Industry group warns onerous criteria for GWACs may benefit large contractors

The Alliance for Digital Innovation (ADI) has urged caution over the introduction of further evaluation schemes for contractors bidding on governmentwide acquisition contracts, or GWACs.

In a report issued Tuesday, the industry group said that while it supports action by the federal government to tackle rising cybersecurity threats, the use of overly complex evaluation criteria benefits large incumbent companies working in the federal technology space, and may be stifling innovation.

“An example of this concern is presented by the recent heavy reliance on using scoring worksheets for evaluations of GWAC proposals (where companies must score high in order to receive an award),” says the report. “While this objective method of evaluating high numbers of offers can save time and protect the government from frivolous protests, the criteria used in these worksheets is based on traditional large, long-term government contracts.”

The report argues that such criteria “heavily favor the traditional large government contractors and create a huge barrier to entry for smaller, more specialized firms that provide deep expertise in specific technology solutions.”

In addition to raising concerns about one-size-fits-all evaluation criteria, ADI has called on GWAC administrators to engage more effectively with commercial industry. It noted that some agencies had made recent progress by appointing liaison staff to maintain relationships with the private sector.

“[M]any agencies still have a limited interest in meeting with potential vendors that are not familiar with the unique government culture and acquisition processes. This unintended bias particularly impacts nontraditional vendors whose commercial solutions were not built primarily to deal with government-specific requirements,” the report says. “Moving these activities further up in the procurement cycle gives GWAC administrators greater access to information, market intelligence, and customer feedback that can help them even before the first word of an RFP is published.”

ADI also called on GWAC administrators to show a more open approach to prior commercial use cases presented by new vendors. In some cases, according to the trade body, these may provide as accurate a guide as a company’s previous track record in government procurement.

“Just because a certain vendor (or vendors) have followed the letter of previous procurements and built the government whatever unique, bespoke solution they requested, that does not necessarily mean that they have the kinds of ideas, products, and services that will meet the evolving customer demands required in new GWACs,” ADI said in the report.

DOD to embed data experts within military units

The Department of Defense is launching a new Artificial Intelligence and Data Accelerator initiative (AIDA) that will embed teams of data experts within combatant commands, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Tuesday.

Under the scheme, two types of teams will be embedded: operational data teams, which are focused on creating new tools and policies, and “flyaway teams” that are parachuted in to assist on specific problem sets.

The initiative is part of the DOD’s work to implement its Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy, which outlines a vision in which a military internet of things and data become central to the theater of war.

Hicks said the new data teams will bring “top tier talent and technology” to modernize the data and IT infrastructure combatant commands rely on and the policies that dictate data usage. They will start with a 90-day window to make improvements.

Artificial intelligence is to be used to sift through the large amounts of data being generated as part of the JADC2 strategy. AI systems in command centers will have the power to communicate directly with each other.

The strategy for how JADC2 could modernize military operations was signed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in May, giving the department the approval to move ahead on new initiatives like AIDA.

The technology that is intended to drive JADC2 has largely yet to materialize. That’s one of the problems the new operational and flyaway teams will work on, building out the data platforms and AI infrastructure that will form the basis of the strategy.

Connolly floats legislative fix for IT working capital funds

Congress probably needs to revisit the Modernizing Government Technology Act because some agencies still haven’t created IT working capital funds, based on legal advice from their general counsels, said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., Monday.

The Subcommittee on Government Operations he chairs may open up a policy dialogue with those agencies and their counsels, but more likely a legislative fix is needed, Connolly said.

Only three out of 24 agencies graded received “As” in implementing the MGT Act on the last FITARA scorecard in December, in part, because their lawyers continue to tell leaders they lack transfer authority to put appropriated money in IT working capital funds.

“[I]n some cases they’ve formed the funds,” Connolly said, during a MITRE event. “In some other cases they have not because they’ve been advised legally they don’t have the authority, even though the law we passed says you do.”

A jurisdictional “turf battle” between the House Oversight and Appropriations committees could ensue over the working capital funds — designed to bank unused IT dollars until agencies are ready to invest them in long-term modernization projects — unless they work together, Connolly said.

Agencies must also be required to produce plans for the use of their IT working capital funds, he said.

“From my point of view, it’s just critical every agency has a working capital fund so that they can stay abreast of changes in technology, implement the latest encryption programs and measures to protect the assets in the databases and proprietary information, and retire those legacy systems,” Connolly said.

Former CISA innovation chief joins Silicon Valley defense tech incubator

Defense technology incubator and consultancy BMNT has hired the former chief of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s innovation hub.

Sabra Horne joins the Palo Alto-based company as an entrepreneur in residence, where she will help to lead its InsightAI program.

Horne has held senior roles at CISA since 2017, and prior to that at the National Security Agency. Earlier in her federal career, Horne was a director in the Office of Communications at the Department of Justice and has also served as a senior adviser at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

BMNT is an innovation consultancy and early-stage tech incubator that was established in 2013 by former U.S. Army Colonel Peter Newell. It applies the Silicon Valley startup mentality to national security issues and works with large organizations including federal agencies. Its clients include the Australian and British governments, and earlier this year set up a U.K. entity.

InsightAI uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to sift information from employee surveys and other internal information. The program is intended to reduce the number of human hours required to do such work and to carry it out in a more reliable and objective manner.

Horne joins other leaders within BMNT with federal government experience including Jackie Space, who was a visiting senior research fellow at the National Defense University. Before joining the private sector she was a program manager in the U.S. Air Force.

Commenting on the appointment of Horne, Newell said: “All of the staff who arrive at BMNT join the company because they have a unique drive for mission-driven work.”

“Sabra brings an incredible skillset and understands the context of how natural language processing and artificial intelligence will change the nature of defense and intelligence work.”

Horne said: “I am thrilled to be part of the remarkable group at BMNT and to join their work in supporting national security. With the success of the company’s hacking programs, their mission-focused and innovative services, and the development of  InsightAI, under the inspiring leadership of Pete Newell, this is a group I had to join.”

DOD to elevate cyber, network testing in new exercises

The Department of Defense will hold large-scale exercises this calendar year to test the resiliency of battlefield networks and project how the U.S. military would cope if it comes under sustained cyber attack while fighting future wars.

The latest exercises will differ from current war games that focus on guns and tanks or experimenting with emerging tech, Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, chief information officer for the Joint Staff said Monday. They will be focused on testing the Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy, where networks connect all military operations in air, land, sea, space and cyberspace.

The event will take place”not just in a special IT forum, not just with CIOs, but with the warfighter,” Crall said .

Crall was critical of the department’s prior lack of attention to cyber and network connectivity. He described the place of IT in briefings as “one-slide deep,” with that slide containing some graphics with lightning bolts and little information.

“No one was really looking at this,” he said, adding that while some people in DOD have focused on network resilience, it was “not holistically.”

That will change with combatant command-level exercises planned for this year, he said. He didn’t give any more details or a name of the exercise, but said they would represent a new way of testing the strategy.

So far, services have hosted test events for the tech they are building as a part of JADC2. The Air Force’s contribution, Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) has had several joint “on-ramps,” where new tech was tested, but Crall said these were carried largely as a means of experimenting with new technology instead of simulating entire battles.

DOD weighing options on JEDI with possible changes coming soon, says No.2 Hicks

The Department of Defense could take a new direction by next month on its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Monday.

Hicks said that while the department is keeping its options open, she expects movement on the stagnant contract soon.

“We are very actively looking at our options,” Hicks said at the DefenseOne Tech Summit Monday. “We will be moving forward in a…direction in the next month or so, but I am not going to get into where we might end up,” she said, citing the ongoing litigation around the contract.

The contract remains stuck in legal limbo as Amazon Web Services continues to protest the 2019 award of the contract, worth up to $10 billion over 10 years, to Microsoft.

Hicks reiterated the importance of getting enterprise cloud into the department, both for emerging warfighting capabilities like Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and back-office business operations. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently signed a new strategy for JADC2 — a new digitally-driven concept of operations that relies on an enterprise cloud to store data and connect weapons in a battlefield.

“The department must have an enterprise cloud solution approach in order to make the most of JADC2,” Hicks said.

One option before the DOD is canceling the JEDI contract and starting fresh; while DOD officials have contemplated the possibility in the past, Hicks did not mention it Monday.

AWS recently scored a victory in court with a federal claims judge agreeing to the company’s requested timeline on hearings in the case and receiving additional documents.

HHS launches $80M public health IT workforce program promoting equity

The Department of Health and Human Services launched a program for IT workforce development with American Rescue Plan Act funds Thursday.

Dubbed the Public Health Informatics & Technology Workforce Development Program, the $80 million consortium will create a curriculum; recruit and train participants; secure paid internships; and place people at public health agencies, nonprofits, clinics and companies.

The program will encourage minority-serving colleges, universities and other institutions to apply for funding, in keeping with the American Rescue Plan’s goal of addressing health and socioeconomic inequalities highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With this funding, we will be able to train and create new opportunities for thousands of minorities long underrepresented in our public health informatics and technology fields,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in the announcement. “Investing in efforts that create a pipeline of diverse professionals, particularly in high-skilled public health technology fields, will help us better prepare for future public health emergencies.”

The pandemic showed race and ethnicity-specific data was lacking during public health reporting and data analysis due, in part, to limited IT infrastructure and underfunding of staff needed at the state and local levels. Data on infections, hospitalizations, mortality rates, and health and social vulnerabilities must be disaggregated by variables like race, ethnicity, age and gender to paint a complete picture of a disease’s spread.

About 4,000 participants will be trained by the PHIT Workforce Program over four years, with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT awarding up to $75 million for cooperative agreements and spending the remaining $5 million on administration. Awardees must show their training, certificate, degree and placement programs sustain a continuous pipeline of diverse public health IT professionals.

Participants will not only be part of the consortium but a community of practice for sharing resources and lessons learned with each other.

ONC’s notice of funding opportunity supports President Biden‘s executive order on ensuring a sustainable public health workforce. The office will hold an information session on the opportunity on June 23.

“The limited number of public health professionals trained in informatics and technology was one of the key challenges the nation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health IT, said in a statement. “This new funding will help to address that need by supporting the efforts of minority serving institutions and other colleges and universities across the nation to educate and launch individuals into public health careers.”

How one corps is trying to modernize the Army

Last summer, the Army’s highest-ranking general had a meeting with the three-star commander in charge of some of the service’s most elite forces. The purpose of this encounter was not a briefing on readiness or a new war game, but a chance for Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville to deliver a challenge to his subordinate at the 18th Airborne Corps: Build the corps of the future.

McConville’s meeting with Commander Lt. Gen. Erik Kurilla sparked the creation of a new program at the corps’ home in Fort Bragg, N.C., dubbed Project Ridgway after Gen. Matthew Ridgway, the corps’ first commander. Unlike the Army’s plethora of existing programs dedicated to developing new technologies, Project Ridgway is an experiment to not only field those new technologies but also develop cultures that support them, senior project leaders say.

“We have to create a culture in the corps where soldiers know they have the ability to see a problem…and actually be a part of a solution,” Col. Jeff Worthington, deputy director and senior technical adviser to Project Ridgway, told FedScoop in an exclusive interview.

Policy leaders have for many years advocated for faster technological development to ensure the U.S. military is equipped to face future threats. That military-wide transformation can’t happen without its largest component, the Army, changing — nor can the Army change without its corps changing, and so down the list of units that leaders say need to be reformed.

“We cannot be an Industrial Age army in the Information Age,” Gen. McConville wrote in 2019 in his initial message to the Army when he took over as top officer. “We must transform all linear industrial age processes to be more effective, protect our resources, and make better decisions. We must be the Army of tomorrow, today.”

The 18th Airborne Corps — often called the nation’s “contingency force,” as it must be ready to fight anywhere in the world with “18 hours’ notice” — saw itself as a ripe candidate to lead that change from a unit level.

Small steps

Project Ridgway is built around four lines of effort: culture change, upskilling data and tech literacy, using data as an asset, and building an artificial intelligence-enabled infrastructure.

“[We] needed to make the first AI-ready corps; we could never be AI-ready if we were not data ready first,” Worthington said.

Ridgway shares a similar mission with many other bodies in the Army, like Army Futures Command, cross-functional teams and task forces focused on modernization. But what’s unique, its leaders say, is its drive to operationalize at the lowest level possible the use of the tech, not just its development.

Despite big ambitions, so far the corps has taken small steps, posting an open job position for a chief data officer and holding several rounds of its “Shark Tank”-style pitch event called the “Dragon’s Lair.” A dozen or so soldiers from the corps in February participating in data boot camps, with more expected to take internships at U.S. Special Operations Command — the unified combatant command that has taken the lead on many of the military’s data and AI-initiatives.

Additionally, the team is the first to develop an application entirely in the cARMY cloud environment and has adopted parts of the Department of Defense Joint AI Center’s “data fabric,” its cleaned-up data architecture available for use.

“We are moving out and I think we are breaking down some of the bureaucracy,” said Col. Dan Kearney, the project’s director.

A soldier-developed app for range finding

To showcase the type of work Project Ridgway hopes to foster, its leaders walked FedScoop through a project meant to be like an Airbnb for shooting ranges — small in scope, but representative of the type of culture the team wants to create.

Maj. Evan Adams, an operations planner in the 101st Airborne Division within the corps, came up with the idea to replace the current process, more akin to signing into a motel on carbon copy papers, with a smartphone app — an idea that he pitched to leadership and earned him resources to continue it development.

“It is an enduring issue in the military…we are pretty much stuck to our desks doing admin work,” Adams said. “We can do this stuff on our phone.”

The application itself will allow soldiers to schedule a spot at a range for shooting practice. It’s a mundane problem unique to soldiers who need to keep their shooting skills sharp and range managers who are burdened by paperwork and maintenance requirements.

That mismatch of time, effort and means to schedule time on the range is one part of what the “Range Finder” app is targeting. But it’s also a small use case for a larger ambition. Adams said the app will also collect data on range usage, feed predictive maintenance efforts and provide a starting example for what soldiers can accomplish when supported to provide their own solutions to challenges.

Ridgway leaders point to the Range Finder app as the first of many soldier-led tools they want to implement.

“Bottom line, we typically have to carry a bunch of books…It is 2021 — the book should fit in our pocket,” Adams said.

Formalizing innovation

The cadre of innovators across the Army remains an informal one, strung together in a shadow network of LinkedIn and Microsoft Teams connections. Adams said formalizing that network and putting time and resources behind soldiers’ ideas is what is needed to advance from one-off apps to the type of technology ecosystem the Army wants.

“We like to stay in the shadows,” Adams said. “We don’t know what we are doing; we just figure it out as we go.”

Other lines of effort in the project, like the data and tech upskilling, are more institutionalized means of attaining the goals of modernization. The internship and data boot camps are supported by Galvanize, a data and tech boot camp company. But it remains a small effort with only a handful of soldiers sent through the program on temporary assignments out of the tens of thousands in the corps.

The challenge on both ends becomes formalizing change without that processes overshadowing its initial goals. In Adams’ mind, that means burning everything the Army does down to the ground.

“If we want to apply this model and this thinking and saying this is a success, we are going to essentially have to burn what we thought was the right way of doing things and build anew,” he said.

Ultimately, Kearney, Adams and others take a long view of the approach they have started. The colonel said his unit of time is set to years, not months or weeks, to measure change. Adams too acknowledged that his app for finding ranges was a small start to a big problem.

“I don’t think these are short-term wins,” Kearney said.

Air Force to issue $750M IT contract for drone squadron operation center

The Air Force is preparing to issue an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for IT and technology services for an operations center dedicated to flying a squadron of drones.

The contract has a $750 million ceiling and would be to service network and data curation for the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Squadron Operation Center Enterprise at Joint Base Langley-Eustis.

The center plans and operates drone missions around the world, which are an increasingly important part of the military’s strategy to use integrated technology systems to guide military operations in war zones.

“The requirement is to Install, configure, operate, maintain, manage, and troubleshoot equipment and networks to support long-haul communications (both satellite and terrestrial), and provide help desk function,” the request states.

The Air Force plans to issue an eight-year contract with requirements for small businesses to be included in work delivered under the contract. The contractor will also need to keep IT systems up to date in the center with tech-refreshes over the period of the contract.

The Air Force expects to release the RFP by early August, it said.

Leidos wins $999M contract to support reserves’ health IT infrastructure

Leidos has won a contract to provide commercial health services to U.S. military reserve forces, which includes medical and IT infrastructure work.

The contract, known as the Reserve Health Readiness Program III, has a total estimated value of about $999 million if all options are exercised. The work will be carried out by Ledios’ subsidiary company, QTC Medical Services. The award is a firm-fixed-price, cost-no-fee contract, and could extend for up to five years.

Leidos will work with the Defense Health Agency to carry out the contract and will provide services to the reserve arms of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Commenting on the contract win, Leidos Health Group President Liz Porter said: “We are excited to begin this contract and expand our health care offerings for all U.S. military reservists.”

“This work builds on our robust health delivery solutions, which are leading the industry in innovative care for active duty, reserve and veteran service members,” she added.