HSDF THE PODCAST

Procurement Innovation to Enhance Mission Capability 1 of 2

• Homeland Security & Defense Forum

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Welcome to “HSDF THE PODCAST,” a collection of policy discussions on government technology and homeland security brought to you by the Homeland Security and Defense Forum

In this episode, our panel delves into fostering collaboration within DHS and with industry partners, ensuring that rapidly evolving technological needs are met efficiently. Listen as we uncover creative strategies and successful collaborations from both private and federal sectors, offering a roadmap to achieving procurement success. Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and inspiration from leaders at the forefront of procurement innovation.

 Featuring: 

  • Dina Thompson, Assistant Administrator and Head of Contracting Authority, Transportation Security Administration 
  • Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security 
  • Polly Hall, Senior Advisor, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security 
  • Garth White, Director, Intelligence Community, Oracle Corporation 
  • Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security (moderator)

 This discussion took place at the HSDF’s Technology Innovation in Government Symposium on September 26th, 2024. 

Follow HSDF THE PODCAST and never miss latest insider talk on government technology, innovation, and security. Visit the HSDF YouTube channel to view hours of insightful policy discussion. For more information about the Homeland Security & Defense Forum (HSDF), visit hsdf.org.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

So I'm thrilled to be here with all of you today in this illustrious panel. It is quite the busy time, so I too want to thank our panel for being here today, especially Miss Thompson, who's in operations at DHS in TSA, and we know how busy everyone is in the final days of fiscal year. So, as many of you know, dhs has really been at the forefront of a lot of what we're going to be talking about today in terms of procurement innovation to enhance mission capability. So I am thrilled that this panel is here with me today. They are thought leaders in the space of procurement innovation and enabling mission through procurement and how we are trying to get better and better at that every single day. But before we dive in, I would like to introduce you. I have a few people shadowing me today and they are part of our Acquisition Professional Career Program.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

The Acquisition Professional Career Program, or APCP, is a three-year developmental program at DHS for acquisition professionals, and the purpose of that program is to graduate seasoned acquisition professionals into our component program and procurement offices. So today we have Jacob Westerfield and you can just either turn around or raise your hand. Jacob is a contract specialist in his first year with the program and is currently assigned to the contracting office at ICE, at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Woo-hoo, we got ICE fans over here. We also have Will Greer, who is another first-year contract specialist on a rotation at US Citizenship and Immigration Services Office of Contracting, and then Christian Zeman, a second-year contract specialist, who's supporting the Office of Contracting. And then Christian Zeman, a second-year contract specialist, who's supporting the Office of Contracting, also at USCIS. And while I say they're first and second year, you should know that our APCPs often come with extensive prior careers and backgrounds. And some of these folks do have pretty extensive backgrounds and careers, so we get a wealth of knowledge and skill coming to our acquisition workforce at DHS. So welcome to all of you and actually the head of that program I don't know where he is Mr Carlos Morgan. He's in the audience somewhere. There he is. He's our executive director. That enables all of the acquisition workforce training, professional development, certification, all that good stuff. So welcome, carlos in the back. So feel free to engage with these folks at the breaks or whenever.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

So before we get to today's panel, I'd like to first introduce them to you. I mentioned Dina Thompson already. Dina is the head of contracting and the assistant administrator of contracting and procurement at TSA. Dina has quite the long background, also from DOD and her time at TSA also as the Deputy HCA. So, dina, welcome to be that you're here and again thank you for giving up precious time with your team for awarding those last-minute contract actions. We also have Ms Jackie Rubino. Jackie is the Executive Director of our Strategic Programs Division in the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, also very much involved with our strategic sourcing, and I heard there were some questions before that came up around that, so we'll get to that. And then we also have Polly Hall who is the Senior Advisor to myself and to Chief Procurement Officer Paul Courtney, and Polly also used to lead the Procurement Innovation Lab, so she's going to have quite a lot to say about procurement innovation at DHS. So she's going to have quite a lot to say about procurement innovation at DHS.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

And last but certainly not least, I'd like to introduce Garth White. He is our industry representative on our panel today. He currently serves as the Director of Intelligence and Homeland Security at Oracle, but he's no stranger to DHS because before joining industry, garth served in many roles at the department, including the Deputy Chief Data Officer, chief Information Security Officer at DHS headquarters and the Chief Operating Officer at DHS's Science and Technology Directorate. So, as you can see, we have quite the illustrious panel here and it's great to have you all here today Just for a little bit of you know. To make sure that we get this panel going nice and smoothly, feel free to ask questions during our conversation. We're happy to pivot a little bit and see if someone has a pressing or urgent thing that they want to talk to us about. So we'll do our best to get everyone, but we'll also try to leave a few minutes at the end if anyone has any questions.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

So let's dive in. You might know that one of our strategic priorities in the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer is to inspire innovation to enhance mission capability, and this focuses very much not only on a lot of what the Procurement Innovation Lab is doing to develop techniques for our extended procurement community and program offices to do things more innovatively in a more agile fashion to enable some of the emerging technologies that we've been delivering, but also it focuses on culture change. That has been a big part of this strategic priority and I'm proud to say that we've been partnering with Arizona State University over the past several years to begin to measure what that culture change has actually begun to look like. And so I'm going to go over to Polly, who's been involved in quite a bit of this. Polly, can you share with our audience how we are leveraging the PIL and insights gleaned from the competing values framework to innovate on our procurement processes?

Polly Hall, Senior Advisor, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Yeah, absolutely, nina. Thank you. And first of all, our new PIL director, who's been in Brown for about a year and a half now almost two years Katie Crompton is with her team thinking about the new service delivery opportunities that the PIL has as we move into 25 and forward. So she sends her regards and I'm excited to share some of the work that the PIL has done over the years to really drive an assessment of what the work of the PIL and others across our procurement community, what inroads we're making into shaping that culture. When the PIL was initially stood up right, it was stood up to address a culture that was perceived to be, well you know, rather structured and maybe overly focused on process, sometimes at the expense of timely meeting the mission demand, and so the focus of the pill over the last 10 years, right, has been on driving that cultural change through hands-on, immersive learning, sharing well testing and sharing across our procurement community. In 2018, as Nina said, we partnered with Arizona State University through one of our science and technology directorates academic centers of excellence and leveraged a model called the competing values framework, which is an organizational culture assessment tool. Now how many of you are in organizations that measure your organizational culture, show of hands Right. So this is good, like I mean, maybe a third right, maybe a third are measuring, which which is really great, you know. The fact that we are, too, as a government agency, I think speaks highly about the priority our leadership has had on really understanding where we're headed and where we still need to go. So this cultural assessment survey, which we call our procurement culture survey, measures four value priorities innovation, human relations or teamwork, process and control and mission outcomes. And the first year we did this survey right and this survey is implemented across all 15,000 members of our DHS acquisition community. We average about a 14% response rate, with good dispersion across all of the different roles across our acquisition community right Contracting officer, program manager, policy legal cores, contracting officer representatives, et cetera. So good percentage on our returns. Good dispersions means we have seven years of valid and reliable data to look at, to inform where we've been and where we're going.

Polly Hall, Senior Advisor, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

In the early years, 2018-2019, process and control and mission outcomes were pretty highly valued across our procurement community, and human relations and teamwork and innovation were less valued across our procurement community.

Polly Hall, Senior Advisor, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

And so the goal that our chief procurement officer set for the PIL is how can we drive better valuation on innovation and human relations right, maybe bring down the value placed on process and control while really prioritizing mission outcomes as the value, right?

Polly Hall, Senior Advisor, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

So we had our goal line set, and so, year over year since 2018, we've measured the assessment, and we have seen an increase, in fact, a steady and consistent, though slow, increase in the value of innovation and human relations.

Polly Hall, Senior Advisor, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

What we've noticed, though, is that in the past two years, that that progress to goal line has slowed down quite a bit. Right, that's compelling, right. It's telling us that we've maybe met some of the easier inroads, right, and opportunities, but we are probably at the 10-yard line, right, and have some hard work to do to goal there ahead of us. And so this data, which is brief, to our chief acquisition executives, to our heads of contracting activity, to our acquisition innovation advocates and to our workforce, broadly helps shape priorities at the contracting activity level, with the leadership there on what they can do internally to their own local organization, as well as the priorities that the CTO, paul, courtney, nina and the PIL team can set on what we can do more strategically department-wide. So that's a little bit about how we're measuring the progress we've met and the fact that we assess, I think, hopefully shares a strong message that we do care about the culture and we're really excited that we have tangible data to help inform our decision-making.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Thank you, and I think I'll just add to that one of the interesting things we've really been paying attention to more recently in the surveys is the responses by role. So we've been paying close attention to not just what is the procurement community saying, but what are the people we collaborate with our customers program managers, contracting officers, representatives, representatives, even others who we put in sort of an other type, our legal support, our policy experts and we're it's giving us really great insights on how the results of this survey are shaping kind of our path forward to continue to inspire the innovation. So that's a good segue into talking a little bit about collaboration, and I know the prior panel talked a lot about that, right, and so I think I'll go to the next piece, which is our next strategic priority, or one of them is to energize partnerships through collaboration. So the reason I want to talk about this is more in the context of what we're talking about today right, ensuring that we are doing this in the context of rapidly changing technology and delivering that to our customers in the program offices who need it so desperately.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

We do have our own sort of way of doing things in procurement, but we have to pay attention to how to enable what our customers need. And we really do this by enabling the right partnerships, not just with our customers but with all of you in industry. As we realize you are just as key in helping us enable those outcomes. So there's nobody better than to address this first, I think, than Jackie Rubino, because, jackie, in your role as leading our industry engagement program, talk to the community here about how DHS is working and partnering with those stakeholders to achieve those outcomes.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Thanks, Nina, you know it's interesting. What we've found over the years, and we've heard from largely many of you, our industry partners, is that program officials won't talk to you. So if you're offering us emerging tech and capabilities that are evolving at a rapid pace and programs won't talk to you, well that's a big problem because we're likely to write a requirement or slap a new date on an obsolete requirement and think that we're going to have, you know, a better outcome in the next cycle of a procurement. So some of the work that we're focused on in my team is collaborating with our CIO partners and others. Right, it doesn't have to just be a CIO entity. Emerging tech is bought by anyone and everyone. It's largely coming apparent in a lot of our services. You know contracts to supplement the work that's being done from support service providers.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Well, we're trying to shift the narrative and get folks to understand the rules of engagement.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

How could they, and should they, engage with industry up front, ask meaningful questions, not just sit there, you know, in listening mode when you come in and deliver your capability statement, but truly equip them with questions to engage and understand.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Where is innovation taking us, where is the particular marketplace going, even if it appears to be a stagnant capability.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Asking those questions, we find out so much more, and so our team has been very focused on not only connecting the dots and saying, hey, there's industry providers out there, but really pushing the behavior and shifting the culture and trying to drive change so that our program managers understand that they should and could absolutely connect with you well in advance of the requirements development process, so that they're mindful about what is out there in the space, so that we can obtain the right solutions at the right time to deliver to the Homeland Security mission. Likewise, understanding that we've got to be mindful to write requirements that can shift and evolve. Being too definitive in some instances is going to get us an obsolete requirement, potentially on day one, and an unintended consequence of us needing to start over. And so, being mindful of how do we help our programs write requirements in such a way that they can really obtain those objectives that they have, deliver on mission and ensure that contracts evolve with the capability to deliver.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Thanks, Jackie Ashley.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Question already.

Audience:

I wonder, jackie, if you wouldn't mind discussing the industry engagement training that you've sponsored and the breadth of the program communities that you've engaged, and as well how really your Homeland Security Acquisition Manual, in Part 10, encourages program managers to lead market research in coordination with their contracting officers, small business specialists and others. That's kind of a leading question, but there you go.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Absolutely the efforts thank you, ashley, the efforts that I alluded to. We realized that we've got to formalize this in a training that's interactive. We have industry partners come in, but we have developed a series of I call them two-pagers. They're quick reference guides that equip our programs managers with. Here's what you're trained on, but this is the takeaway and how you go implement right. Here's some great ways to have a dialogue with industry and the questions to ask and what the outcomes are that you might get achieved by asking these specific questions. And so last year we launched this effort and it's been well received across the department and more times than not, not, we receive in the chat from program officials across the agency. Wow, I learned so many new things that I can apply to my work that I didn't know I could do before, or I wasn't aware that I can engage and talk to industry without a CEO present, and so it's it's part of shifting the culture.

Jaclyn Rubino, Strategic Programs Executive Director, Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

We've put all these guides and the information out on our DHSgov website, and one of the things I like to challenge our industry partners is to help us spread the word right. You're our grassroots. We can get the word out as much as possible, but sometimes you're hitting some walls with the customers that you're trying to serve and the programs you're trying to get into some walls with the customers that you're trying to serve and the programs you're trying to get into. And don't hesitate to go to our DHSgov site, find some of these practical guides and resources for engaging with industry and we encourage you to go ahead and share them and direct them my way to me and my team. We're happy to talk to anyone that has some challenges with understanding how to navigate the industry landscape and have conversations.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Thanks, Jackie, I'm glad you mentioned culture, because not only are we measuring it on the innovation side, it's as you all know. You probably deal with many of our different components. There are different cultures even within DHS and within the components around things like innovation, around things like industry engagement and talking to industry, and so we're really trying to kind of bring that together in a way that our customers are receiving the same type of information and guidance. Oftentimes people come from different federal agencies. That too, can be a different culture that people are coming to the table with. So we're very aware of that and we're trying to target this training to help address that. So thanks for that question, dina. Back to the topic of collaboration and partnerships. I know TSA does have a lot of programs that really depend heavily on intergovernmental partnerships, partnerships with industry, including TSA's Open Architecture Initiative. Do you want to talk a little bit about that or any other thing that's going on at TSA around collaboration and partnerships?

Dina Thompson, Assistant Administrator and Head of Contracting Authority, Transportation Security Administration:

Yeah, thanks for that question, Dina. Open Architecture is. Anytime I speak I try to introduce that, so you help me to get there sooner. It is our TSA administrator's top priority now and it does involve a whole lot of collaboration across TSA, across DHS and with industry. Basically, the concept is that he's trying to take an airport checkpoint and build it into a system of systems so that the machinery that scans your baggage can tie that back to the person that's being scanned through a walk-through metal detector or the newer technology for that, to the baggage that's going that you don't see, that you've checked behind, and even your ID checker, that we call it a credentialing authentication technology machine where you stick your driver's license in so that if there is a bad actor, we can trace every point of entry for that person as they go through the checkpoint. It's a very difficult task because currently we can't stop mission as it is now. So we're still buying new equipment. We're buying newer versions of existing equipment. We're deploying them to different airports from different manufacturers that have different terms and conditions associated with all theirs the warranty periods. So it's a pretty heavy lift to try to get that through.

Dina Thompson, Assistant Administrator and Head of Contracting Authority, Transportation Security Administration:

From a contracting perspective, we are trying to meet with lots of innovators from industry, because we are certainly not the subject matter experts as much as we try to be, we just can't be, and I personally think the best ideas usually come from the smaller businesses that are doing these things in a small setting. And they have good ideas and they just don't know how to get them to us. So we've been engaging a lot of small businesses to try to get them to tell us some ideas for how to do those things. And yeah, it's building the plane while we're trying to fly. It is the biggest challenge, along with unpredictable budget cycles. Right, we think we're going to head somewhere. We plan what the next fiscal year is going to be. We're getting funds incrementally. When they come, it might not be what it what we want it to be, so we have to be very flexible, agile in our approach to doing the contracting as well as what we're trying to procure really helpful.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

Thank you, dina. I'm going to wrap up this question with Garth Garth. I'm very curious about what you think the challenges and opportunities are for government and industry kind of collaboration and any stories or successes or anything that has surprised you around the type of collaboration we've been doing and trying to do.

Garth White, Director, Intelligence Community, Oracle Corporation:

Yes, so to foot stop. What Jackie spoke to earlier is that for industry, that moving at the speed of industry is hard to kind of translate into the government procurement cycle. However, with that that MOVING AT THE SPEED OF INDUSTRY IS HARD TO TRANSLATE INTO THE GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT CYCLE. However, with THAT, that PROVIDES AN INTERESTING CHALLENGE FOR US IN THE INDUSTRY WHERE WE CAN ENGAGE WITH OUR GOVERNMENT PARTNERS TO GET INVOLVED IN THE EARLY CYCLES OF EVEN, in THE REQUIREMENTS DEVELOPMENT CYCLE TO IMP development cycle, to implement a solution that is less risky and more focused on meeting the mission at hand. I have seen this both in the private sector and in the federal sector through the PIL, where we thought of very innovative ways to kind of get things done and engage industry or engage the government to meet those mission needs.

Nina Ferraro, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer, Department of Homeland Security:

So Appreciate that. Thank you.