By Geoff Fein
As the rate of technology improvement shortens the time between advances in areas such as processing speed, the services are going to have to rethink the way they handle IT acquisition to pace those changes, according to a Navy official.
Will a new way be needed to procure information technology (IT)? “Yes, but with a caveat,” Robert Carey, the Navy’s chief information officer, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“The FAR and DoD 5000 series give us a lot of latitude to move pretty darn fast. That being said, there are some impediments to moving fast,” he noted.
One is the budget process, Carey said.
“The Hill gives us the ability to spend money every year, and if it’s R&D, it’s two years, if it’s shipbuilding money it’s five years,” he said. “We have the ability to move rapidly when situations require.”
The Program Objective Memorandum, or POM, process and the budget process need to figure out how to move fast within that, Carey said.
“Today, you get an appropriations bill and here’s what every military program is allowed to spend and the money all goes out for what it is intended to go do. What we find is, IT moves faster than that or cyber issues have sort of cropped up, and we need to do an investment inside the cycle of the POM.”
Carey compared it to the Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (OODA) Loop cycle of the enemy.
“We learned in the desert that the enemy was able to get on top of our tactics inside of 30 days. So in 30 days they have figured out a counter to what we are doing,” he added. “In the budget process, IT moves far faster than does the cycle for the investment process, so we kind of need to navigate that.”
But Carey cautions the Navy can’t just “jump on the leading edge technology” when it wants to.
The service is going to have to be mindful of the fact that some technologies are going to be around for a little while and the Navy is always going to be in a constant state of some level of change, he added.
“The question is, how do you balance that and then how do you map those requirements and that stability level against the POM process. We are getting ready to go through POM ’12, so the money we are going to request two years from now is what we are thinking about,” Carey said.
“Moore’s Law tells us that what you are thinking about isn’t even going to be there, something beyond that is going to be there. So how do you map the two? I personally believe we need to think about this to include a look at the laws because the POM process is driven by how the Hill votes,” Carey said. “There is a connection there. We move at the speed that supports aviation procurement, ship procurement submarines, and tanks, and some things in IT move a whole lot faster and we want to take advantage of them inside that cycle.”
There are probably some regulatory aspects to acquisition and procurement that could be reviewed and relaxed, Gary Federici, deputy assistant secretary, Navy for command control computers communications and intelligence (DASN C4I) and Space systems, told Defense Daily during the same interview.
“I think, for us in the Navy, the past two to three years we have tried to take a look at this whole virtualization concept, and that led us to CANES, and that road changed, at least the strategy for doing IT procurement. I think it will help very very much,” he said.
CANES is the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise Service. The CANES request for proposal was released last week (Defense Daily, April 8).
“There are some rule sets that are part of acquisition that need to be looked at too,” Federici added. “There will be some [challenges], for example in testing…OPEVALs. Today OPTEVFOR (Operational Test and Evaluation Force) would want to test the entire system, even if you are just changing software. In the future they may want to test one system, one set of hardware once, but then the software is done individually, so it should be a lot easier and a lot quicker.”
Another issue in IT acquisition is the potential for requirements creep, Carey noted.
As technology moves with Moore’s Law, the capabilities delivered by a vendor in January could have changed by the time July rolls around.
“We would look at that capability and say ‘boy I sure want that,’ but I haven’t delivered on the first thing I sort of landed my investment on,” Carey said. “So you get tempted to always get into the requirements creep model as opposed to, ‘I need to test this, build this, deliver this, and come back through the spiral development process, but actually deliver a capability.
“Balancing again, the requirements definition process with some speed and agility, and with the budget process with some speed and agility, and mapping that to the Moore’s Law phenomenon, which is very real both in software and hardware, is where I think we have to go,” Carey added. “Once you understand the regulatory and the statutory side of that, you can then decide what needs to change.”
Carey said he talks to and visits industry officials quite often to discuss what technologies they have and where they are going and how the Navy’s needs intersect with their technology.
“Inside of the 12 months, if somebody presented me this whiz bang thing that actually did solve a problem that the department has…that could solve it right now…I would have to break something else in the budget to fund it,” he said. “Because there is no fungible set of resources inside the budget execution year to go do that. And that’s something worthy of a look…and I think we are looking at that…how do you do that?”