Franklin Reeder co-founded the Center for Internet Security, after a decades-long career in the Office of Management and Budget. In the mid-1990s, he was director of the White House Office of Administration. 

If you knew then what you know now … 

…How would you have partnered with industry differently?

I recall a department-level CIO saying that he prided himself on never meeting with industry representatives.  He thought that any conversations raised the specter of conflict of interest. If anything, I would have been even more outspoken that such intentional ignorance deprives the government of the potential creativity of the vendor community.

…How would you have worked more effectively within the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation?

The FAR is an artifact of often overly zealous reactions to individual bad actors and actions. That is a political reality; each new anecdote will give rise  to a FAR clause.

…How would you have sought out innovative ideas and solutions to help your agency (office, department) function better?

I would have encouraged greater use of RFIs and similar vehicles, including workshops, to invite more dialogue on outcome-based solutions rather than responding to internally developed specifications.  There has been a real sea change since I left government.  People like [former Federal CTOs] Aneesh Chopra and Todd Park recognized early that, if they make government-held data available, entrepreneurial individuals and entities will develop apps that address public needs far more quickly and effectively.

Vance Hitch is specialist leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP and a member of its Federal CIO Advisory Council. He is a former deputy assistant attorney general and CIO of the U.S. Department of Justice.

If you knew then what you know now….

…How would you have partnered with industry differently?

Even though I had industry experience before joining the U.S. Department of Justice, there are still areas that I would go back and change, such as being more open-ended with vendors. There are a number of tools at federal leaders’ disposal that can create better results and communication with industry. There is, however, often a pervasive fear in government of unknowingly breaking the rules and paying a big price for doing so. This can result in poor, or in some cases, no communications. To those outside government, it often feels like you are in quicksand. That fear is something leaders should address because it can get in the way of being creative with industry, asking open-ended questions, and asking industry to think differently. If we always ask for things in the same way, chances are, we will get the same results. If I had a time machine, I would go back and address that fear more directly with my team so we could have more direct and open-ended conversations with industry to get to that more innovative approach.

…How would you have worked more effectively within the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation?                                                                                                                                                                                   

In hindsight, I would seek to find a “new best friend” or two in the contracting shop. I would look for contracting officers who are grounded in the FAR (to avoid the oft stated possibility of “going to jail”) but who are also forward-thinking. The confines of the FAR can be challenging, to put it mildly. Knowing what I know now, I would have found other ways – more non-traditional procurement options, which are still in compliance with the FAR, of course – that can get to better results and better communication with the vendors. For example, I would use a statement of objectives instead of a statement of work. With a statement of objectives, you don’t need to get down to a gnat’s eyelash in terms of detail. You ask for alternative capabilities and approaches that address your objectives.

Part of the issue is that when you are in government, you may not have perfect knowledge or awareness of everything that is available to you. A statement of work demands so much detail that you cannot have direct or open-ended discussions about what your real challenges are and what the many possibilities or solutions are for addressing them. This level of detail can also restrict good communication, innovation, and outcomes. The ability to have conversations and push innovation and creativity with your vendors is especially important when you are buying commodity items. You need industry to shed some light on the options and hear what they have done elsewhere.  Also, they can propose how their off-the-shelf offerings could best meet your objectives. In hindsight, I would have worked harder to better understand the procurement process and the non-traditional options available to have better, more open communication with vendors on what the real challenges and opportunities are.

…How would you have sought out innovative ideas and solutions to help your agency function better?

One approach to drive innovation that I have seen more of, now that I’ve been back in the private sector for the past few years, is the use of more prototypes and pilots. These prototypes/pilots tend to be much better opportunities to try new solutions, instead of investing in cradle-to-grave procurements. You can try, fail, retool, try again, or scrap it without the program eating years and years of budget and time.

Looking back, I would have also required every program to include an innovation plan and made it part of the Form 300 process. Every program must have a Form 300 filled out to get budget; so this is where you can make innovation a priority in policy, process, and technology. My intent would be to turn up some new, good ideas and that would receive funding. Budgets are so tight; and most people don’t want to spend dollars exploring new ideas. However, we need to start somewhere and should encourage people to take some risks.  So I would put some heat behind it. Government often throws good money after bad when a program is having trouble, spending more and more dollars, often without a credible rethinking of alternatives. Planning for innovation can help address this problem by encouraging small investments in trying out new policies, processes, and technologies through pilots and other techniques. This can generate some beneficial change to keep things fresh and breathe life into new programs over the years.

Lastly, another encouraging, innovative approach I’ve seen recently for implementing an enterprise program at the department level is to break up the program into useful pieces and create competition among the bureaus or components. Each bureau can present its solution (to one or more pieces) and demonstrate how it affects not just one component but the whole enterprise in terms of mission or service delivery. Department leaders can pick a few winners that answer this call and put budget, along with employee recognition, behind it. I think we’ll see more of this kind of friendly, intramural competition and other innovative approaches across government. I certainly would strive to do so if I were in government today.

ALSO SEE:

This iteration takes on a bit of a different format, given we spoke to Richard Spires, who spent 20 years in private sector before joining federal government as the CIO with the Internal Revenue Services and then Department of Homeland Security. He is now CEO at Learning Tree International, and reflects for us upon his lessons learned about government after his time in industry. 

If you knew then what you know now….

How would you have prepared for your role as a federal CIO?

The thing that surprised me most was how timid a lot of the government people are in dealing with industry. That may sound strategy, but the fact of the matter is that most government employees, because they’ve been told to be careful with industry, tend to not want to share the way that they should. I think that hurts government in the long term, because it doesn’t enable industry to respond well with solutions.

How would you have worked more effectively within the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation?

The far has grown into this beast. I believe it is a challenge because it’s just complex. Why can’t we have a 10-page FAR? Why can’t we strip it down to the essence? We want fair competition, but there are many ways to be fair. There’s the cultural aspect, where individual agencies take it well beyond [the regulation] – and put additional restrictions. The way to do this is redo the FAR, make it very lean; that in and of itself will help address a lot of these cultural issues.

How would you have sought out innovative ideas and solutions to help your agency function better? 

This dates back to when I was at IRS – when I first came to government, and said ‘how can I help.’ I felt I should lead by example. I can’t meet with every contractor. It’s not possible. But I did try to reach out, get on the circuit, and try to tell the DHS or IRS story about where we were trying to go with innovation, what we’re trying to accomplish, what the landscape will be like working as a contractor in the organization, what major procurements we’re tracking. Not a lot of detail, but from the vision of what we’re trying to achieve.

When I was in government I learned a lot. I learned a lot about myself, how to deal with people. It was a great experience. One of the major things I learned, is if you want to get things to government, you need to be able to collaborate across all the stakeholders. Get to know them, find out who they are, understand them, then bring them together in collaborative ways and you can help get things done. Private sector can be more aggressive, but it’s still important.

Sonny Hashmi, now managing director for global government at cloud-storage company Box, was CIO and CTO at the General Services Administration from 2011 to 2014. He also worked for the Washington, D.C., municipal government and other private companies.

If you knew then what you know now …

How would you have partnered with industry differently?

When agency needs arise, in order to ensure fairness and equitable consideration, lengthy and detailed requirements are crafted and sent to the industry. However, this often leads to bad outcomes. In order to mitigate protest risks, requirements are increasingly specific and fixed, but they leave very little if any room for industry to offer alternate, compelling approaches to solve the stated problems. As a result, many innovative and compelling solutions don’t even make it past the first gate, and the government suffers as a result. It also reinforces a cycle of inertia, whereby since government employees don’t see those innovative solutions, they keep asking for what they know, and as a result, continue to get the same traditional approaches and solutions.

If I had to do it over again, I would find ways to re-think how government partners with the industry. Some of the aspects of this new approach would include:

• Find a way to quickly execute simple, straight forward requests for information that are broadly written to get an understanding of the market, and invite cross-discipline personnel from IT and business units to review those responses.
• Rely on broadly-written statements of objectives that identify the challenge and encourage the industry to put forth their solutions, rather than specific statements of work.
• Add more transparency and engagement in the pre-request for proposal phase through industry days and other engagement mechanisms to allow companies to have a voice on what the requirements should be and how they should be drafted.
• Asking for demonstrable success and solutions as early as possible in the solution life cycle, perhaps through a structured 90 day pilot approach to separate companies that have viable products from those that only offer hypothetical solutions.
• Spend more time connecting with new and emerging companies in neutral venues like Silicon Valley conferences, and industry-government partnership organizations, and require that people at all levels in my organization do the same so collectively, we are better informed about what’s out there.

How would you have worked more effectively within the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation?

Some of the strategies that I would employ more deeply would be:

1. Leverage limited term pilots (for cost) with flexible terms to terminate the agreement if the product or service does not meet stated capabilities.
2. Employ the statement of objectives approach by default, avoiding statements of work as much as possible.
3. Leverage contract vehicles that limit protest risk exposure.
4. Employ industry days, demo days and pre-RFP engagement mechanisms to ensure that industry is aware of what we are trying to do, and has the ability to provide input into the process and requirements.
5. Be more directly involved within the proposal review process to ensure that executive level vision is included in solution evaluation. Involve people from both IT and business units into the assessment more directly.
6. Put a page limit on the size of the proposal and require electronic submission of supplemental material, data sheets and other artifacts. No one has time to read through a 200 page proposal. If a company can’t specifically describe their solution in 25 pages or less, perhaps they are not absolutely clear on how their solution meets our requirements.
7. Put a page limit on the number of pages in each RFP/RFQ/Requirements document. If the government can’t describe what we need in 10 pages or less, maybe our expectations and requirements are too complex and will lead to failure.

How would you have sought out innovative ideas and solutions to help your agency function better?

The formal acquisition process is an awful way to invite and introduce innovation solutions. The real work of evaluating innovation and how it may fit into an agency’s needs must happen continuously and well before any specific RFP is released. If the agency is not aware of what innovative solutions are out there, they can’t possible draft requirements and expectations in a way that those solutions can compete.

I would spend more time in Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation across the country, meeting with accelerators, venture capital firms and startups to understand how they are approaching a certain set of challenges (for example, cybersecurity, content management, application development, identity management, etc). The idea isn’t to identify a fully baked solution that we can employ tomorrow, but to understand what the contemporary thinking is related a subject so we can start thinking along the same lines. Eventually, as our agency mindset changed due to those inputs, it will lead to opportunities for those innovative companies to offer their solutions.

I would also be more rigorous about establishing a regular cadence of industry days, demo days and hackathons that allow smart companies to bring their products and services and quickly demonstrate how they can solve some pre-stated challenges.

Martha Johnson, now a consultant and author, led the General Services Administration from 2010 to 2012. Her career as GSA administrator was cut short when she resigned in the wake of an inspector general’s report that revealed apparent overspending and waste related to a GSA conference in Las Vegas in 2010.

If you knew then what you know now….

How would you have partnered with industry differently?

I would have learned more about younger people in business — what they want, how they see opportunity, how they view government.

How would you have worked more effectively within the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation?

I would have pressed even more on collaboration, through slams and such, to build a FAR oversight community that could engage in better work flow re-engineering.

The “slam” is a technique that Johnson brought to GSA. It is a meeting of all key stakeholders in a project or program to talk through an issue until they make all the decisions needed and reach an action plan that all parties can agree to. Nobody leaves the room until the solution is reached.

How would you have sought out innovative ideas and solutions to help your organization function better?

I would have floored it about sustainability and zero footprint for all of government operations.

Early in her tenure, Johnson revealed a plan to reduce GSA’s emissions, first by 30 percent in 10 years and ultimately to zero. Acknowledging the difficulty of the feat, she described it as this generation’s “moon shot.” See this Federal Times story from 2010 for more.

Robert Burton, now a partner at law firm Venable, previously served as deputy administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) from 2001 to 2008. He also served as acting administrator for two of those years. That capped a federal acquisition career that lasted nearly 30 years. 

If you knew then what you know now….

How would you have partnered with industry differently?

While serving as the acting and deputy administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at OMB, I instituted quarterly meetings with industry associations and other industry partners that resulted in useful recommendations for changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation and new acquisition policy initiatives. At the time, I personally recognized the value of frequent communication and interaction with industry. Now, having worked in a law firm the last seven years, I recognize that not everyone in government shares this view.

If I was back at OFPP, I would focus on requiring agency acquisition and program management personnel to make communication with industry a top priority. This is frequently not viewed as a priority and, in many cases, some government managers think it is inappropriate to meet with industry. In most cases, especially in potential dispute situations, communication is the key to solving the problem. Improving government-industry communications should be a top priority for ensuring the health of the federal acquisition system.

How would you have worked more effectively within the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation?

After working in the private sector, I recognize that a growing number of government contracting officials are reluctant to do anything that is not specifically authorized in the FAR. Of course, the FAR encourages just the opposite behavior. The FAR specifically states that contracting personnel are empowered with broad discretion in the performance of their job responsibilities. But, in an era of increased oversight, contracting personnel do not have the incentive to be innovative or to exercise discretion in creative ways. If I was still at OFPP, I would make it a priority to identify and address the factors that are contributing to the misconception that the FAR somehow restricts innovative solutions to contracting problems.  This growing misconception is having a very negative impact on the federal procurement process.
  
How would you have sought out innovative ideas and solutions to help your organization function better?

From a governmentwide acquisition policy perspective, there is no question that improving the description of individual contract requirements will add the most value and improve federal procurements more than any other single initiative.  During my federal and private sector careers, I have observed that almost all legal problems and disputes are rooted in poorly defined contract requirements. Government program managers and contracting personnel can contribute to the improvement of the contract requirements.  Seeking innovative ideas and methods to develop well-defined and clear contract requirements should be a priority of OFPP and OMB.

In this regard, while serving at OFPP, I would have encouraged agencies to adopt what the private sector calls “value analysis” or “value methodology.”  The federal government uses the term “value engineering.”  Simply put, it is a program management tool that, in the context of a procurement, allows agency stakeholders to engage in brainstorming and a productive dialogue that will lead to the development of clearly defined contract requirements. The brainstorming sessions usually result in innovative solutions and ideas that will ensure that the government procures what it really needs. Value engineering is a simple and cost-effective concept, but the government has not widely used it.  By embracing the concept, the government will not only improve the quality of its procurements, but it will facilitate increased communication between agency program managers and contracting personnel. This communication and teaming is critical to the improvement of the contract requirements process.