Lynn Announces Plans to Facilitate IT Procurement
William Lynn
Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn announced plans to facilitate the faster procurement of IT products for the Department of Defense. During the U.S. Strategic Command Cyberspace Symposium, Lynn announced the formation of a task force to speed the procurement process.
The newly formed task force will include DoD experts in acquisition, logistics and technology.
“The goal is to develop a significantly faster and agile acquisition system more tailored to an IT world than [to] large pieces of military equipment,” Lynn said.
The United States is the most networked nation in the world and the U.S. military relies on networks to give it an edge over opposing forces, according to Lynn. However, the procurement process for software has not kept pace with the changing times and operates too slowly.
“In this very ordered process, we decide what the mission is, identify the requirements that are needed to meet that mission and analyze alternatives to meet those requirements,” Lynn said. “Eight or nine years later, we actually have something.”
According to Lynn, IT procurement has followed a similar pattern, which is not adequate. New technology needs to be acquired and implemented quickly with the every changing cyber threat landscape.
“On average, it takes the department 81 months from when an information technology program is first funded to when it becomes operational,” Lynn said.
Lynn compared the amount of time it takes for DoD to procure technology with how quickly Apple was able to develop the iPhone, which took just 24 months to design, develop, test and market.
“In [DoD], we will barely have a budget document in 24 months,” he said. “So Apple gets an iPhone and we get a budget. It’s not an acceptable trade-off.”
The newly formed task force will report directly to Lynn. He has instructed members of the task force to mold their changes around four core principles. Speed of acquisition needs to be a top priority, he said.
“We need to match the acquisition process to the technology development cycle,” Lynn said. “In IT, this means 12- to 36-month cycles, and not seven to eight years.”
Also, incremental development and testing of new capabilities generally provides better outcomes, he said.
“Third,” Lynn said, “to achieve speedy, incremental improvements, we need to carefully examine how to establish the requirements that govern acquisition.”
Finally, the IT procurement process needs to recognize the significant breadth of DoD IT requirements.
“We must recognize that different IT applications demand different levels of oversight and enterprise integration,” Lynn said. “Our intent is to target things we can change now, while laying the foundation for longer-term reforms that may require Congress to legislate new authorities.”
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Hi Michael,
We are small time sofware vendor to DoD and would like to know how we can present our product to this new task force, so that adoption of our technology can facilitate the department more productively.
Look forward to your reply.
Cheers
Allis
As far as I know, they still intend to operate in the same acquisition manner, with RFIs and RFPs. So you’ll still need to monitor FedBiz Opportunities and submit your proposal through that medium.