A key Pentagon official sees “real challenges” in information technology acquisition because it has only been recently acknowledged and the Defense Department doesn’t have the skills necessary for IT acquisition.
“Our weakest area is IT,” Katrina McFarland, who is president of Defense Acquisition University, said at an Aviation Week conference in Arlington, Va. “We have real challenges in that area.”
McFarland, who President Obama intends to nominate to be assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, emphasized that IT acquisition is different from normal product acquisition.
“It’s only recently been discovered and acknowledged,” McFarland told Defense Daily following her presentation. “IT acquisition has different challenges than normal product acquisition, so we don’t have a lot of skills developed for acquisition of IT.
“They are developing the skill set…We’ve come to recognize that IT has to be acquired differently and treated that way than normal products.”
McFarland said defining the teaching and learning objectives would facilitate properly training people to perform IT acquisition.
“IT has some very different aspects, so now we’re going about doing the learning objectives after we’re complete with discoveries with what we need to teach that is specific to IT acquisition,” McFarland said after her presentation. “Not software development. But IT acquisition.”
McFarland said mentoring she received when she came into the government in 1986 is lacking and preventing newer acquisition executives from having the “organic government skills” that are crucial to proper acquisition execution.
“I had excellent opportunities,” McFarland said during her presentation. “Those vanished and our work force, especially those who came in the ’90s, don’t have those skills. So I can’t fix this overnight. This isn’t something that heals quickly.
“If I don’t have the competent capability to look at what I am being offered and being able to understand it, being able to understand what is good and what is bad, I can barely be capable of doing what I need to do…to protect the public,” McFarland said. “It is bad. So we are making all sorts of efforts to improve getting our peoples’ skills up to par.”
McFarland also discussed general issues surrounding defense acquisition and challenges industry faces in the acquisition process. She said the federal government has “not been a good customer” because newer acquisition executives don’t have the engineering skills to make proper analysis of input.
“In order to be a good customer, you have to have the engineering skills to do the appropriate analysis of an industry partner’s input to you,” she said. “We had done a huge amount of activity in the ’80s and ’90s that sent a lot of government skills out the door. We need to reestablish our competency in our workforce that we, frankly, lost.”
McFarland said she believes some of the problems in defense acquisition stem from a lack of passion new employees may have for their craft.
“I have a sense that they are not living to work, (but) they are working to live,” McFarland said.