get anything done in government."

What's more, Louie, a Democrat who had demonstrated against California ballot initiatives favoring English-only classes and opposing affirmative action, was not a likely spook. But the CIA paper intrigued him and convinced him the Agency wanted to change. "I'm an American-born Chinese, fourth generation, a 'banana,' " Louie says. "In the circles I hung out in, there was a lot of discussion about how the U.S. misread the climate in China and couldn't understand how Chinese youth had become more nationalistic. They were the Internet generation and the U.S. thought they would be sympathetic and not want to fight over Taiwan. But that was not the case. So I thought that if the intelligence services could do a better job of understanding the other side it would lead to less mistakes and better policy.

"I decided to take the job because I was convinced that the Agency was serious. With these people, it's a game for keeps," Louie says. The board was delighted, despite Louie's leanings. "Gilman knocked the socks off the interviewers with grasping what we wanted," says Krongard. "So much of the technology is in California, and Gilman was very well connected out there."

Q'D IN

In-Q-Tel is no typical CIA front company. From the beginning, the Agency was completely public, even proud, about having cracked the government mold to connect with the bleeding edge of business. Simultaneous stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post on Sept. 29, 1999 unveiled the Agency's venture capital aspirations. Since then, Louie and In-Q-Tel have become media darlings. The youthful software king has posed in black glasses, in a trench coat and seated on the CIA emblem for photographs accompanying stories entitled, "Spy Tech," "Spies Inc.," "The Spy Who Funded Me," and the like.

"The coverage worked in our favor," Louie says. "The high-tech companies in the Valley are run by people who were kids in the 1970s and 1980s. They thought Bond and his gizmos were cool and if they had cool Bondish technology, they'd have a big customer in the CIA." The homage to gadget master, "Q," in In-Q-Tel's name, multiplied the Bond effect, surpassing the wildest hopes of In-Q-Tel supporters. "We assumed the Valley would be intrigued by the CIA, but reluctant to deal with it," says Smith. "To our delight, that was not the case. The smarter ones recognized an opportunity for them. When they worked with the CIA technical people they discovered they were enormously talented. Plus, they recognized the imprimatur of the CIA is a useful selling device: If it's good enough for the CIA, it ought to be good enough for you."

The reception inside the CIA was markedly cooler. Fiercely protective of their own projects, CIA program chiefs resented having their budgets reduced by the $28 million it cost to start In-Q-Tel. They also doubted that a group of slick, geeky outsiders could possibly find technology on the Agency's behalf. A congressionally mandated status report found that In-Q-Tel needed to enlarge its PR campaign to include the CIA. The vehicle for that marketing effort and for getting In-Q-Tel's finds adopted within the Agency is the In-Q-Tel Interface Center, known as the QIC.

The center, made up of 13 to 15 widely experienced, well-respected CIA staffers, is responsible for overall planning and management of In-Q-Tel's relationship with the agency. "We had to come up with a mechanism to lock the two together to avoid too much of a culture shock between In-Q-Tel and the Agency, [so] we created QIC," says Krongard. "QIC's a broker between In-Q-Tel and the Agency. They do every thing from say, 'That's not true,' if they hear a rumor about In-Q-Tel, to sifting out the ideas. Somebody has to take a corporate view-If we're going to spend dollars and time, where is there a big payoff for the entire organization?"

In-Q-Tel's 40 employees, along with the interface center staff, have become adept at identifying solutions and getting them into the Agency. They have engagements of various types with 20 firms and investments in 14. About 80 percent of In-Q-Tel's $35 million annual contract with the CIA goes into project funding, investments and the costs of transferring technologies into CIA programs. Unlike a typical venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel measures its success not by return on investment, but by return to the CIA in the form of technologies adopted. Since 1999, In-Q-Tel has delivered 19 technologies and demonstrations of 6 others, mostly in the fields of knowledge management, enterprise intelligence, and data classification-all methods of distilling knowledge from masses of different types of data from multiple sources.

In-Q-Tel employees tap into the high-tech deal flow by working the room wherever techies and venture capitalists hang out. Increasingly, they collect leads from other venture capitalists seeking to vet promising firms by piggybacking on In-Q-Tel's fiendishly rigorous technical due diligence. In-Q-Tel has become a sought-after investment partner as well, which nets early intelligence from other venture capitalists. Since Sept. 11, patriotism has swelled the proposal stream-more than 60 percent of the nearly 2,000 proposals In-Q-Tel has received since 1999 came after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon.

MORE THAN MONEY

Unlike most government buyers, In-Q-Tel will negotiate almost any aspect of its relationship with a company. It will forgo government's traditional rights to intellectual property and data, for example, on the theory that a company must preserve full intellectual property rights to interest other venture capitalists in investing. In-Q-Tel also varies the deal to match the company. "Investment is extremely important at the very early stage," says Louie. "For more mature companies financing is not as critical." In addition to money, know-how and the world's most sophisticated beta site, In-Q-Tel offers entrée to the Byzantine federal market.

Take In-Q-Tel's arrangement with Mountain View, Calif.-based Stratify. The Stratify Discovery System classifies and manages unstructured data-documents, e-mail and the like. When Stratify began its mating dance with In-Q-Tel, the firm had raised more than $35 million since its creation in 1999. "Whatever few million [In-Q-Tel] brought wouldn't make any difference," says Nimish Mehta, Stratify president and chief information officer. "The attractive part of the relationship was their knowledge of the government market, their position, the introductions," Mehta says.

Zaplet, a Redwood Shores, Calif., maker of collaborative tools that allow software applications to travel by e-mail and be automatically updated by each recipient, wasn't looking for money either, says co-founder David Roberts. "We had just finished a $90 million financing round." So instead of investing directly in Zaplet, In-Q-Tel bought the firm's product and services and credit to buy stock down the road at a set price. "We wanted to say, 'We are interested in your product and services and we will help you build a government market, but we want to understand what's in the heads of your investors-we want a strategic-level engagement,'" Louie says.

The Stratify and Zaplet engagements are among the two-thirds of In-Q-Tel deals that Louie deems "evolutionary"-new ways of applying known technologies to solve new kinds of problems. Another 10 percent are revolutionary. They are new science with a hot new market and no competition. An example is In-Q-Tel's investment in La Jolla, Calif.'s Graviton, which makes Web-based wireless sensor monitoring and control systems that could, for example, allow an electric company to measure the temperature of electrical transformers and alert the customer if one overheated. Such sensors could have myriad intelligence uses for monitoring equipment, communications and the like. The rest of In-Q-Tel's deals involve mature technologies, such as System Research and Development's Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness soft- ware. Popular with the casinos in Las Vegas, where SRD is based, as well as among retailers, NORA surveys a company's collections of data to identify relationships that could point to fraud and collusion among employees, clients, suppliers and outsiders. The software has obvious applications for detecting terrorist sleeper agents and scrubbing airline reservations. SRD CEO Jeff Jonas says he is using In-Q-Tel's money to add a secret "ultimate feature" to NORA. Especially attractive to the CIA, the feature should make NORA even more attractive to corporations. "To my shock, everything we're doing, every feature valuable in the federal space, is just a bigger problem that also goes on in corporate America," Jonas says.

BEARDED BABY

Not surprisingly, the rest of government also is interested in In-Q-Tel and its technologies. "It's like a baby with a beard. Everyone is rushing to see it," says Krongard. Louie's briefed the Office of Homeland Security, NASA, and the Defense, Justice and State departments, some of them many times. In January, Retired Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, head of the new Pentagon Office of Force Transformation, suggested the Defense Department get into the venture capital business. The Army's already moving into the venturing game. The 2003 Defense appropriation ordered the Army to reserve $25 million in R&D funds to establish an independent venture fund modeled on In-Q-Tel.

But not everyone is keen on In-Q-Tel proliferation. "It's not in In-Q-Tel's interest, because right now we've got the field to ourselves," says Krongard. "So we are cooperative and we tell everybody the good, the bad and the ugly, but if they think I'm trying to sell them on having [an In-Q-Tel] they're wrong." Lister worries that agencies won't fully appreciate the risks involved in betting on untested firms and products and that creating more funds will dilute potential technology gains. "If NRO and [the National Security Agency] and NIMA and the Army and Air Force and Navy and Marines all do In-Q-Tels, the competition is going to be enormous. And I question how much return on investment you get as a community," he says.

Last year, the Army Science Board said the Army, and federal agencies in general, "should avoid owning a minority interest in private companies." The panel "disfavors the In-Q-Tel model of making anticipated return on investment an evaluation factor" because "it detracts from the foremost objective of selecting vendors with the potential to develop technologies necessary for the objective force." The Army currently collects little more than $400,000 a year in royalties on products developed with industry, so the board also doubted the existence of commercial markets for technologies in which an Army In-Q-Tel might invest.

"I went to the Army and said, 'Why not spend your money through Rosettex?'" Lister says. "Do your R&D and we'll put our fee in the venture fund and Army leaders will be gaining some knowledge." Lister already is working with In-Q-Tel and has invited Louie to sit on the board of Rosettex's venture fund. "Gilman and I are interested in working collaboratively so people who come to him with ideas that are too early-stage for him and need prototyping he will shoot to me. He'll also see stuff he could pick up by sitting on the Rosettex board," Lister says. "Our models are complementary: I can't compete with him because I don't have enough money. He will not compete with me because the stuff Rosettex invests in is too early in its development for him."

If In-Q-Tel and its look-alikes continue to cooperate with one another and other venture capital funds, they may succeed in speeding the flow of fast-evolving, useful technology into federal agencies. That won't quiet critics who believe government has no place in business, but it might help intelligence agencies better grapple with the multiple threats and unfathomable welter of information they confront in the post-Cold War era of terror. "We live with fear in this business," Krongard said in an interview 10 days before Sept. 11. "One of our biggest fears is that something happens today, and when we do the autopsy we find that two weeks ago we had it, [but] we didn't know because it was buried in something else that wasn't getting processed or we lacked for a Pashtun speaker or who knows what."

A 'KILLER BOARD'To create a company daring, agile, and hip enough to be attractive to Silicon Valley startups, the CIA pulled together a board packed with corporate mavericks, innovators and canny investors.

Lee Ault, chairman of the In-Q-Tel board; former chairman and CEO of Telecredit Inc.
Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp.
John Seely Brown, former director, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Howard Cox, general partner, Greylock; chairman, National Venture Capital Association
Michael Crow, president, Arizona State university; former executive vice provost, Columbia University
Stephen Friedman, senior principal of Marsh & McLennan Capital Inc., and former chairman of Goldman Sachs and Co.;
Paul Kaminski, president and CEO of Technovation Inc., senior partner in Global Tech- nology Partners, and former undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology
Jeong Kim, former group president, Lucent Optical Networking Group, part of the Lucent Technologies Group, and founder of Yurie Systems
John McMahon, former president and CEO of Lockheed Missiles and Space Co., and former deputy director of central intelligence
Alex Mandl, former chairman and CEO of Teligent and former president and CEO of AT&T
William Perry, former secretary of Defense

Seeking SolutionsIn-Q-Tel scours the high-tech world for start-ups and established companies developing or selling products that will address a specific set of problem areas for the CIA. Here are the Agency's current priorities:

Internet Search and Discovery
Web crawling, indexing, ranking
Personalization
Information Security and Privacy
Adaptive threat detection
Network privacy/anonymity
Digital rights management
Enterprise Knowledge Management and Visualization
Enterprise search/retrieval, indexing, access management, personalization
Data warehousing/mining
Collaboration environments
Geospatial Information Services

Distributed Sensing/Data Acquisition

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Management Counts

Anne Laurent — Wed, 15 May 2002 00:00:00 -0400

It makes a difference now more than ever.

anagement matters.

If you doubt it, just ask the folks at the Interior Department. They found out the hard way last December. The 2001 Federal Performance Report's findings about mismanagement at the Bureau of Indian Affairs kicked off a series of events that ended with all of Interior being cut off from the Internet and e-mail to and from outside the department. Some bureaus remained offline for months. Our story about BIA, which received an overall grade of D in our ratings last year, prompted an investigation of Interior's computer networks that revealed serious security lapses. A federal judge ordered the department off-line until the holes could be plugged.

BIA's failure to properly manage and secure information plunged Interior back into the pre-Internet Dark Ages and left 71,000 employees scrambling to communicate with the public or each other by phone, fax or mail. Interior employees lost access online to real-time weather information, crime data, the Federal Register and the government's online contract announcement site, among other things. Citizens no longer could see Interior Web sites, and lost the ability to reserve campsites at national parks online. They no longer could join e-mail "blasts" responding to proposals to change rules and other Interior actions. The 40,000 American Indians who have trust fund accounts at Interior suffered most grievously. The department was unable to process payments to them from the users of their land. Some Indians rely on those checks for sustenance.

The BIA story, "Trail of Troubles," ran in April 2001 and quoted Dominic Nessi, then BIA's chief information officer. "For all practical purposes we have no security; we have no infrastructure. Our entire network has no firewalls on it. I don't like running a network that can be breached by a high school kid. I don't like running a program that is out of compliance with federal statutes, especially when I have no ability to put it into compliance," he said. Nessi's quote caught the attention of Indians pursuing a class action suit against Interior for mishandling Indian trust funds. They filed a complaint in May 2001, prompting U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Royce C. Lamberth to order an investigation.

A team of hackers hired by Alan Balaran, special master in the Indian trust case, easily penetrated the bureau's computer systems three times last year, once setting up a bogus account in Balaran's name. Lamberth is hearing the 1996 class action, the largest ever filed by American Indians, charging that BIA has mishandled trust fund accounts set up more than a century ago to compensate Indians for the use of their land and resources. Lamberth wrote in 1999 that Interior's handling of the trusts is an example of "fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form." After receiving Balaran's scathing report on BIA computer security, Lamberth ordered Interior in December to disconnect from the Internet all computers that could provide access to Indian trust data. Unsure which computers might be conduits, Interior took them all offline.

While we couldn't have known the full extent of BIA's security weaknesses in 2001, the Federal Performance Project certainly foresaw trouble for the agency, handing it a D for information management. We found BIA's technology was so deficient that data often was accessible only by phone, fax or mail. What systems there were frequently crashed. At various times, computer service interruptions-due sometimes to faulty technology and sometimes to unpaid bills-have left BIA unable to communicate with Interior headquarters or Indian schools and without Internet service. We found BIA's capacity to manage information as bad as anything we had seen, save for the Internal Revenue Service's abysmal handling of its Tax Systems Modernization project, which was scrapped in 1997 after $3.4 billion had been spent with little to show. That earned the IRS a D for information management in 1999. Today, the tax agency is several years into a technology turnaround. At BIA, however, the news just keeps on getting worse.

Lessons Learned

That management matters is a core belief of the Federal Performance Project, a partnership of Government Executive and The George Washington University Department of Public Administration. The project is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. For four years we've rated federal agencies' management abilities. We've assessed management of human resources, information, physical assets and finances as well as ability to manage for results at 27 agencies. We focus our reviews on management capacity because it is an indicator of agencies' health and ability to deliver results. We also believe that reporting what stands in the way of good management can help political leaders and the public understand the challenges involved in running government programs and what needs to be done to help them run better.

This year, for the first time, we are re-evaluating agencies we've graded in the past. All six-the Social Security Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, IRS, Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Immigration and Naturalization Service-received grades during the project's first year, 1999. Three, the IRS, FAA and EPA, have improved in three years; IRS from an overall C to a B-, FAA from a C to a B, and EPA from a B- to a B. Others, SSA, CMS and INS have fallen in the rankings; SSA from an A to a B, CMS, which was called the Health Care Financing Administration when we graded it last, from a C to a C-, and INS from a C- to a D. The overall grades of 1999 and 2002 aren't precisely comparable, though, because we've changed how we weigh grades in each of the management issue areas we examine. We've also altered our focus in a number of management issue areas.

In four years, we've refined and deepened our evaluations in a number of ways. The biggest change came last year, when we began basing each agency's overall grade 50 percent on its performance in managing for results, as opposed to giving grades in all five categories equal weight. We made the change to give results-based management the attention we feel it merits as a predictor of success, or at least improvement, in the other areas and in overall agency performance. This clearly has been true at the IRS, for example. IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti's reorganization divided the agency into four primary business units, each focusing on a separate segment of the taxpayer population Designed to sharpen the focus on assisting taxpayers, the reorganization also is driving the agency's business systems modernization, which promises better information management and customer service; a pay-for-performance system that is increasing managers' accountability; and better allocation of and accounting for funds, staff and other resources.

Four years' experience rating agencies also has taught us to be less mechanistic in assessing how finances and information contribute to management success within agencies. Where we once based financial management grades largely on success or failure in achieving a clean audit opinion, we now consider the cost of achieving clean opinions. In far too many cases, clean opinions are won only by dint of excruciating manual data reconciliation by agency finance staff at the close of the fiscal year. Clean audits that come at such expense no longer win agencies as much credit for financial management ability. We've also moved away from evaluating information technology systems toward assessing whether managers and employees get the right information in the right form at the right time in order to achieve strategic goals. Thus, we're now at least as interested in the quality of data agencies use to measure performance as we are in the quality of their enterprise architecture.

Tricky Task

Grading management capacity-the degree to which an agency sets clear and appropriate goals, girds itself to achieve them and then measures performance and improves-is a tricky task. Many agencies are assigned contradictory or confused missions. They are blocked by politicians' objections or badly conceived laws from closing unneeded facilities, shifting staff to match workload, collecting data to assess performance and from taking many other actions that would be considered no-brainers in the private sector. As we grade, we must weigh whether to hold such failures against the agencies or chalk them off as insurmountable limitations. For the most part, we've chosen to let our grades reflect these problems, but to explain them in the accompanying stories. In some past cases, such as the Coast Guard and the Postal Service, we've credited agencies for mustering their management resources to frankly predict the consequences of externally imposed limitations.

But it's not always easy to make the call, especially in cases where management appears to be good or getting better, but some combination of limitations and management weaknesses contributes to disaster. That was the case this year as we evaluated the Federal Aviation Administration. Though the FAA had improved in all five of our areas of study since we last rated it in 1999, we struggled to properly assess the FAA's responsibilities with respect to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

FAA Administrator Jane Garvey has vastly improved human resources management at the agency since negotiating a five-year, $1 billion labor agreement with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association in 1998. The pact raised controllers' pay and provided higher salaries at the busiest airports. Three quarters of the FAA's employees now work under a pay-for-performance system. The agency has gotten control of its constantly criticized technology modernization program. Financial management still is a weak point-cost accounting is rudimentary and bookkeeping requires painstaking manual intervention-but the FAA won a clean audit for 2001, and improvements are on track. Clear, well-constructed strategic goals encompass all parts of the agency. Corporate performance measures focus on achieving results and Garvey has signed contracts with top officials linking their compensation to performance against agency goals.

The FAA sounds like a success, until you remember Sept. 11. The fact that the hijackers carried box cutters aboard the doomed airliners with apparent ease and purchased tickets in their own names, even when they appeared on FBI terrorist watch lists, casts a cloud over the FAA's indisputable management improvements. After all, the FAA was ultimately responsible for regulating airport security. Recognizing this, in December, Garvey reversed her plan to award FAA executives bonuses totaling $1 million, instead spending the money to offset unplanned security costs resulting from the attacks. "The impact of Sept. 11 has disrupted the U.S. air transportation industry and the personal lives of people throughout the U.S. In this unprecedented time in the history of the FAA, I do not think it would be appropriate to grant incentive payouts," Garvey wrote in a memo announcing her decision.

Some argue Garvey was wrong, that the FAA responded admirably to the attacks, safely grounding thousands of planes in short order. Controllers won a Transportation Department gold medal for their performance. And Garvey acknowledged executives' role in the successful shutdown in her memo. "You responded magnificently to these attacks," she wrote. "Still, I know you, like I, have asked yourselves what we could have done better to help prevent the attacks in the first place."

For one thing, the FAA could have speeded up a regulation that took six years to draft requiring tighter training requirements and higher standards for the private firms hired by airlines to screen passengers and their baggage. The rule was approved in July 2001 and finally took effect two months after the hijackings. For years, the FAA had issued warnings and fines to airlines and airports for security failings. But the agency did nothing to raise standards for screeners, who were paid as little as $6 an hour and not even required to hold high school diplomas. As it turns out, rule-making is one of the FAA's persistent management weaknesses. The FAA's failures in regulating airport security result not only from management weaknesses, but from limitations in political will and national vision. Until Sept. 11, airport security just wasn't the paramount concern of the 2 million passengers boarding 40,000 flights each day in this country. On-time arrival and efficient baggage handling ranked far higher on the scale for fliers, businesses, airlines, lawmakers and, ultimately, the FAA. In such an environment, why hold the FAA responsible for failing to force the security issue? How about because the agency's own mission statement says: "The FAA provides a safe, secure and efficient global aerospace system that contributes to national security and the promotion of U.S. aerospace safety." According to the agency itself, security is a key element of its mission.

Had the FAA focused more closely on securing airports, planes and the flying public; had it pushed out its regulation more quickly and found more painful punishments for lax security; the agency surely would have faced the wrath of industry and consequently of Congress. Had such steps slowed air travel, the public, too, would have been aroused. The FAA might well have been ordered to back off or had its funding shifted in order to reinforce other duties. But then at least Garvey and her executive team wouldn't have found themselves asking in December what they might have done better to prevent the horror of September. Such recriminations became moot when, in November, apparently with Garvey's support, Congress voted to create the Transportation Security Administration and have it take responsibility for airport security away from the FAA.

In the end, we gave the FAA a B for managing for results. Despite its failures in regulating security, the FAA's management abilities are more similar to those of agencies we've given Bs-NASA, the Food and Drug Administration and the Administration for Children and Families, for example-than those we've given Cs-such as the Forest Service, Bureau of Consular Affairs and the National Park Service.

Mixed Missions

The FAA's failure to rigorously enforce screening and security rules is in part a result of a mission conflict dating back to 1958, when the agency was born of the merger of the air travel-regulating Civil Aeronautics Board and the airline-promoting Civil Aeronautics Administration. It wasn't until 1996 that consternation over a number of accidents prompted a rewrite of the FAA's charter, making safety the top priority. But the FAA still struggles with its relationship to the airline industry. For four years, we've found that such mixed missions create huge hurdles to good management. The Immigration and Naturalization Service exemplifies the problem.

The D we gave the INS this year is a dishonor shared by only one other agency in the project's history, BIA in 2001. Most of the fault for the INS' poor showing lies with its enforcement side, which spends two-thirds of the agency's budget. The agency has doubled in size over the past 10 years-the staff has grown from 18,400 to 36,400 since 1993; the budget from $1.5 billion to $5.5 billion. But the INS still has just 2,000 investigators to apprehend the estimated 9 million illegal immigrants in the United States. An estimated 3.5 million of them overstayed visas, but the INS hasn't enforced visa time limits for years, instead focusing solely on catching illegal immigrants convicted of crimes. Several Sept. 11 hijackers were among the 3.5 million.

The agency's border control efforts have focused disproportionately on the Southwest, where the number of agents has risen from 3,389 to 10,000 over the past decade. But despite their numbers, frustrated Border Patrol agents in the Southwest aren't allowed to pursue every illegal immigrant they see. Instead, the agency strives to create a safe, manageable border in order to protect local communities. Agents' primary duty is keeping the peace, so chases and other enforcement techniques that might upset or endanger the locals aren't pursued. Nor does the INS put much effort into policing the nation's workplaces. The agency says its mission within the United States is to address any harm to citizens caused by illegal immigration. So unless illegal immigrants are displacing citizens from jobs-not likely during recent years of near-full employment-workplaces are left undisturbed.

The INS' services side must handle more than 6 million applications for immigration benefits a year. It has had some success reducing the backlog of pending citizenship applications but the overall backlog of applications for immigration services is nearly 5 million. The INS has begun hiring new staff, offering more training and buying technology to track applications and reduce backlogs. It's able to make these improvements on the strength of fees it collects by offering faster visa processing to those able to pay $1,000.

Accountability Gap

The INS' 33 district offices traditionally have been fiefdoms lorded over by directors who apportioned money and resources between service and enforcement efforts as they chose. Field managers face a daunting set of competing imperatives, including detention and removal of illegal immigrants, investigations, criminal prosecutions, inspections, reducing the backlog of citizenship applications and handling immigration services. The Justice Department inspector general says a "culture of non-accountability" pervades the agency. To address the accountability gap, the Bush administration has begun restructuring the INS into two bureaus-one for enforcement, the other for services. Every employee would fall in one or the other organization and regional and district offices would be replaced by nine enforcement areas and six service areas across the United States, thus ending divided loyalties and battles over resources. Legislators' efforts to split the INS and Office of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge's plan for an overall border reorganization could thwart the restructuring, but the INS clearly is headed for change. Sadly, a new organizational chart won't cure the confusion at the root of the INS' problems. As long as America cannot reach consensus on whether to welcome immigration or restrict it, immigration enforcement will be an exercise in frustration.

If the INS is suffering from end-stage "unaccountability disease," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is at mid-stage and the prognosis is not all that positive. CMS managers are frank about the historical lack of appreciation for performance and accountability at the agency. In May 2001, GAO found that CMS ranked second to last among 28 agencies in the number of managers who reported that they were held accountable for results. The agency's overseers on Capitol Hill and at the Office of Management and Budget have paid far more attention to how much health care providers are being paid than to whether the agency is being well run. Agency leaders generally have focused more closely on policy debates than management. CMS' new Bush administration leaders talk as though improving management is high on their priority list. Whether they'll walk the talk remains to be seen.

Creating a performance culture takes more than simply getting the attention of political appointees. Sometimes, it takes remaking the agency. The Environmental Protection Agency has struggled with the strictures of structure for years. The agency is utterly stovepiped-its program offices for air and radiation, water, pesticides, drinking water, hazardous wastes, toxic substances, food protection, and scientific research and development don't communicate or cooperate well. The system results in duplicative efforts and a fragmented approach to enforcement. The agency also must pay obeisance to some two dozen congressional committees, further complicating its efforts. Though the EPA has made admirable progress in setting performance goals and is beginning to get a handle on measuring its progress, future improvements may hinge on creating systems for setting standards and issuing permits that cut across its current structure, an outcome likely only after the agency's stovepipes are connected or dismantled.

The IRS offers an example of the power of restructuring to address myriad management ills, especially the need to improve accountability. Like the INS, the IRS was little more than a collection of competing geographic fiefdoms until the Senate blew up the agency in 1998 and Commissioner Charles Rossotti began reassembling it. Senate Finance Committee hearings in 1997 focusing on taxpayers' claims of mistreatment led to passage of a reform act in 1998. In 2000, Rossotti initiated a sweeping reorganization, dividing the agency into four business units focused on segments of the taxpaying population-individuals, large- and medium-sized businesses, small businesses, and tax-exempt and government agencies. Gone are the offices that once were responsible for all those segments in each of 33 districts across the country. Gone too, are the competing fiefdoms centered in those offices.

Management capacity is not the only prerequisite for achieving results. As in Rossotti's case, leadership may be key, especially where it has been absent. And while restructuring is possible without legislation, congressional support-or lack thereof-can make or break the effort, as the INS and the EPA have learned. Another determinant of performance, especially in today's government, is courage, both among agency leaders and as an element of agency culture. The Social Security Administration, this year's most highly graded agency, as it was in 1999, has a clear mission, a performance-oriented culture, financial and information management systems to die for and a structure that appears to suit its mission well. But Social Security lacks daring.

SSA rightly emphasizes efficient and effective administration of programs, but it continues to fall short on exercising leadership in shaping the future of Social Security programs. We noted in 1999 that SSA was ducking the policy debates that will determine its future, and that shortcoming remains today. As in the case of the FAA with respect to airport security, it could be risky for SSA to take positions in debates about how Americans' financial security should be ensured. Politicians have a history of smacking down appointees and agencies when they assert themselves. But like the FAA, SSA is failing to fulfill part of its mission by shirking its role in anticipating and advocating for program change. True, that mission begins with ensuring economic security, but it directs SSA to do so "through compassionate and vigilant leadership in shaping and managing America's Social Security programs." SSA has nailed the parts of management that count. But it has fallen down on the part that matters most.

Federal Performance Project Team

Government Executive: Timothy B. Clark, editor; Anne Laurent, project editor; George Cahlink, Brian Friel, Shane Harris, Jason Peckenpaugh, Katherine McIntire Peters, Matthew Weinstock, Cyril T. Zaneski, Shawn Zeller, writers; Susan Fourney, Martin W. G. King, Tom Shoop, editors; Eileen Wentland, designer.

George Washington University, Department of Public Administration: Philip Joyce, associate professor and principal investigator; Kathryn Newcomer, professor and department chair; Howard Smith, project manager; Sarah Fabirkiewicz, Amanda Hazelwood, Cesar Rodriguez, Noah Wepman, and Melissa Zimmerman, research assistants.

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Oklahoma City survivor shares advice for managers

Anne Laurent — Wed, 19 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Handling Traumatic Events: A Manager's Handbook," and has provided benefits, leave, hiring and other information on a special post-disaster Web site. Heath offers another reminder: The victims of the Sept. 11 attacks weren't just in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. He received a late evening telephone call Sept. 16 from a Murrah Building survivor still working for the federal government. "He said he hadn't slept since Tuesday and he wasn't sure he could keep on working," Heath said. "It's tough," he added. "People feel frightened and unsafe. The images they see on television are just so powerful." ]]>

Special benefits procedures for terrorist victims and their families

Anne Laurent — Thu, 13 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

http://www.opm.gov/asd/pdf/ri84-002.pdf. The Defense Department has set up a Pentagon Family Assistance Center for surviving family members of those killed in the Pentagon attack: 1-800-769-3988. Callers will be briefed, receive counseling and told what benefits they are entitled to receive and how to apply for them, according to Maj. Cynthia Colin, a Pentagon spokeswoman. "The best first place for federal employees and their families to go for benefits information is the agency that employed them," said Ed Flynn, OPM associate director for retirement and insurance. "In New York, on the basis of the information I have, it seems fairly clear people should be able to be in touch with their agencies," he added. "There were federal employees killed and injured; we don't have the exact numbers yet. Everything I've heard indicates it was not a substantial number." "We've been getting a few calls [from injured employees and employees' families], but the agencies have been getting most of them," Flynn said. He added that OPM has suspended the requirement that survivors provide a death certificate in order to claim an employee's life insurance benefits under the Federal Employees Group Life Insurance Program. "We're all geared up and will handle [claims] very, very quickly," he said, adding that survivors should receive FEGLI benefits within a week to 10 days after applying. The President directed OPM to set up an emergency leave transfer program to aid employees affected by the attacks. The new program will allow employees to donate unused annual leave to employees of any agency who have been affected by the attacks and need additional time off. In a separate memorandum, OPM Director Kay Coles James explained that, under the emergency program, leave recipients need not have exhausted their own accrued annual and sick leave and that the use of donated leave is not restricted to medical emergencies. Forms for donating and receiving leave under the emergency program are available at: http://www.opm.gov/oca/leave/. James directed agency heads to determine how much donated leave is needed by their employees, approve leave donors and recipients, and facilitate distribution of donated leave from approved donors to approved recipients within their agencies. OPM will coordinate the governmentwide transfer of donations among agencies should the amount of leave donated by their own employees not be sufficient. James also urged agencies to pay higher rates of premium pay to employees performing emergency work related to the attacks. Employees whose work is related to emergencies posing a threat to life or property must be paid under the annual limitation of GS-15, Step 10, rather than the GS-15, Step 10 biweekly limitation. Agency heads are required to determine as soon as practical whether an emergency exists that would entitle employees to the higher rates and to make the entitlement effective as of the first day of the pay period during which the emergency began. Flynn said OPM sent a letter Sept. 12 to all insurers in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program advising them that some attack victims may be federal employees, retirees and family members covered under FEHBP. The letter asked insurers to be "particularly sensitive to claims filed as a result of this tragedy." OPM also asked the companies to be flexible, for example, in relaxing pre-certification provisions requiring notification and setting limits on benefit payments when victims were taken to non-plan or non-PPO hospitals or treatment centers. OPM also provides advice for managers in handling events such as Tuesday's in "Handling Traumatic Events: A manager's Guide," available at http://www.opm.gov/ehs/traugdpg.htm. ]]>

Benefits for families of those killed and for the injured

Anne Laurent — Wed, 12 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

http://www.opm.gov/insure/life/. Employees enrolled in FEGLI who were injured in the attacks also may be eligible for FEGLI dismemberment benefits. According to OPM, military service members and civilians and their families can get benefits information by calling 703-696-8467. Survivors of federal employees killed in the line of duty also may be entitled to a death gratuity payment. Agency heads must decide whether to make these payments of as much as $10,000 available to the beneficiaries of employees killed in the line of duty. The gratuity cannot exceed $10,000 when combined with a Labor Department payment of up to $800 to eligible survivors for funeral expenses, the $200 payable by Labor to reimburse the cost of the termination of the deceased's status as a federal employee and any payment payable to survivors of employees of the Interior Department or other agencies under Public Law 103-332. As news of casualties trickles in, OPM is preparing an administrative letter to send to all agency benefits coordinators with instructions for helping federal employees injured and the families of those killed in the blasts. Agency benefits coordinators can call 202-606-0788 for further information. By the end of this week, OPM will send a team to New York to assist the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the New York Federal Executive Board with coordination of benefits for federal employees. ]]>

CIA employees get a pep talk

Anne Laurent — Wed, 12 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400