“We’re not moving in government at an agile pace that reflects the nature of the competition. It’s about speed,” the DIU director said. “When we have successful prototypes that we’ve done, it’s difficult for the budgeting process to catch up and the services to catch up.”
We have to change what is now about a two-year process, he said, if we want to have the flexibility to incorporate the most innovative technology. “That could happen with bigger budgets that are focused on innovation; it can happen by trying to speed up that process,” Brown noted.
DOD now has the variety of authorities to tailor the contracting instrument to what we’re buying, he said. “But the speed is now all about the budgeting process. And that requires work with Congress…. We have to develop a relationship that involves trust so that there is more budget flexibility,” he added.
That was Michael Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, in a nice article, “DoD Innovation Speed Must Increase to Modernize.” HT: Jack R.
I’ll add Michael to the growing list of people who recognize that the budget process is now on the critical path and must be the next frontier of acquisition reform. To learn more about these issues, please join me in a special Mason GovCon webinar event on budget reform on Thursday, Aug. 19 at 2:30pm EST. It will feature three amazing panelists:
- Katharina McFarland (Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition)
- Bob Daigle (Former Director of Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation)
- Bill Greenwalt (Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Industrial Policy)
You can register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8RCOtR2QS_q2L3PTbS8Bgg
Here’s a little more about the necessity of budget reform, from my conversation with Linda Lourie, also a DIU alum.
The problem when I was at DIU is that we would work with a DOD component who would say “I love that tech, I need that tech, but when I wrote my budget — when I did my POM [Program Objective Memorandum] three years ago, I didn’t know I was going to see what I’m seeing.”
Secretary [Ash] Carter was visionary in cracking the code out in Silicon Valley, in demystifying DOD to the Valley, of demystifying the Valley to the components, but the last piece of that puzzle has to be the budget cycle, because you don’t know what you’re going to love three years from now when you have to put your budget requests in today.
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