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GCN Home > 11/22/04 issue

The business end of new IT

By Richard W. Walker, GCN Staff

Context is the key to how agencies evaluate technology

In an era when IT is treated as a capital investment whose principal purpose is to support agency goals, no technology is an island.

In this environment, the evaluation process is more important than ever. You have to weigh technology in the context of mission support.

“The answer isn’t just technology for technology’s sake, and it isn’t just business for business’ sake,” said Mark Krzysko, deputy director of defense procurement and acquisition policy for e-business at the Defense Department. “It’s ‘How can we use technology to im- prove our business and move forward?’ ”

The department’s Acquisition Domain uses a cross-service governance structure to make sure the technology it evaluates and acquires buttresses the department’s business and network-centric goals, Krzysko said.

It recently applied this approach to evaluating technology when it convened representatives of all the services—the Army, Navy, Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency—to identify basic capabilities for a department-wide system to track and analyze procurement and contracting information.

The Acquisition Spend Analysis Pilot assessed ways to provide an automated, centralized view of data from sources across each of the major Defense services.

Once the services collectively determined the basic capabilities for the system—for example, the ability to aggregate data from disparate sources—officials had the criteria with which to evaluate and test vendor prototypes in the pilot.

In the pilot phase, Army Contracting Agency officials had vendors put their software to the test in a series of pre-defined scenarios based on those capabilities.

Officials are currently evaluating the results of the pilot, Kryzsko said.

The pilot underscored the effectiveness of the governance structure in providing criteria for assessing and piloting technology, he said.

“Pulling the services together, identifying basic capabilities and piloting [ASAP] for the enterprise was a significant event,” he said.

Indeed, the involvement of key parts of the agency—not just the CIO’s office or IT shop—in a collaborative evaluation process is critical to ensuring that a technology will meet mission aims, experts say.

More news on related topics: Executive Center, Management, New Products / Technology