Lohfeld Consulting Group: Insights Blog

"By the Office of Personnel Management's calculations, 30 percent of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire during the next four years" states Charles Clark in his article for Government Executive Magazine. He goes on to talk about the fact that 59% of the Senior Executive Services are also in this group. This is an engaging article that brings up four trends we should be watching in 2013. The link is below.

http://www.govexec.com/magazine/features/2012/11/facing-hurdles/59138/?oref=mag-module

The 6 Biggest Federal IT Trends Coming in 2013

 This article hit my inbox this morning, I thought it caused enough thought that this would be a good discussion for us. Let me get the discussion started.

• Common theme is data; bigger, cheaper, easier to receive. Which you would expect for a IT trends list. The question that I have is have we really moved out of the "risk vs. reward" stage, and are we really ready to handle this innovation. There is no doubt we have companies that CAN do this, but I fear because the government does not move as fast as it can at times, they will not be able to handle the changes. Training, integration, and as we all know, the inevitability that agencies will regress out of fear of change. but I do have to admit, exciting possibilities if done correctly.

Minority Contracts Threatened as U.S. Court Limits Preferences
By: Alex Brown

Today,my inbox had an article that I simply did not expect. Bloomberg wrote an article (By Nick Taborek, Kathleen Miller and Danielle Ivory) about a court case filed in 1995 involving DynaLantic Corporation, a company that makes flight simulators and other military training equipment. The article states that DynaLantic contested a Navy plan to award a contract for a flight simulator through the preference program. Seventeen years later, on August 15th of this year, a ruling was made that barred the Pentagon from favoring disadvantaged companies for work on military simulators. This clearly sets an important precedent – Joe Hornyak of Holland & Knight LLP states, “For the first time, a federal court is declaring an important program unconstitutional as applied to certain types of procurements."

How does this affect us? Essentially, companies that are not eligible for a program may seek to overturn awards by filing lawsuits. The Pentagon is on record saying that it is too early to say whether this will affect its policies. While it is true that this was a specific case for specific products and services, there is nothing in this case that limits the decision from moving to other lines of business and federal agencies. As in the old fable, you cannot close Pandora’s box once it is open.

Beer and FOIA, what could possibly go wrong
By: Alex Brown

It has been a long hard year so far, so a little light reading for everyone. Most presidents are remembered for their actions while in office - a select few are mostly remembered for what they did after their presidency. President Obama will be remembered for many accomplishments but should be remembered for doing one thing that no other sitting president has ever done before.  Brew beer in the White House. News sources have said three things about this topic; no other president did this (can we say history!), it comes in both light and dark versions (very bi-partisan), and it tastes brilliant (Before anyone goes over the top, he paid for this out of his own pocket, he does not brew it himself the kitchen staff does, and did I mention it tastes brilliant). I say KUDOS Mr. President.

Each day I struggle with grammar, punctuation, and tone. I am always worrying that my error will go unnoticed by everyone except the reviewer which is why I found this so funny. One simple comma or two if you are a disciple of the oxford comma rule; and the meaning would have been conveyed as it was intended. Over the years I have collected hundreds of top ten lists and I will be sharing the best over the next few weeks. Please, share yours so we can all save families and dogs from a terrible fate. While there are no hard and fast rules about punctuation, there are good style guidelines. In today's article we will talk about the Comma, one of the ten most commonly used punctuation marks and a guide to their use.

Late last week a Federal Register notice released June 8, showed that the Office of Federal Procurement Policy has proposed several revisions to its value engineering model, a World War II-era approach to saving money when resources are tight. This can be a good, or a bad thing. The idea of VE is to make agencies and contractors work under the lowest life-cycle cost. Yes, agencies are using VE now, so the big question is, will updating Circular A-131 to reflect present-day buying strategies and practices, be harder on the agencies or the federal contractor?

Federal Computer week listed the major points that the OFPP wants changed or updated:

It is essential in any capture that you develop a rapport with the customer and that you have a good understanding of their mission and buying objectives. As part of this, you must have a good understanding of their “must haves, needs, hot button requirements”. These are the specific items that the customer will demand of the procurement.

How hard can it be to do federal business development? All you need is to be good with people and a willingness to talk to decision makers, right? If it were so easy, why for years has BD been given a bad name, and why have many companies struggled to hire business developers who produce results?

As budgets for the DoD and other government agencies are reduced in 2012, different  technologies will be requested by these agencies to augment reduced workforces.  For one example, the term “Knowledge Management” is starting to appear in more RFIs and RFPs as a technology that will be widely implemented.  This term can have many meanings depending on the application and effort.  Wikipedia defines Knowledge Management  as :

“A range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences.   Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizations as processes or practices.”