Recently Alan Joch wrote a piece on the FCW website, called
"Is Government Procurement Ready for the Cloud?" The piece was one of the five-most read and emailed on the FCW website for two days running.
"Many IT procurement practices and contracting vehicles," Alan wrote, "were designed to help managers provision hardware and software, not on-demand services. Can the current acquisition practices translate easily to the dynamic world of cloud computing?" The article quoted a technical manager at DHS who was worried about the ability of the procurement system to accommodate to cloud computing, though it also quoted Larry Allen, longtime head of the Coalition for Government Procurement, which represents vendors on the GSA schedules, saying he didn't see a problem.
What was frustrating about the article, frankly, was the lack of specifics. The only actual example of a "procurement problem" the article cited was a protest over a requirement in one procurement that, for security reasons, the cloud infrastructure be hosted in the US. That requirement is not a "procurement problem'; it is a policy decision about risk that the procuring agency made. (Maybe the procurement problem was the ability to protest. One may have different views about bid protests, and I am hardly known as one of the great supporters of protests, but this is hardly a special problem the procurement system has in buying cloud computing.)
The article was an example of a genre of statements that one often hears about how rigidities in the procurement system create barriers to buying certain kinds of products and services. Often, these statements are not accompanied by examples of specific problems. They appeal to, and exacerbate, a climate of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that many in the government feel when they are going to have to deal with the procurement system.
It is possible that there are procurement regulations or practices that throw roadblocks in the way of intelligent procurement of cloud computing services. If so, I hope blog readers will post comments saying what they are -- which will offer progressive people in the procurement system the opportunity to put on their thinking caps to see if ways to unblock these obstacles can be found. But all too often, consumers of the procurement system get paralyzed by worries of roadblocks they think the system creates that in fact aren't there. The fear also makes it more difficult for program people constructively and collegially to deal with their counterparts in procurement or, worse, to avoid the procurement system until the last moment -- like getting an infected tooth pulled -- which only makes things much worse.
Program and technical customers, and folks in contracting shops, need to realize they are part of the same team and to work to overcome the FUD factor.
Posted on Feb 02, 2012 at 10:05 AM1 comments
I recently met with the latest group of China Future Leaders university students coming through Boston. There were 140 of them this time -- reflecting the growth of Chinese tourism to the US -- and I had to divide up my appearance into two meetings, because the room we had couldn't fit more than 100.
As I always do (faithful blog readers may recall earlier posts on these student visits), I asked them a bunch of questions at the beginning of each session. I started by asking them a version of a question I had asked in the past. First I asked them what the best thing about the US was, and the worst thing. Then I asked them the same question about China -- what were the best and worst things.
What was interesting was that there was very strong agreement, for both the US and China, about the best thing about each country, and much less about the worst thing. For the US, by far what the students shouted out was that the best thing was "freedom," with "education system" in a fairly distant second place as the best thing. (Critics of US education take note, though -- the Chinese were probably thinking more about universities than elementary or secondary schools).
For China, two answers dominated the best thing -- Chinese history and Chinese culture, with Chinese food in distant third place. Anybody who looks at the popularity of historical dramas, involving long-ago dynasties, on Chinese television would not be surprised about this answer. Things were relatively silent -- maybe due to politeness? -- about the worst thing about the US, and no real consensus, but individual answers included arrogance and high crime. For China, again there wasn't as much shouting out about the worst thing, but the most common answer was "too many people," with pollution in second place.
Then, as I have frequently asked them before, I asked them whether they thought the US government was on the whole friendly or unfriendly to China, and then whether the Chinese government was on the whole friendly or unfriendly to the US.
The response was the same as it has been every time before: Most students thought the US government was unfriendly to China, but that the Chinese government was friendly to the US. This time I asked the majority why they answered the way they did. On the US being unfriendly, the good news was that the students pointed to very concrete issues, such as the value of the Chinese currency, trade relations, and Taiwan. Nobody suggested anything more broad. Why did they think the Chinese government was friendly to the US? One answer dominated: "They buy US government debt."
At the end -- in the context of inviting interested students to "friend" me on Facebook -- I asked them how many of them were on Facebook, which is of course blocked in China and can be accessed only using special software to "jump the wall" (the so-called "Great Firewall of China"). To my surprise, about a quarter to a third of the students raised their hands -- though this number probably isn’t a good guide to guess the number of people who have managed to get and use this software, since some of these students are studying in Hong Kong, where the Internet isn't blocked.
I then asked them, "If Facebook were allowed in China, would you participate?" Essentially every student in the audience raised a hand. This is interesting, since just about all of them are already on Facebook's Chinese knockoff Renren, so this suggests they want to be able to communicate with foreigners. These students aren't necessarily typical of all Chinese students -- they come from families rich enough to afford this trip, and they have chosen to come to visit the US -- but their responses suggest a continuing desire by young Chinese to cultivate contacts with us.
Posted on Jan 30, 2012 at 6:55 AM4 comments
Good news travels slowly, so perhaps it is not surprising that I only recently found out about an October 2011 GAO report called Critical Factors Underlying Successful Major Acquisitions, which examines seven recent government IT systems acquisitions -- ranging in dollar value from $35 million to $2 billion -- that have met their schedule, cost, and performance targets. (I don't recall seeing anything even in FCW about this report when it came out, and a search of the fcw.com website with the key words GAO and the title of the report came up dry. FCW, tell me it isn't so!)
The projects ranges from a logistics support system fielded by the Defense Information Systems Agency to a Department of Homeland Security for high-volume Mexican and Canadian border crossings that uses license plate identification and other technologies to allow checking background information about visitors without slowing down border crossings too much. Agencies were asked to identify projects, and GAO vetted project performance. They then interviewed people involved in the program with open-ended questions about what factors in their view contributed the most to program success. GAO coded and tabulated replies, and the report presents information about the most-common success factors the interviews revealed.
The single most common success factor -- mentioned in all 7 of the programs -- was that "program officials were actively engaged with stakeholders." GAO noted that the stakeholders were internal (including top management) and external (such as oversight bodies and non-government customers). Internal stakeholders were involved in ongoing meetings with the contractors, assessing progress and issues, and in reviewing contractor deliverables. In all but two of the cases, end users and other stakeholders were involved in the development of requirements and in informal testing prior to formal acceptance testing.
The next most common factor, present in six of the seven programs, was "program staff had the necessary knowledge and skills" and "senior department and agency executives supported the programs."
In the successful projects, program managers were knowledgeable about procurement, contract management, organizational change, and/or earned value management. As for senior leadership, they were credited with interventions that would have been more difficult at the program manager level, such as reaching agreements with senior leaders in other departments about necessary cooperation or assuring end user involvement.
Perhaps surprisingly, sufficient funding was named as a success factor in only three of the cases.
It was also interesting that features of the technology approach used generally didn't make it on the list at all, with the exception of agile development, which some successful projects mentioned. Nobody mentioned commercial off-the-shelf products or cloud, or much else about the technology itself as success factors.
The message seems to be: it’s the management, stupid.
Researchers (including me) are often skeptical of research that tries to draw conclusions only from successful cases, because even if you see that all the successes did x, you don't know whether maybe the failures did x as well unless you compare successes and failures. In this report, however, I feel more confident in the results because past studies of failures have developed long lists of mistakes that IT systems that run into problems make. This report draws from that long list to identify mistakes avoided in the successful projects.
All in all, good job GAO.
And aside from the helpfulness of the lessons learned reported in this GAO study, this report should be getting wide distribution to give GAO credit for writing a report that tells us what we might learn from success instead of just dumping on failure. If the silence is deafening, it will hardly encourage more such reports from GAO.
Posted on Jan 26, 2012 at 7:03 PM7 comments