850th director discusses need for acquisition speed

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • ESC Public Affairs
Feb. 22, 2007 --  Given the rapidly changing environment at U.S. Strategic Command, system users there might not always have a complete understanding of their requirements,"but they want them met fast," Senior Executive Service member Ron Mason said Tuesday. Speaking at the monthly meeting of the Hanscom Representatives Association, held in the Minuteman Club, the 850th Electronic Systems Group director said the acquisition community is being challenged to significantly reduce delivery cycle times.

Cycle times refer to how long it takes to provide major capability enhancements, either to existing systems or in the form of new products, to operational users. While a decade ago the focus was on reducing these cycles to 18 months, operational users would like them reduced to just six, Mr. Mason said.

The 850th, which leads the Electronic Systems Center's effort to support U.S. Strategic Command, has been asked to do this by STRATCOM Commander Gen. James Cartwright.

"From the first time we met with him, he told us 18 months was too long," Mr. Mason said. "He told us that if we couldn't deliver in six months or less, we were wasting time and money."

A key tenet of the spiral approach to system acquisition is accepting the reality that developers won't provide the 100-percent solution up front. Under the concept, acquirers generally shoot for satisfying around 80 percent of a user's needs and then building the rest in over time.

"Now it's pretty interesting when you go talk to General Cartwright and he says, 'give me the 10-percent solution; if it doesn't work, I'll throw it away and start over,'" Mr. Mason said. "That makes for an interesting discussion when you go up to talk to [the Office of Secretary of Defense] about an [Acquisition Category One] program and tell them that."

But this sort of out-of-the-box thinking is indeed helping to spur quicker fielding of truly useful technologies, he said. Those technologies are enabling STRATCOM to fulfill its global command and control mission.

"General Cartwright needs to provide real-time assessments of any global contingency," Mr. Mason said. That means having the right information tools at his disposal to monitor, in real time, something like the North Korean missile activity, he said.

"We have to make sure the data is visible, accessible and understandable," Mr. Mason said, noting that this is a major thrust of his group's Global C2 Data Pilot project.

He also touted the 850th's efforts to provide STRATCOM a user-developed operational picture, or UDOP. The UDOP, developed in just a couple of months, allows users to see what they need to see, the way they need to see it.

"A couple of weeks ago, Defense Secretary Gates was out at STRATCOM and viewed a demonstration of this, and his comment was: 'This is great; how do I get it on my desk."

That's just one example of a quick-turn delivery that seems to be providing immediate benefit to a key user. There are others in the pipeline and several initiatives under way to help do things like rapidly build prototypes. But there's still a long way to go, in terms of refining acquisition processes and business practices, Mr. Mason said.

"Our current business model isn't responsive enough to meet Combatant Commander needs, and yours isn't either,' he said to the mostly industry audience. "We need to keep working on solutions that allow us to increase our delivery speed."