The Defense Department is reviewing “unproductive processes and bureaucracy” it has put in place over the years in the hopes of better understanding how that hinders industry as part of its Better Buying Power 2.0 effort, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Katrina McFarland said Tuesday morning at Defense Daily’s Open Architecture Summit.
McFarland said that risk in an acquisition program presents a certain added cost, but “there’s a lot of pressures from people on the Hill who over the years have started to really stack up legislation trying to prevent risk.” And though the legislation was meant to keep costs down, bureaucracy itself can add costs to programs, she said.
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| Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Katrina McFarland. Photo courtesy Defense Department. |
To address bureaucracy, DoD tasked two researchers with collecting data from industry on the costs of complying with different contract line item number (CLIN) structures, McFarland said.
“It’s an exploratory thing, very small, and that was sort of a trial that we’re starting with,” she said, adding that the Pentagon randomly selected some industry partners to survey in this first round. “What we’re trying to find is, there are things that we can, in government or in industry, do better. … We’re looking at not just government but our processes that we impose on industry as a place to remove bureaucracy.”
DoD announced earlier this year it had started looking at its own internal bureaucracy, and this move will address the industry side of the issue.
McFarland said she hoped that this effort, as well as the rest of the Better Buying Power 2.0 focus areas, would help the department achieve meaningful acquisition reform. DoD has spent 40 years reforming acquisition processes over and over again but never given any initiative enough time to take hold and demonstrate whether it is effective or not, she said, so she wants to see the Pentagon do better this time around.
Open architecture fits nicely into this idea of acquisition reform, McFarland said, because it promotes so many of the BBP 2.0 focus areas outlined in a memo signed exactly one year ago: controlling costs, incentivizing innovation and promoting competition, for example.
Open architecture has already permeated how DoD does business, McFarland said, from her office asking program managers during Defense Acquisition Board meetings about data rights and opportunities to open systems up to future competition and innovation, to program managers moving from proprietary systems to open ones when doing Service Life Extension Programs on their existing platforms.