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Cost Estimating NewsBrief: February 3, 2023
Want More Innovation? Get Out of Your Office and Talk to People
(Government Executive) It’s no great secret that the Pentagon suffers from innovation inertia. How can we change that? From my experience, change starts with good conversation. Here are three ways to get innovation into your organization’s natural rhythm. Get on the “battlefield.” Within your organization, you have to know your problem and understand it inside and out. What, exactly, are you trying to solve? Reports and documents will not give you the insight afforded by getting out of the building and talking to people. That’s not just other senior leaders, but the people who are personally struggling with the problem. Read More
New Institute Will Study How the Defense Department Manages Itself
(Government Executive) The Department of Defense and bureaucracy are considered nearly synonymous, but the Pentagon’s newly launched Defense Management Institute aims to speed up the pace of decision making by studying how leaders at various levels actually manage everything from acquisition to logistics to human resources. In remarks at the launch Tuesday, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks framed the new institute as part of a broader push by the Biden Administration to incorporate data into decision-making as soon as it’s available, rather than months or years later. Read More
Contractors possess a lot of Defense Department property, but no one knows how much
(Federal News Network) For various reasons, defense contractors have quite a bit of Defense Department property in their possession. But DoD can only guesstimate how much it’s all worth. That figure isn’t small. Like, $220 billion worth. The Government Accountability Office found Defense officials don’t have a good plan for figuring it out. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom spoke with Kristen Kociolek, the director of GAO’s financial management and assurance team. Read More
Reflecting on a momentous year in defense and shifting focus to what challenges may occur in 2023
(Breaking Defense) It was roughly a year ago that US intelligence warnings were becoming clearer that Russia was preparing an invasion of Ukraine, even as there was an assumption both in Washington and in European capitals that Moscow was just being belligerent. By late February, not only had it become clear the threat was as real as could be, the world was given a first-hand look at Russia’s vaunted military falling apart at the seams, setting up a stalemate in Ukraine that would last 11 months and counting. In the process, the entire security framework of Europe changed, with NATO expansion on the table, a reassessment of the importance of armor in modern conflict, and fears of a full-on continental war. Read More
New CISA Office to Help Agencies Implement Supply Chain Risk Management
(ExecutiveGov) The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has stood up a new office aimed at helping government and industry partners implement policies for managing supply chain risks within their organizations, Federal News Network reported Monday. Shon Lyublanovits, a former information technology official at the General Services Administration, oversees the project management office for cyber supply chain risk management that operates within CISA’s cybersecurity division. Lyublanovits, who previously served as IT security subcategory manager and director of the security services division at GSA, said that some federal agencies are still facing challenges with the basics of C-SCRM. Read More
With dreams of JADC2, Pentagon relaunches AI-driven command & control experiments
(Breaking Defense) This week, after a year-plus hiatus in high-tech exercises in high-speed data sharing, the Pentagon kicked off a new Global Information Dominance Experiment. Building on GIDEs I through IV in 2021, GIDE V, running Monday through Thursday, is the first of a new series of four, even more intensive exercises that will run this year, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & Artificial Intelligence Officer announced. Everyone who’s anyone is coming to this party: “Our experimentation teams are comprised of military and civilian leaders from across all service branches, all eleven combatant commands, technology vendors and international allies,” the exercise commander, Col. Matthew Strohmeyer, told Breaking Defense via email. Read More
Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories
(MIT Sloan Management Review) Like many companies at the end of 2021, a small European precision toolmaker was having trouble hiring and retaining talent. The executive team had a solution: Create a more attractive social space to encourage informal collaboration. But when the head of human resources presented the plan to the board (which included one of this article’s coauthors), the directors were puzzled. They didn’t know what problem the redesign was supposed to solve. In retrospect, their confusion was understandable. Read More
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