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Integrated Technology Acquisition Plan Suggested for DHS

June 26, 2008 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Daniel Fowler and Rob Margetta, CQ Staff

A Homeland Security Advisory Council task force is recommending that the Department of Homeland Security create a new technologies acquisition strategy for the entire department and a plan for implementing it -- an idea popular with contractors and the department.

The recommendation was part of an Essential Technology Task Force report that the full council adopted at its meeting Wednesday.

"Together this strategy and plan should allow for rigorous management, priority-setting and budgetary decision-making across missions and components," said task force Chairman George Vradenburg, a former strategic adviser for AOL Time Warner.

"This strategy should be dynamic, including a variety of program life spans, and provide for changes in threat and hazards environment. The task force commends the department for moving forward with the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review and the Office of Net Assessment, which should be linked to this departmentwide capability/acquisition strategy."

According to the report, having an integrated and comprehensive DHS-wide strategy "will enable DHS management to more effectively prioritize programs driven by event, time, threat or funding and gives decision-makers the ability to make understandable trade-off decisions between systems, programs, or technologies" and will "allow for requirement decisions based on cycle time, lease, purchase, or service provisions."

One of the problems identified in the report was a lack of effective leveraging of technologies and goods that can serve several DHS component agencies with complementary missions. The department's current strategic plan cannot identify cross-component needs that can be filled with common solutions, the report said.

Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council, a trade association, said that sort of shortsightedness has been a problem for DHS since its inception. He gave an example of one instance in which the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement all wanted to purchase handguns. Each agency sought to procure them individually, but ended up driving up demand for the others.

"The departments and agencies were competing against themselves," Chvotkin said. "There was a limited number of handgun manufacturers."

Chvotkin said the agencies eventually performed a "spend analysis" and, seeing that they all had the same need, put together a list of guns that would fill it and did centrally managed group procurement under the DHS chief procurement officer. Although he did not have a chance to read the task force's report, Chvotkin said anything encouraging a more integrated, comprehensive approach to procurement would be a positive.

"If the idea is to do a more aggressive job and looking for goods and services that are common for the entire DHS mission, I think it's a great recommendation," he said. "You don't need a new procurement system for that."

Chvotkin said DHS has already taken some steps in the right direction through a technique called "strategic sourcing," where the department tries to identify goods that can be beneficial across its component entities -- from vehicles to office supplies -- and use centralized procurement for them.

Strategic sourcing requires collegial agreements between the heads of procurement at the component agencies, Chvotkin said. But, he said, if DHS gave its chief procurement officer line authority across the department -- currently, the CPO is on roughly equal footing with agency procurement heads -- "it could be done more quickly and more easily."

DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie said the task force recommendation is a good one and that the department is working to accomplish it. "We are moving away from just simple procurement and working on acquisition strategies," he said.

While "procurement is just purchasing goods and services," Orluskie said, "an acquisitions strategy starts with being part of the program management from the beginning and seeing it through even after the purchase to ensure that goods and services are being delivered to meet the needs of the department."

The task force said that by creating the acquisition strategy and the implementation plan "government stakeholders and oversight authorities will gain confidence in the department's ability to build programs and propose budgets based on mission, operations, time and risk-based priorities" that may lead to oversight authorities granting the department "a more flexible budgetary authority," which would help with long-term procurement.

Task force Chairman Vradenburg said the acquisitions process is a particular problem for DHS because it's a very young department.

"It has not developed a history of acquisitions capability," he said. "It has a procurement function, but it doesn't have a program management function with all the skill sets that need to be built into that to assure that once you've procured something it's actually implemented, installed in the field, operates effectively over its life in the manner intended and accomplishes its mission."

Daniel Fowler can be reached at dfowler@cq.com. Rob Margetta can be reached at rmargetta@cq.com.