“We still have concerns, there still are roadblocks as we go to execute,” Fick said. “Everything from something as simple as U.S. government documents that get uploaded into a system and come back with Lockheed Martin proprietary markings on it. That is a frustrating occurrence, but not one that prevents us from doing work.
“What we’re working to do is to figure out where are the places at which intellectual property assertions actually prevent us from doing the kind of work that we intend to do. … We’re getting to a place where we don’t need all the data, but the data that we need — it’s important that we pursue it.”
“One of the challenges we have is that fact that a lot of the ALIS data and functionality works back through Lockheed Martin computers,” Lord said. ‘So, what we need to have in a newly rearchitected ALIS to is have that in a government cloud and accessible. So, this deconflicting of Lockheed data and government data will become much more clear.”
That was from an interesting Defense News article, “The Pentagon plan to save the F-35’s logistics system hinges on whether Lockheed will relinquish data control.” HT: Michael Oar who quotes a congressional hearing on the matter: “Some of Lockheed’s intellectual property assertions have bordered on ridiculous, according to F-35 Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Eric Fick…”
This is a kind of problem the DOD hasn’t seemed to have faced in the past. It’s not just about the intellectual property to the software design so that the software can be modified by the government or another contractor, or that maintenance specs are available for another company to perform repairs. It’s the fact that the data the system collects about F-35 operations and maintenance actually belongs to Lockheed Martin itself. So it appears that the government has no inherent right to know about its usage, mean time to repair, and so forth, to support organic depot maintenance or otherwise. The information is held on Lockheed’s computers.
This is analogous to issues pertaining to internet companies like Google and Facebook, which owns information about my activities online. For example, I don’t have an inherent right to see the compilation of statistics about what I’ve searched, or the photos that I’ve uploaded, and what that implies about my tastes or whether it is portable so that I can bring my business to another platform. If the Facebook app also controlled my camera (meaning I didn’t save them elsewhere), then all those pictures are Facebook’s — not mine. These issues are the rationale behind Europe’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which, in effect, have locked in the existing players because new firms would find it hard to comply out the gate.
Now, what I’ve searched on Google, the content I wrote on LinkedIn, and pictures on Facebook is not exactly a big deal to me personally, though others might not feel similarly. But all of that pales in comparison to national security issues regarding an advanced fighter aircraft that the US taxpayers spent billions on.
You know how much I spent on Google and social media? Zero. If 100% of Google’s investment came out of my own pocket, then you’d better be sure I’d want some access to that data. We all know 100% of Lockheed’s investment came from US and foreign taxpayers. Even their internal R&D didn’t exactly come out of earnings.
Now, I’m not saying that because the government forked over the development dollars that it owns all intellectual property created, whether that’s in the software design itself or a result of data from the user’s activities. This is obviously a “wicked” hard problem, as former Acquisition Talk guest Bruce Cameron stated. But if we accept the way government does business with sole-source providers — show me the cost and pricing data — then there shouldn’t be too much issue. The government should pay the costs Lockheed expends on computing and manning the databases — those costs that government would have to pick up with its own data centers.
That isn’t a very satisfying analysis, however. This demonstrates how government needs to rethink how it does pricing in an age of intangibles, where most of the cost isn’t in reproducing hardware of known specifications, but comes up front in software, databases, product design, supply chains, business processes, and so forth. You can say that government should have created contract clauses about who owned the data, and then price it… but that would have required absurd foresight ahead of the development contract signed in 2002 for a system that will operate through the 2070s.
Leave a Reply