DISA issues sources-sought notice for migration of combatant commands' common-use IT services

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1:02DISA has issued regarding this effort and in fairly close proximity to each other. What does this tell us about how the agency is actually approaching this migration? Yeah, so there are a couple of things. The latest notice asks industry a number of questions about the qualifications necessary to migrate the combatant commands to the Defense Department Network. It asks companies how they're going to meet the mandate September 30, 2020 deadline that the Chief Information Officer said for them, how they're going to stand up a workforce that is capable of working globally, and also how they're going to execute this migrations without disrupting combatant commands on going operations, which is very important. So it looks like DISA is pretty set on migrating all combatant commands, common use IT services to this DOD Net architecture. We previously talked about DOD Net and that it's an environment that was created to consolidate

2:05DOD Fourth Estate back office IT infrastructure in 2022. DISA awarded that enclave contract to LIDOS and the goal was to transition 22 fourth estate defense agencies and field activities into this one single secure network that is managed by DISA. So a source familiar with this matter that I spoke to raised a couple of issues here. First, DISA needs to maybe ask a lot more complex questions given the scale and complexity of this effort. Just to remind everyone, the agency will need to migrate 11 combatant commands to DOD Net by the end of 2028 and that would be about 2, 231,000 users across 200 sites worldwide. So this effort, as you can tell, is a lot more complex than moving fourth estate

3:05because each command has different requirements, different technical needs, you know, like Paycom and Sendcom are vastly different. But the agency with this second sources sought notice gave industry 24 hours to respond and it's going to raise in questions about their true intent. And it stays here that quick turnaround really has raised some people's concerns. What are they worried about there? What are they asking about? Yeah, so when DISA released their first sources sought notice, they gave industry a couple of days and like we discussed, now this time they gave industry 24 hours. So just to remind everyone, initially the agency wanted to expand LIDOS enclave contract to include the combatant commands. Now general dynamics information technology challenged that decision and they said that that work should have been competed. They said that the agency should have conducted market research and at the same time,

4:11DISA said that LIDOS is the only viable alternative because of the short timelines that the chief information officer gave them. Now GAO, the government accountability office dismissed the protest after DISA said that they would conduct new market research, they would make a new acquisition approach and they would develop a new acquisition plan. So given the pace, you know, 24 hours, a couple of days that the agency gave industry, there are questions like, you know, are they is DISA trying to meet this aggressive timeline? So they're rushing or is it seeking to kind of establish requirements narrow enough to justify another sole source approach? And the state says you talk about both the timing and the scope, there are also questions about whether DOD net really is the right environment for this, right? Oh yeah, this is something that keeps coming up as I'm talking to different sources about this. DOD net was stood up again for DOD fourth-estate

5:16back office, I team infrastructure and you know, building a common infrastructure for back office functions is a lot different from developing services that can support combatant commands that are operating globally. Also, the original enclave solicitation required the contractor to support the migration of at least 370,000 users, but so far, LIDO's only migrated about 40,000 users to DOD net. So a lot of questions are about whether DOD net is really prepared and can support the combatant commands, whether the features, the requirements, the scope, the flexibility, whether it can meet the needs of the combatant commands. It's a tool that DISA has, but it's not necessarily the tool that might be right for this. It sounds like there are a lot of aspects of

6:21this decision that are still up in the air, so what happens next? Yeah, so DISA was supposed to provide the chief information officer with a plan within 90 days, we don't know if that happened, we don't know if the plan was delivered, but we'll be watching how DISA continues to engage with industry. This is a really massive initiative and we'll see where it's heading in terms of whether there will be a new competition or if it's back to that expansion of the enclave contract. That's Federal News Networks Anastasia Obis. Anastasia, thanks for the story. Thank you Terry. You can find her full story at federalnewsnetwork.com. What does it take to drive transformational change in large mission-driven organizations? In this episode of Lessons in Leadership, former Treasury Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebrick sits down with WAPA CEO Shane Canfield to explore the answer to that question, drawing on nearly four decades of public service. Lebrick shares insights on how to maintain

7:26employee trust and accountability while striving for strategic leadership and operational excellence. He discusses his biggest lessons learned from modernizing major government systems and how he worked to break down silos and build high-performing teams, all while staying rooted in character and integrity. Hello and welcome to the Lessons in Leadership podcast. I'm your host Shane Canfield CEO of WAPA. Today I'm joined by David Lebrick, former Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the department's most senior career position, where he spent nearly four decades help oversee and modernize the federal government's financial infrastructure, including payments, collecting, debt financing, and cash management. David, welcome and thank you for being here. It's a real pleasure to be here. So let's jump right in. What does it actually take to drive transformational change inside the federal government? And related, Treasury is obviously a huge organization.

8:28What did that teach you about leadership as you drove these changes? Sure, I think one of the things that you realize at time is that change and transformational change is very difficult, but it is doable. And I think sometimes we don't think that we can do big things in government and yet we can. I think over the course of my career, I was enormously fortunate to work with some of the really wonderful people, some of the most preeminent people in government over the course of the last 35 years. And from them, you learn a lot of really important lessons about leadership. I think early in my career, what I would tell you is that I was very much new, my interacted with political appointees as a civil servant, that you're really an advisor. And I had some really wonderful experiences advising some of really great people. My second job at Treasury, for example, was as a special assistant to Jay Powell. I knew I was not going to be the most, the smartest person in the room or the expert on many things that were going on. But what I did know is that I had a very good understanding about what

9:31it meant to navigate in government. Also, what it meant to advise and provide options and analysis to decision makers. As you move up in your career and you actually take on more operational responsibility, you find out that you are a decision maker. And when you are a decision maker, you know, I had a very good framework that I used throughout my career, which is you, as a well-edged organization, the leadership had to think about three very distinct things. One was thinking strategically about where the organization was going, not just about where it was going tomorrow and the next day, but actually into the future. The second area was that you really had to be able to deliver in the operational excellence. So if you're responsible for providing a service or a product, you can do that well. And you need to think very purposefully about that. And the third area is really about people and about how you attract good people, how you retain good people, how you incent good people, and how you really treat people. And so throughout my career, I had an opportunity to see people be very effective in all three of those areas. So when

10:36it came time to do transformational change, that model worked very well. I would also say that what you learn very early on is that regardless, is that you as an individual, it takes the ability to work collectively and collaboratively with a lot of people. And so some of the things that I did, for example, which were cross-government, you realized that you really didn't have authority over many of the people that you were asking to do something different. But if you had character and competence, you could actually have trust. And so I think when people looked and said, this is someone who has capability and they have character, they will actually go and reduce the friction and actually making change. And so those collaborative relationships that ability to sort of lead with purpose, I think was very important with respect to really deriving transformational change. Yeah, that's an amazing perspective. I just had a chance to

11:39listen in a small room to the CEO and the chairman of the board for Marriott Corporation. And they're celebrating their 100th birthday next year. And most US companies don't make it to 100. And so it was it was fascinating. Both of them were asked to what do you attribute this? And they said both of them with energy, it was about their people. They focused on their people and everything came back to the employees, the people that worked there, the people that they have to motivate. Do you find something similar in government? I do. I actually take a, you know, oftentimes you'll hear people say people the most important asset in an organization. And there's an element of truth that, but I also think that leadership is probably the most important aspect attribute in organization. Because if you have the right leaders and you're using a framework, like I mentioned, you're going to be really focused on getting good people in the organization. And those people will thrive. I think the thing that you find certainly in government is that federal employees are

12:46very mission driven. And they are committed. And they, you know, there's a lot of discussion about, you know, what really motivates people? Intrancyc versus extrinsic, you know, motivators. And I really do believe that, you know, when you really get a high performing organization, regardless of as private sector or public sector, it's going to be those intrinsic things which are going to actually drive employees to do great things. And so setting up those right working conditions to remind people how important they are to actually invest in their development to actually give them good feedback. You know, one of the things that is really important in an organization is if you really care about an employee and you really want to see them develop, you have to tell them not only good things, you have to tell them things they have to work on. And I think you need to set up an environment and we add a saying which is feedback as a gift and and and assume noble intent. So that when someone gives you feedback, your first reaction shouldn't be defensive, it should be,

13:46let me make sure I can really understand why I'm getting feedback and what I can do about that. You know, I think of a story from a book called Radical Candor which the author had gone out and spent a lot of time recruiting a new executive in the organization and thought they had a perfect match. They got to six months and the executive was struggling and they ultimately fired the executive and at the Exinterview, she had turned to the executive and he said, well, I really was someone who had told me earlier on what I wasn't doing well. And I tell that story because I think it sort of says that if you're not giving good feedback to people, you've spent all this money on recruiting someone, all this time and we know it takes a lot of time to bring people on board. And if you're not giving them the benefit of that, you're not giving regular feedback to someone about what they can do better, then you potentially have a failure and now you have another vacancy that you have to fill, which is very costly and expensive. So I think you need to have an, and I think there's another

14:48element of that, which is in a high performing organization. If people are comfortable raising their hand when something's not going right and in my world, large scale operations and what we did, every day something doesn't go right. It's just inevitable. And the issue within a well performing high performing organization is that people will raise their hand and say we have a problem and we need to fix it. And the leadership is receptive to that and says, okay, what do we need to do? And then after the problem is solved, you have an obligation to go back and do lessons learned, do action learning to see, hey, what could we have done differently? How could we have avoided that problem so that you have a learning organization? It's not just that you're comfortable communicating and have trust in the organization that you can communicate openly, but also that you're learning as you go along every day to improve your operations. The very first podcast we had was Cutler Dawson, who was Admiral and the Navy, charge of the enterprise carrier and the fleet

15:55in the beginning of Desert Storm. And then he went on to run Navy Federal, the world's largest credit union. And it was fascinating to hear you because he talked, he used an example of a problem they had on deck with airplanes on the carrier. And it was pretty serious accident that happened. His culture was exactly what you said. You've got to talk whether you're at fault or not, whether you're partly at fault. It doesn't matter. We have to have an honest conversation about this. And that doesn't mean there weren't consequences, but at the same time that honesty has to be front and center. It really is true. And I think that that I think that you raised an interesting point, which I think sometimes the word accountability has a negative connotation. You're going to be held accountable. But also, but I would have it in a different way, which is we're accountable for high performance and we're accountable to each other to make sure that we can deliver on our mission. And that's a positive attribute along the way. And I think when organizations take that seriously,

16:57the collaboration, the teamwork, the openness, the feedback, but they also have a culture of accountability that says we do things well. We're going to actually be successful of what we do. And we all have a commitment to doing that. I think you're really a high performing organization. You've been listening to a preview edition of Lessons in Leadership. To hear the rest of this conversation and all past episodes, subscribe to Lessons in Leadership wherever you get your podcasts.