Shaping the Army's Information Technology Acquisition Workforce in an Era of Outsourcing
Abstract
For the last few decades, a variety of market forces and government initiatives have pushed the Army to outsource information technology (IT) system development. At the same time, IT has become more pervasive within the Army and increasingly critical to the Army's success in the field. Almost every Army system fielded today contains a computer system. Nonetheless, there is mounting evidence in the military and the federal government that too much outsourcing can be a bad thing. Outsourcing can leave an organization without the talent it needs to oversee the outsourced work, and it can eliminate a career ladder that would allow Army IT leaders to learn their trade before making multi-million dollar procurement decisions. Congress has realized this in the last few years and is beginning to push the armed services to strengthen their control over IT outsourcing efforts. This paper analyzes the current Army IT acquisition workforce along with current Army and DoD policies regarding this workforce. The analysis shows that there is much confusion over the exact duties that the Army IT acquisition workforce should be performing, there is no single entity responsible for shaping and developing this workforce, there is inadequate technical education and training for acquisition personnel, and there is a lack of hands-on development experience that would help acquisition personnel oversee the commercial contractors doing the work. The author offers several recommendations to strengthen the Army's IT acquisition workforce: determine the specific duties and responsibilities of the IT acquisition professional, initiate centralized management of this workforce, formalize a mid-career hiring program for acquisition professionals, create a nonmanagement technical track, and keep some technical work in-house to train civilian and military personnel so that they can better understand and oversee contractors' technical efforts.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 12, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA511554
Entities
People
- John C. Kilgallon
Organizations
- University of Texas at Austin