Acquisition

Roth TSP Contributions…Are They Right For You?

This May the Thrift Savings Plan is launching a new investment option that provides more flexibility for TSP participants. Federal employees and military members will be able to allocate their contributions between a Roth and the traditional plan shortly. The flexibility is in the tax treatment of the employee’s contributions and it may be beneficialRead… Read more »

Acquisition Transformation FREE Webinar: Department of Veterans Affairs Supplier Relationship Transformation (SRT) FY2012 Webinar

VA is soliciting Supplier participation in this fiscal year’s SRT Webinar to be held on Monday, March 12 from 1-3 PM EST. The SRT initiative is a part of VA’s broader effort to transform the end-to-end acquisition process which will capitalize on industry expertise as an effort to improve the VA acquisition process as aRead… Read more »

Cloud Confusion: Finding Best Practices For State and Local Gov

Cloud computing is taking the business and government world by storm. Just like anything else new, it’s uncharted waters and guidelines and best practices are hard to come by. Of course the federal government has the NIST standards and the FedRAMP programs to guide the way on cloud services and acquisitions, but what about stateRead… Read more »

Dan Ward: Acquisition Prophet

Defense acquisitions sometimes get behind schedule, cost too much, and/or have poor performance. This often comes from using incorrect approaches. Dan Ward, who I actually consider an acquisition prophet of sorts, argues for a different methodology called FIST — Fast, Inexpensive, Simple, Tiny. It calls for rapid acquisition using “80% now is better than 100%Read… Read more »

Use the FAR to stop Iran from getting the bomb

Slogging my way through the DAU online COR training has generated a question. If we translated all Federal Acquisition Regulations into Farzi and secretly insinuated them into Iranian government policy, wouldn’t that completely halt their ability to procure anything, let alone a nuke, in under 50 years?

Putting “Commercial” Back in Commercial Item Contracting

As GSA works to establish the “Next Generation” of the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program, it is a wonderful opportunity to reinvigorate commercial best practices in the federal market place. As its best, the MAS program provides access to millions of commercial services and products to customer agencies. It is the largest, most successful commercialRead… Read more »

5 Basic Principles for Keeping Productive State of Mind

Do you ever yourself in a slump, mired in corporate politics, overwhelmed, or disenchanted? If you ever get in an unproductive state of mind, remind yourself of the five basic principles below. 1. Mind the fundamentals. Especially if we have been doing something over and over again, we grow bored with things. We hit aRead… Read more »

New challenge hopes twitter can catch crooks, Fuse Corp takes off, saying goodbye to a TSP Pioneer

New challenge hopes twitter can catch crooks, Fuse Corp takes off, saying goodbye to a TSP Pioneer by GovLoop Insights So… day two of GovLoop Insight’s DorobekINSIDER. Thanks so much for being here. Here is what we have for you today… * We all remember tag — we all played it as kids. But whatRead… Read more »

Brief Thoughts on Various Issues and Items of the Day

Myth-Busters: This week I traveled to Fort Worth and provided a policy update to the Greater Southwest Region’s 2012 Alliance for Quality Business Solutions Training Conference and Partnership Meeting. Next week I am off to St. Louis for the Heartland Region’s Facilities Maintenance and Hardware Center Industry Event entitled “The Innovation Locomotion.” GSA is toRead… Read more »

This Week in Computer Security

Anonymous Arrests, NASA hacks, and more this week Linode Hacked, Bitcoins Stolen: Linode.com, popular provider of virtual private servers (VPS) systems responded to a morning breach of it’s control panel software, which apparently enabled a malicious attacker to gain control over several virtual servers of a bitcoin service named Bitcoinica. The Register has a conflictingRead… Read more »