Do you remember the old days of Geographical Information Systems (GIS)? You had to get some base-map, which were raster-based, and slow to build. Ugh, I remember how painful it was. Then, of course, you wanted to move just a little east to include a feature, and it would have to build the entire map all over again. Then Google Earth came and it was jaw dropping and fast.
The problem with Google Earth's product is that it doesn't bring in all of the GIS data. If you want to find a place, and see it, cool, you can do that. But if you want to look at the demography of a place, you need to stick with the older products. That is, until now.
ESRI, the silicon valley company that developed the entire ARC suite of products, has developed an online version of their product. ArcGIS Business Analyst Online is very cool and very cheap. I don't mean cheap in a stetson cologne sort of way, I mean cheap in that it only cost $2500 per user. For $2500 you get granularity down to the block group level with current and historic demographic data.
If you are a geologist or a biologist, this is not going to give you the level of detail that you need to conduct research. But if you are a business and want to know where your customers are, yes. If you want to know where traffic congestion is highest in the aggregate, yes. If you want to know which area is expected to have the highest density of families with school-age kids yes. The applications for this type of product are virtually unlimited. All real estate agents should have this information because it would help you to sell houses. School systems should have this information because it will help you to visualize the growth areas as well as see the difficult traffic areas. The most beautiful thing is that it is completely turn-key. There is no hardware to buy, no software to install. No data to buy, and maintain. If you have a browser and an Internet connection, you are there. Oh, and I almost forgot, the interface is simple, type in the address, identify the distance for rings around your location and generate the reports. It is so easy, even my Mom could do it.
A friend posted a link to a presentation that could be legit, could be part marketing. Check out his NetFlix Culture post. While it sounds good and pure, I am somewhat dubious of the overall impact to the organization. Anecdotal evidence indicates something less than complete satisfaction with the process. But these people could be people who fell out as a result of the process and want to spend their time grinding axes.
That being said, there is a lot of content in the NetFlix deck and it is a worthwhile read. Some of the slides have an indication of "Confidential" at the bottom which makes me think that it is more image/marketing related because if it was really intended to be confidential, then it wouldn't be available for everyone to read. I found the annual compensation review to be interesting. This is a real motivating factor, but it can also create a feeling that you are working for your lunch.
Some people will look at that presentation as an inspiring opportunity. I can't believe I haven't included this before, but my favorite presentation is Shift Happens_. If you aren't familiar with it, you should watch it. I watch it frequently to recharge the batteries. I find a new nugget every time I watch it.
I was privileged to attend a lecture by Rob Cross from the University of Virginia a couple weeks ago. His book, Driving Results Through Social Networks is quite good and I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. In every organization there is the traditional org chart with people assigned to positions. That is how things are supposed to get done, but it is rarely the case. Have you ever noticed that people who smoke tend to be the most informed people in an organization? This happens because these people take their smoke breaks and talk with people who are outside of their defined organizational space. These conversations transcend the organizational boundaries and allow information to travel more freely. He told a story about how there was one woman, an assistant in a division who was critical to accomplishing a bunch of distinct processes. To the organization she represented a risk because there was only one of her. The question Rob tried to answer was, how. How did this assistant come to hold so much power? He went through all of the factors and came up blank. It wasn't until he actually visited her and found a huge bowl of M&Ms that he realized the answer. People were coming to her because doing so gave them an opportunity to grab some candy. As such, I promise to get a bowl and put some candy on my desk. If I can keep from eating it all myself that will indeed be a feat. But these anecdotes illustrate that the org chart on the website and sent around by HR don't always provide a complete picture of how things actually get done in an organization. You have to understand the social network and see who people go to for activities to understand the complete picture. Cross has a lot of excellent content on how to map that out and get a feeling for the shadow organization.
Sorry for harping so much on acquisition and procurement stuff, this makes 4 in a row, but I saw an article last week in Federal Computer Week titled Acquisition Workforce Needs Retooling and I feel compelled to comment. I agree that we can't leave it as it is. The Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI) has created a bunch of different flavors and we don't quite get how they are all supposed to work. Check out their Certifications site for more detail. I am currently a FAC-PM and a FAC-COTR. Should I pursue the FAC-C? I don't know. It's a patchwork and there is considerable overlap for the types of projects I'm involved with. The good news is that FAI has recognized that more is needed. I participated in a focus group a week or two ago in which a number of people from a variety of agencies and the DoD participated in a COR/COTR focus group. There were some themes that came out of that experience that will help to build some more hard skills for constructing work statements that are objective and measurable and then monitoring performance against those benchmarks. I'm optimistic that new content will be developed to reinforce these types of adjustments at the COR/COTR level.
I've touched on reducing risk and how the pendulum keeps swinging away from Time and Materials contracts and to the Firm Fixed Price side. Then I wrote about how A-76 seems to favor the industry because it doesn't consider the total cost of ownership. Today, I'm going to focus on the third memo that was identified in the Washington Post article last week. This one is an easy one for me to write because it is something I have blogged about before. Back in February I posted an entry about a web application that has gone relatively unnoticed in the federal sector. The Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) should be a no brainer. Almost every solicitation indicates that the technical evaluation will be based partly on a review of the offeror's past performance. But in reality, PPIRS does not help in assessing that factor. Since my post 6 months ago, I feel stronger about this issue. I've used PPIRS, I have tried to verify contractor performance, and, I have found it to not be a useful tool. The problem with PPIRS is data. The data in this application is terrible. I wanted to objectively evaluate the performance of several offerors. Each of them indicated that they were the prime on a government contract, one was even a DoD contract, and only a couple were actually in PPIRS. The DoD contract was not, which is surprising since PPIRS is run by the Navy. One of the offerors that was actually in the system was in there 4 separate times because their name was spelled 4 different ways. Don't misunderstand, I really like the idea of PPIRS and I am all for requiring everyone to input more information. But before we start doing that, let's take a moment to identify the goals of what we are trying to do. This memo neglected to do that. The goal, I believe, is to objectively score past performance when awarding a contract. Based on that goal federal agencies should input information into a system (PPIRS) that will help acquisition offices in other federal agencies to form a clear opinion of that performance. The problem, as I mentioned is data. What this system needs is a primary key that will allow contractor companies to be uniquely identified and trap nuances for spelling. Almost all of these recipients of contracts get paid for the services they perform and most pay taxes on those fees. As such, I would recommend the Tax Identification Number (TIN) be used to uniquely identify companies. Once the companies are known it is a lot easier to consolidate all of the information we have about their past performance. Next, standardize the evaluation of the performance. This standardization should be on two fronts; qualitative and quantitative. The qualities that are evaluated should be as objective as possible. If you asked me, I would say, Cost, Schedule, Quality, Scope, Satisfaction and Risk, but I'm a Project Manager. In the qualitative review the contractor's performance in each of these categories should be evaluated. In the quantitative side, each of these should be scored from 0 to 10 (0 being the worst performance). These numbers could then be rolled up to identify an overall contractor score. Of course, this would greatly favor the small contractor that only has a few contracts and could hinder the larger vendors that have hundreds. As such, there should be a way to weight the amount of information we have to identify the confidence we have in the score that was assigned. As such small company ABC, that has only performed 1 contract, but did it well, could have a score of 59, but a confidence of 1. Whereas, big integrator DEF may have a lower score of 49, but a confidence of 200. This would give acquisition personnel what aren't familiar with those companies an opportunity to understand the rated performance and put it into perspective. While getting on the right track in scoring past performance is a good idea and the right thing to do. What would make an even bigger impact would be to figure out a way of getting the government's Independent Government Cost Estimates (IGCE) under control. We are terrible at generating these. I am terrible at these, and I'm better than most. Estimates, regardless of where you are, are notoriously slippery. But, if we are going to be doing a better job with collecting information about the past performance of contractors, couldn't we use that information to help us generate better estimates too? Think about how many contracts the government awards per year. When I go to generate an IGCE for some segment of work, PPIRS should be the first stop to generate a parametric estimate.
