shapethevision

The Air Force’s Acquistion lead, William LaPlante is launching an initiative to improve the acquisition process called “Bending the Cost Curve”. In a speech at the Atlantic Council he shared that the AF needs to get better with the up-front tasks in the acquisition process — the part between initial concept to production. He acknowledged that everyone is frustrated with the quality and the processes in the early part of acquisition, including getting to RFPs that are issued by the service. He wants to see industry brought in early-on in the development planning to help in the conceptualizing when everyone is just starting to think about a program need.

This is a great idea. To make it work, it is good (and necessary) to talk to industry, vendors, and product and service providers. As Bob Lohfeld points out in an article in Washington Technology last month, too many acquisition program managers and teams have come to believe they are not allowed to have conversations with the potential providers of something they might ultimately buy. Or they are concerned that if they talk with one vendor, they have to talk with all the vendors in order to be open and fair. Not true in either instance. As Mr Lohfeld highlights, the rules in the FAR Part 15 talk to setting a fair and level playing field – if you disclose specific information to one potential offeror you need to make that information available to all.

An acquisition requirement deserves new ways for the community to consider, conceptualize, and start to think about how to meet the need.  Lots of offerors bring new ideas and technologies that could get to an end result. Technology is an enabler and allows us to do and accomplish things in ways that we never thought about a few years ago. Certainly, it is wise to understand that everyone on the non-government side of the discussion ultimately would like to benefit from the business that results and help shape the RFP into something that lends itself to their capabilities. That is the business of the business. However, limiting, filtering, or having no discussions at all is frustrating for everyone on both sides
 

This is a really big deal and huge step!  The Defense Intelligence Agency is focused on co-mingling data, self-discovery, and contextual analysis.

The lifeblood of intelligence is not raw data, but the process and quality of analysis that turns the data into finished intelligence to make decisions. Their Nerd Brigade takes source developers, source coders, business process [experts] and engineers and sits them beside production analysts, using true data the Agency and these analysts have to live with every day, to look at their process and figure out how to do a very agile two-week spin to improve their process and make their lives a little easier. The thrust of their analytic modernization effort is figuring out how to make use of the data its employees and customers generate and how to gain insights from data the agency has never used before.

fedscoop.com/spy-agency-accelerates-innovation-deal-big-data

DIA accelerates innovation to deal with big data – FedScoop

Bloomberg.com recently had an article that highlighted the potential use of any available data to better understand their patients’/customers’ health and fitness lifestyle.  This is essentially the same information that retailers use to market new products to potential new customers, so it is not as if we’re plowing completely new ground.  It instead raises a more personal conversation that everyone is not ready to jump into.

The opportunity to learn more about someone’s real medical status may sound an alarm from privacy advocates, but the real issue is more about lifestyle honesty. It is important for doctors, medical groups, and insurers to know if their prospective patients are being forthright about what they do when they’re not sitting in front of the doctor in his office. We are all guilty of painting a rosy picture when the white cloaks ask questions about whether we’re doing what we need to take care of ourselves.  However, it may take a combination of both big data analysis from the medical and insurance community and an active participation from the patients to get to a more honest assessment of what we really do once we leave the office.

Not only can medical groups leverage the same consumer oriented information that is gathered to market products to us, but wearable technology is soon going to help make us active participants in the battle to become real. traditional data can provide a far better and honest picture of how we take care of ourselves.

From a medical perspective, this is smart preventive medicine. From and insurance perspective, it lowers the risk by knowing who that individual really is that you’re insuring and charging the appropriate cost to cover that risk. It is conceivable (and hopeful) that the combination of both actually lowers both medical cost and insurance premiums. At that point, for those of us who are skeptical about the privacy issues, the cost of healthcare and insurance, for those willing to give up a little privacy for lower cost for the result, will lead us to the path that makes that honesty pill a lot easier to swallow.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-26/hospitals-soon-see-donuts-to-cigarette-charges-for-health.html

Call it the Cloud, Big Data, new technology — all these affect the way we improve our business efficiencies, effectiveness, and mission.  Information technology is a support function — if you are not using it to improve the business, you’re wasting money.  Just as you think of your supply chain, your HR functions, your financial organization, or your contracting shop, the IT organization is there to improve the bottom-line.  If they are all about building an IT kingdom, you need to re-assess the purpose of the group.

Your company has data that you use to run the business.  Most of that is available in rows and columns of relational databases.  Often, it is maintained across the company in individual spreadsheets that are maintained (and guarded) by individuals or organizations in the company.  This information is what they use to run their function, and it is what they use to help the CEO, CFO, COO or other C-suite folks make corporate decisions that affect the business.  Leveraging that information across the enterprise is critical to improving the functions of the corporate enterprise as a whole and leads to far better understanding of the relationships between functions and decisions (data is just data until it is placed into context.  What happened to X when Y occurred and was then the effect when Z began.)

There is also a whole group of information assets that may be outside the relational databases inside the corporate firewalls.  The information in those external environments affects your business and may include data sets that you put in place to help run a function or it may be data that is occasionally referenced to gain some insight about a sector or business area.  This might include smart meter readings in the utility industry, geospatial data from cell phones or iPads, engine performance data from airlines, traffic images from local news feeds.  It could also include reports or images or non-traditional data that is not in digital format or easily broken out and could also include text-based documents, or customer call center logs, or twitter feeds, or LinkedIn comments, or on-line hits to a website.

The point is there is a WHOLE lot of data available to sift through that could potentially provide additional insight into how your business is running, could run, or might be more made more efficient, more customer friendly, more bottom-line invested.  If the point is to make your customers happier, so that they come back more often and spend more money, how will you determine that?  It is likely not going to occur by tracking register receipts or going on a hunch about what the coming market season will bring to your door.

As a CEO you want an edge that will make your business stand out and better able to bring in higher returns.  How do you do that now?  If you say you can do that by seat of the pants or an intuitive instinct, or you’ve been doing it for 30 years and know your business and customers, that’s good.  But the reality is that you are actually doing the data integration of many, many data points in your own computer, using the big muscle between your ears to make those decisions.  Perhaps you are the genius of Wall Street or Market Street and just have a sixth sense of how to make it happen.  If you’re like most of the business world, however, you leverage your marketing team, your industry consultants, your sales force to dig up the opportunities that will help you excel this week, this month, this quarter.  Every one of those functions gets their insights from some data points.  Leveraging it to discover the unknowns and analyze, predict and positively shape the business is what your information technology should be about.

Organizations need to leverage all the data available to them to improve their bottom line.  If your IT team is more concerned about the technical shiny new HW/SW in the data center, the focus needs to come back around to why the IT functions in the first place.  They are there to improve the business.  If that is not what you’re experiencing, then re-assess.

Do you need to own the infrastructure to do the analysis?  It depends. Owning an IT infrastructure is not a core competency of most companies — figuring out how to leverage someone else’s technology infrastructure is smart business.  Let’s face it, there is not funding to do all the things we need to do, so companies – your company – need to think about whether they want to grow an infrastructure if someone else can do that for them. 

Do you need to own a power plant to get electricity to run you laptop or copier?  Probably not.  Is there a way to better leverage your resources to get that analysis that will improve your business?  Perhaps.  It depends on how much, how big, how in-depth, how critical, how complex, how intricate, how sensitive the data is that you need to make your decisions.  Do you want to put your trade secrets and the intellectual property that is your secret sauce in a cloud that is run and maintained by somebody else?  If they can guarantee the same support, availability, and security that your own in-house team would provide, the answer may in fact be yes.  That is a risk-management decision that you need to review and then determine how it fits into your strategic vision and corporate objectives.