Contract action done quickly

"If you're getting a contract action done quickly, you're in trouble. You have missed something, I can tell you," said Retired Army Lt. Col. Michael Devine, while a panel at the FOSE Conference and Trade Exposition in Washington, D.C.Devine, now president and CEO of Agility Development Group, learned hard lessons helping to launch the Army Private Cloud. Devine recently completed a three-year assignment as the Army's product manager for Power Projection Enablers, where he was responsible for leading more than 120 information innovation infrastructure and services projects valued at $414 million annually and in excess of $1.7 billion across the Army budget cycle.

The importance of planning

Devine stressed the importance of planning and assessing the risks associated with data center consolidation and cloud migration previously embarking on the contract process, while a panel on the subject at FOSE, April 4. The panel as well included Stanley Kaczmarczyk, deputy director of cloud computing service, with the Federal Acquisition Service's Information Innovation Services, which is a part of the General Services Administration; and Lamont Harrington, public sector cloud specialist with Microsoft.

From a government perspective. setting up cloud computing is an education process across every community -- program managers, users and contracting officers, Devine noted. Objectives of the migration have to be obviously stated in the contract language, so the government can make a successful transition at the end of the contract. Additionally, the contract has to lay out the right incentives for industry to make money and for agency managers to get the services they are looking for, so no one loses. Taking everything into account, the contract has to ensure that IT is able to meet the operational demands of the community it is serving. Setting up the cloud or migration strategies "is not for the feint of heart," Devine said. "You're not gong to do it quickly." First, agency managers need to know what they want and of course describe their requirements. Contracting officers can only go so far since their job is to handle the contract and move on, Devine noted. Agency managers can move actually fast and put out a bad project because they lacked knowledge about their data and the services levels from their vendors are not what they expected. It will take a long time from them to extract themselves from contracts based upon bad projects, he added.