For the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and General Services Administration (GSA), acquisition of new technologies and methodologies requires making sure that all the right processes and controls are in place.
“One of the main points – I make it a lot of the panels – is at the end of the day, the hard part for what we’re trying to do is, is not the technology, not the technology delivery necessary, necessarily, but the processes through which we deliver that technology,” CDM Program Manager Kevin Cox said during the AFCEA Homeland Security Conference on April 23.
Cox added that CISA wants to make sure that defense task orders can run on many threads simultaneously to provide the most efficient and affordable processes. Jim Piche, Homeland Sector Director for GSA and FEDSIM, said that acquisitions should be approached as projects and made mention of having more project managers than contracting officers.
Senior Procurement Director at GSA Jeff Kosas, talked about having the support of the workforce during acquisition processes, as well as having a ‘measure twice, cut once’ approach to acquisition processes and having the right processes and controls in place.
“It’s about having defined metrics built in upfront to evaluate each of these are pilots. I’ll tell you the couple of times we’ve tried to move with our metric to say ‘hey, we’ll get to the metrics later,’ we’ve come to regret that,” Kosas said.
