FCW Insider: May 31
Top stories, quick hits and other updates from FCW's reporters and editors.
Is the Office of Personnel Management measuring the appropriate factors in its annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey? Steve Kelman explains that positive employee feedback about managers and the workplace might be produce warm fuzzy feelings but not improve agency performance or service delivery.
Army acquisition head Bruce Jette is looking to leverage modernization efforts including AI and automation to improve logistics. They're not close yet, but Lauren C. Williams looks at what might be on the horizon for Army logistics.
With China gaining ground in high tech and with federal budgets flat, the CIA sees tech industry partnerships as increasingly important for securing new capabilities -- especially in big data. Mark Rockwell has more.
Quick Hits
*** Northrop Grumman won a $12.7 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract to research hardware and software architectures to better protect sensitive data as it moves between highly protected systems and more vulnerable ones. The GAPS project focuses on the data security problems affecting systems that are isolated from the internet, or air-gapped. DARPA believes that current market capabilities do not provide enough protection during file transfers between Department of Defense systems that have differing levels of security, something GAPS is designed to address head on.
*** General Dynamics Information Technology announced on May 30 that it will provide the Department of Health and Human Services with artificial intelligence technologies via HHS' Program Support Center contract. An indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract, PSC has a total estimated value of $49 million over five years.
*** Crowdstrike is the latest company in the growing cybersecurity space prepping to go public, joining Tenable, Carbon Black and Zscaler. The company is expecting to raise at least $342 million through the sale of 18 million shares, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The public offering would value Crowdstrike at about $4 billion. The company plans to acquire more federal contracts as part of its growth strategy, and notes that its platform was recently FedRAMP certified, added to the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation approved products list and used in Amazon Web Services' GovCloud.