By Jeff Erlichman

For the Business Transformation Agency (BTA) Procurement transformation happens one process at a time.

One of the banes of government Procurement is the poorly written requirement.

That fact has not been lost on the new Administration. Recently Federal CIO Vivek Kundra told an AFCEA audience that “the federal government historically hasn’t done a good job of defining what those requirements are. Then it engages in contracts, and because the needs haven’t been defined very well, you end up with 400-plus-change orders.” He also asserts that the government’s process for writing requirements and proposals is overly complex.

At the same time he said “to be fair, we’re not holding the private sector accountable when things do go wrong.” Both groups have a responsibility to ensure that requirements are clear said Kundra and he called for a new means to evaluate solutions.

Kundra may not have to look far for an example. There is an agency that has Transformation as its middle name. They take this stuff very seriously.


The BTA Mindset

David Fisher is the Director of the Business Transformation Agency at DOD. 

Established in 2005, the BTA provides accountability and insight into the business activities around the Department, such as finance, procurement, acquisition, logistics and HR. “We perform those enabling business capabilities that enable us to perform the ultimate warfighting mission,” Fisher said in a recent interview with 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media.

Fisher also said that BTA stood up because DOD wasn’t doing a good job delivering business services in a cost conscious way.

To get the insight needed to improve that situation, Fisher is candid when he says he is looking for, “someone who is intolerant of waste and willing to take on the status quo. There is a mindset of being associated with an organization like the BTA, because we look at the whole piece of pie.”

“There are many things that we find that organizations are doing, because that is the way they have always done it,” said Fisher. “We need people who are analytic enough and strong enough to challenge that status quo mentality.”


Two Missions - Two Sets of Stakeholders

“We work closely with the policy owners at the Pentagon and as they develop policy to align business activities, we provide a conduit to help guide that information, those
standards, those rules,” Fisher noted.

For things going to be done DOD-wide, BTA plays a guidance role to make sure those policies are defined at a level of detail that are implementable. “We are a guidance conduit role between those who set policy and those who have to implement it and actually run the business.”


The other half of what BTA does is actually implement systems – only those that are DOD enterprisewide. “We have 27 IT systems; some are large, some are small, the common thread is they are used throughout the DOD. They are not just an Army, Navy or Air Force capability. We support and maintain those used by everybody in the entire enterprise. Examples are the Central Contractor Registry (CCR) and FedBizOpps.”


Standards Quest

Fisher said the BTA is also responsible for the DOD’s business Enterprise Architecture. “That’s where we aggregate those rules and write them into a repository. Everyone knows that is the one place where the business rules reside coming down from the corporate level enterprise, so we facilitate getting access to those rules.”

While that’s nice, it is far from sufficient said Fisher.  “Developed in 2006, we released our Standard Financial Information Structure, a set of 70 data elements that the department has said we are going to use in managing our business, our process and our systems,” Fisher said. All those data elements were codified in the EA and it serves as a model for other processes including Procurement.

“This is foundational stuff. If we get this stuff right our ability to share and aggregate information will be significantly improved.”


Procurement Standards

At this time BTA is developing its first set of Procurement data standards that are moving us toward having standard data types noted Fisher. As BTA has different systems that are doing various phases of the procurement work and function, sharing information and doing it on standard data types and standard data business rules will significantly improve the ability to do that.

“The PDS (Procurement Data Standards) is coming along right now; it is making a lot of progress. We are getting to the point where we can have them codified and implemented in a standard way across the department,” said Fisher.


Practicing What They Preach

Guidance is one half of BTA’s mission. The other half is making sure we practice what we preach said Fisher.

“We look at our systems portfolio (CCR, FedBizOpps and 25 others) and if we are looking to drive transformational behavior in how people acquire and deliver business systems, then we need to make sure we are executing along those lines ourselves and have a responsibility to deliver an important capability.”

BTA procures and maintains these systems. Some they acquired in 2005, others are being organically grown as needs arise. For those Fisher said BTA is responsible for the IT lifecycle from initial pre-RFP, working with functional community to get that right; all the way through delivery and close.

Being in the systems business has also helped BTA recognize another issue facing IT system buyers. “One of the things was our observation that DOD was performing acquisition for business IT systems in exactly the same model we were using for weapons.”

Let me repeat. The same level of testing, documentation, validation that you would use to build weapons systems, were required for Procurement of business IT systems.

“We took it upon ourselves to recommend to senior leadership that we streamline that activity, not just streamline for efficiency, but new concepts that we are using now from the effectiveness standpoint,” explained Fisher.


Business Capability Lifecycle

The result is the BCL – Business Capability Lifecycle. What the BCL does is take a look at the requirements milestones and ask is the minimal sufficient set of documentation needed?

“It has to be sufficient, we are not cutting sufficiency,” explained Fisher, “but we want to be minimally sufficient so we are not being over bureaucratic in doing unnecessary work.”

The process asks what are the things that are really value add to the PM. What part of risk mitigation or test plans or EVM or integrated master schedules – those elements that could be part of any program – are most useful for a business system as opposed as using the same mantra as a weapons systems?

“We have taken that and tried to codify a new set of documentation and lifecycle reviews which are more tailored to business systems; that’s the efficiency side,” said Fisher. “The effectiveness side is that we have introduced a new approach to monitoring the progress of these programs with an eye of having risk drive the monitoring and we call these reviews ERAMS – Enterprise Risk Assessment Methodology.”

“The idea is that at certain points of the program a small team that is highly skilled at looking at programs comes in and does an exhaustive, but short review in 2-3 weeks. We rapidly get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not from the people who are living it today,” Fisher explained.

The team’s job is to the pull all of this together and come up with themes that we can share with Program Management and Executive Sponsors. 

“The objective is before leaders make key decisions at each stage of the program they know what risks are prevalent and what should be done to mitigate those risks,” noted Fisher. For Fisher doing that is real transformation.

Find out more about BTA at www.bta.mil.