Two senior Navy and Army acquisition officers say commands need to be upfront in addressing their data rights requirements with contractors and do a better job of following through to ensure that required intellectual property is acquired.

Vice Adm. David Dunaway, the commander of Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), and Lt. Gen. Michael Williamson, the principal military deputy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said the government should have the rights to the technology it has paid to develop.

“When the government procures something and puts money toward, those data rights are inherently governmental data rights. We just don’t ask for them,” Dunaway said at Defense Daily’s

annual Open Architecture Summit Tuesday.

The government’s control of data rights is seen as critical to developing open architecture systems for creating a more competitive and innovative market that enables lower lifecycle costs and more rapid upgrades. By having the rights, the government can more readily compete future upgrades and sustainment, thereby lowering cost and spurring innovation, rather than being tied to a single contractor in what is known as “vendor lock.” The issue has been a source of tension between government and industry, which sees keeping the data rights as key to future revenue and has been reluctant to surrender them to the government.

Williamson said the Army has gone back and looked over data rights problems on previous contracts to evaluate causes and apply lessons learned, and one conclusion is that they need to be thinking about data rights earlier in the contracting process.

“What I am looking for is what we do in our processes so we ask the right questions early on in the process so that we are not surprised at the end,” he said. “We should not have to keep reliving this.”

Dunaway said NAVAIR has not historically been effective at capturing the data rights, something he said he is working to change.

“We have not well executed our data rights strategy within Naval Air Systems Command,” he said, noting that it occasionally takes place in small pockets but without an overall approach.

“We’re working through the process by which we will in a much more comprehensive fashion exercise the data rights that are inherent within our procurement system,” he said. “We just have not done that in the past.”

Dunaway said one problem has been that acquisition officers have waited until late in the process like on a “Friday night” to address data rights in the requirements, and when industry pushes back, effort is abandoned.

“The contractor comes in with a high cost for delivering data rights and we just throw up our hands and say: ‘We’ll get them later’,” he said. “We just can’t do that anymore.”

Dunaway added, however, that government is not going after intellectual property developed by the contractors and put into the system, calling it their “secret sauce.” In those cases, the government should, though, be seeking purposing rights.

Industry, in turn, needs to get out of the mentality of claiming control of data rights by viewing them as a source of revenue during the sustainment of systems throughout their existence, the admiral said.

“It has been an industry practice and standard to protect the data rights as a future revenue stream for lifecycle sustainment,” he said. “We have to get out of that old habit where it’s not necessary.”