Page 9 - FCW, March/April 2018

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is the limit for initial project proposals to the Technology Modernization Board
NGA previews upcoming acquisition overhaul
Why DOE needs a cyber of ce
In February, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced a new Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response. The department is seeking $96 million in funding in scal 2019 for coordinating preparation for physical and cyberthreats to critical infrastructure.
Lawmakers at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, however, were skeptical that the new office dovetails with governmentwide efforts to incorporate cybersecurity across all systems.
Bruce Walker, Assistant Secretary of the Energy Department’s Of ce of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, said the proposed of ce is meant to be “actionable, near-term and highly responsive,” while the rest of DOE’s reliability efforts focus on longer-term strategies and research and development.
Congress has designated the department as the sector-specific agency for grid security under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act. “Just that strategy alone in identifying and working through the defense-critical energy infrastructure is a signi cant undertaking both in breadth and depth,” Walker said.
In her opening statement, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) told Walker that she and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) were still waiting for cybersecurity threat assessments about the vulnerability of the U.S. energy infrastructure. The two lawmakers had asked President Donald Trump for an assessment a year ago.
“We are just dead serious that this is a problem,” Cantwell said. “And we are dead serious that we have to come up with a threat assessment.”
— Mark Rockwell
Change is coming to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s acquisition strategy.
“I’m not going to give too much of it away, but I am looking forward to sharing with you a new approach that I’m taking to acquisition,” NGA Deputy Director Justin Poole announced during a U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation event in February. “We’re overhauling it.”
Poole, who also serves as the agency’s component acquisition executive, said he will lead a panel detailing NGA’s plan to restructure acquisition at the GEOINT Symposium in Tampa, Fla., in April.
He said NGA’s component acquisition executive team will work with the chief procurement executive and the CIO to drive changes in the agency’s consolidated IT and services
shop, which launched in 2015.
Poole told FCW the overhaul was more of an alignment activity because “we have a hard time explaining what the mission outcomes are. I want our acquisition program to make more sense from a mission perspective. So it has a lot more to do with aligning the way IT programs are managed for
support-speci c mission areas.”
He added that “what I want to do is make sure we understand what that looks like and then ensure we have contracts properly aligned to those
mission programs.”
Poole said the realignment would
include leaning on small businesses and using other transaction authorities, which allow the Defense Department to carry out rapid prototyping and pilot programs.
— Lauren C. Williams
FCW INSIDER
Raj Shah leaves DIUx
After almost two years at the helm of the Defense Department’s innovation shop, Raj Shah has returned
to the private sector.
Shah, a 2018 Federal 100
winner whose background
is in venture capital, served
as managing director of the
Defense Innovation Unit Experimental. He joined DIUx
in May 2016 and oversaw its expansion from a single Silicon Valley outpost to an initiative with of ces in Boston and Austin,Texas.
Current focus areas include arti cial intelligence, space, IT and autonomous systems. DIUx has awarded in excess of $100 million in contracts for more than 45 pilot projects.The agency is expected to be
funded at $54 million in scal 2018, and the Pentagon is seeking $71 million in
scal 2019.
“There is no doubt in my mind
that DIUx will not only continue to exist, it will actually grow in its in uence and its impact on the Department of Defense,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last summer during a visit to the unit’s SiliconValley of ce.
Shah’s departure has long been expected, two Silicon Valley sources told FCW, and the Pentagon has started a search for a new managing director. In the meantime, Navy Capt. Sean Heritage, the military deputy at DIUx, is serving as acting managing director.
— Adam Mazmanian
Raj Shah
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