Pentagon Archives

I can't do this job without the help of a lot of people, and this is the time of the year to thank them -- and they deserve it, because sometimes I can get cranky.

So, kudos to the following folks who exhibit true grace when dealing with me:

• Katie Roberts, Veterans Affairs Department press secretary
• Roger Baker, VA CIO
• Art Wu, Republican Deputy Staff Director, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, House VA Committee
• Laura Williams, public affairs officer, Defense Information Systems Agency
• Air Force Lt. Col. April Cunningham, Pentagon press desk
• Lt. Col. Lee Packnett and Lt. Col. Steve Warren, Army Pentagon media relations
• Paul Mehney and Dave Hampton, Army public affairs officers who help me my trips to Ft. Bliss/White Sands Missile Range
• Lt. Myers Vasquez, Navy public affairs, Pentagon
• Warren Suss, Suss Consulting
• John Garing, DISA/Suss Consulting
• Bernie Skoch, Consultant and fellow radio geek
• Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, former director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, and Dr. Greg Reger, Army psychologist with the National Center for Telehealth and Technology, for their insights into PTS/TBI at the Government Executive Leadership Breakfast in April

President Obama withdrew on Wednesday the nomination of California Chief Information Officer Teresa "Teri" Takai for the Defense assistant secretary for networks and information integration, a job that currently includes the Defense CIO title.

ASD/NII will go bye-bye under the massive restructuring of the Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates announced in August, but the CIO title is mandated by the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act.

This means that sooner or later the Pentagon will need to nominate someone for the job, which Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said will be even stronger than the current CIO role.

Will the new CIO nominee be Takai -- who has been waiting for this new job since March -- or has she tired of the process? And, what priority does that job have in the massive reorganization plan?

I predict the answers to these questions will not become apparent until next year due to the upcoming elections, the need to pass delayed budgets, and Christmas and New Year's.

I am picking up low-level signals that the administration may offer Takai a comparable job elsewhere, and I also have heard she still wants out of California before Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves office at the end of the year.

The Defense Department would like to whittle down the number of reports it has to provide Congress every year as part of a project to cut $100 billion from its overhead during the next five years, Ashton Carter, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

Generating reports requires about 1,000 people he said in a response to a question from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. That's enough for an infantry battalion, by my reckoning. Carter added Defense is required to write about 1,000 reports a year because of requirements inserted in various bills, and another 1,000 various reports requested y individuals every year.

McCain agreed the requirement may be unnecessary considering what Congress does with them. "I'll let you in on a dirty little secret," McCain told Carter. "We don't even read them . . . [although] we might get briefed on them [by staff]."

In another moment of senatorial candor, Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was about to ask Carter a question about the fiscal 2012 Defense budget, but then paused. Referring to the fiscal 2011 budget, Brown said, "We don't have a budget yet, maybe we should lead by example."

As the new guy on the Hill, Brown has evidently yet to learn that it seems to be the mission of Congress not to pass budgets on time.

The Defense Department forks over about half its annual budget -- about $200 billion -- on acquisition of services such as information technology, transportation and upkeep of bases. It's track record of managing these buys is even worse than its record on the procurement of weapons systems, Ashton Carter, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, told a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday.

Lack of common terminology in part frustrates efforts to better manage acquisitions and rein in costs, he said.

"We don't even have a standard way to talk about services," Carter told the briefing, during which he and Defense Secretary Robert Gates detailed plans to cut $100 billion from the Defense budget during the next five years. Lack of standard definition for services makes about as much sense as buying ships or tanks without defining what they are, he added.

The lack of a standard language -- a taxonomy -- for services acquisitions means the Pentagon has no way of measuring productivity in more than 50 percent of its contract investment, Carter said in a memo to acquisition professionals issued on Tuesday on how the Pentagon can better manage its spending.

Here's the Carter short services taxonomy -- a must read for anyone acquiring the intangible stuff that oils the Defense machine:

Knowledge-based services

Electronics and communications services

Equipment-related services

Medical services

Facility-related services

Transportation services

This item was updated at 4:22 pm, Aug. 20, to reflect a reply from Microsoft.

Or, based on this sole-source contract announcement from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Google now owns, at the least, visualization of the planet.

NGA says it needs a secure system that will provide Web-based access to geospatial visualization services and Open Geospatial Consortium compliant Web-service interfaces. It says only Google can do the job.

"Google is the only source that can meet the government's requirement for worldwide access, unlimited processing and Open Geospatial Consortium compliant Web service interfaces," said NGA, which plans to award the company a two-year contract, with two one-year options.

NGA did not detail the value of the Google deal, but I have a hunch it's big bucks.

I've asked Microsoft what its Bing folks think of this, but have not heard back.

Update: Micorosft spokesman Keith Hodson said the company's Bing Maps Server can meet the NGA's requirements.

I reported on Monday the Military Health System decided to consider commercial software for its loathed AHLTA electronic health record system. The folks over at MHS told me the planning process started in December 2009, with establishment of an EHR Way Ahead Planning Office this February.

For those into wiring diagrams and org charts, the EHR Way Ahead Planning Office (EWAPO, right?) resides within the MHS Joint Medical Information Systems Program Executive Office under the Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Mary Ann Rockey, acting MHS CIO (she's acting because Chuck Campbell, the CIO, has been dispatched to the "in limbo" ASD/NII, an organization slated for whatever lies beyond limbo) told me in an e-mail EWAPO was stood up "to look into the options available for the future of the military's electronic health record."

The Military Health System may have finally decided to get rid of its electronic health record system called AHLTA, which military clinicians loath and what S. Ward Casscells, who served as the Defense Department top doc from 2007-2009, described as being "hard to learn and use, slow and often down". Officials are looking to replace the system with some (hopefully) easier to use commercial software.

In a Special Notice tucked away inside the FedBizOps digital closet on Aug. 12, MHS Tricare Management Activity said it wants to find commercial outfits capable of modernizing AHLTA.

The notice said MHS wants an "interoperable set of EHR capabilities automating health care in a continuum of care settings including: inpatient acute care, ambulatory care, intensive care, emergency department, expeditionary (wartime, peacekeeping, disaster relief, and humanitarian) and ambulatory surgery."

The agency also wants a system that will provide patient identity management, e-mail between patients and their clinicians, and share data with the Veterans Affairs Department and health care systems connected to the National Health Information Network.

Since the Defense Department operates 59 hospitals and 364 outpatient clinics worldwide, and has more than 9 million health care beneficiaries, this is the kind of announcement that should attract attention from a slew of commercial contractors, including Epic Systems (the EHR supplier to Kaiser Permanente, the largest private health care organization in the country), GE Healthcare, Siemens as well as Google and Microsoft.

If MHS goes for a pure commercial play, it might be able to modernize its EHR system for a price tag measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But, and I fear this will happen, if MHS taps an inside-the-Beltway contractor to adapt commercial software to its needs, it could end up paying billions of dollars for software delivered late. Does this make me a cynic or a realist?

A variety of speech transcripts and slides released by the Pentagon on Monday called for combining the Defense Department chief information officer ship with the Defense Information Systems Agency, but various crystal ball folks I've talked to are still trying to figure out the end game.

Does this mean that Army Lt. Gen. Carroll Pollett, the director at DISA, will end up dual-hatted as the Defense CIO? (And for those who argue this is a job for a civilian, others counter that Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson serves as the Army CIO.)

Or does it mean that Pentagon management will select a civilian CIO and install him or her in DISA, with Pollett serving as the deputy CIO, but still retaining his director title?

Finally, will Teresa "Teri" Takai, the CIO of California whom President Obama nominated for the Defense CIO job will wait until the Pentagon finishes re-arranging its deck chairs -- or will she jump ship?

More needs to be revealed.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates made official the elimination of the office of the Assistant Secretary for Networks and Information Integration - also known as the office of the chief information officer. At a Pentagon press briefing today he detailed cuts in the Pentagon budget to save $100 billion over the next five years.

Gates added that the Joint Staff will also shut down its central command, control and communications shop. He added that the work done by NII and the Joint Staff C4 operation will be "assigned to other organizations and most of their acquisition functions will transfer to acquisition, technology and logistics."

Gates also derided what he called the decentralized approach to IT throughout the Defense Department:

"All of our bases, operational headquarters and defense agencies have their own IT infrastructures, processes and application-ware. . . . This decentralized approach results in large cumulative costs, and a patchwork of capabilities that create cyber vulnerabilities and limit our ability to capitalize on the promise of information technology."

Gates told the press briefing he wants to see the use of more common IT systems and applications throughout Defense.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I thought standards and commonality was a key job of the ASD/NII organization.

The "removal" of Teresa "Teri" Takai, California's chief information officer, from her planned nomination hearing on Monday to become the assistant secretary of Defense for networks and information integration and Defense CIO was no accident.

Tara Andringa, press secretary for the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., wrote in an e-mail to me that Defense scotched Takai's appearance pending an overall review of the Pentagon's management structure.

Andringa said the panel received the statement below from Defense on why it removed Takai from yesterday's hearing:

In light of the secretary's initiative to reduce overhead and achieve efficiencies, the department is in the process of reviewing the entire organizational structure. While we are examining any number of options and avenues for the best way forward, we wanted to maintain some flexibility. Therefore, we determined that it was best not to go forward with this confirmation hearing until this internal review was completed.

John Grimes, the most recent ASD/NII who resigned in April 2009, told me that this definitely shows top Pentagon management may follow through with recommendations made last month by the Defense Business Board to eliminate the NII organization -- a move he views as a serious mistake.

Although Defense can eliminate NII, it cannot do away with the CIO job, which is mandated by the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act. But I wonder how long Takai wants to be on hold before Defense makes up its mind on NII.