What Palantir and Lockheed’s financials say about the GovCon business
Here’s a good piece from Simply Statistics on Palantir: At first glance it seems their doing pretty well. Their gross profit (Revenue – Cost of […]
Month: August 2020
Acquisition headlines
Leaders at Navy’s innovation ‘super-connector’ give advice for getting in the door. A few people have been confused on this point: NavalX does not buy […]
Upcoming Army xTechSearch event
On the main stage, 10 team finalists from the xTechSearch 3 Accelerator competition will pitch and demo their technology solutions aimed at tackling the Army’s […]
Reconsidering the DoD’s Soviet-style budget process
The Pentagon and North Korea are the last bastions of Soviet-style central planning left in the world. The Planning, Programming, and Budget System (PPBS) system […]
Commercial solutions openings as a path to continuous competition
A CSO-type general solicitation advances two core concepts: modular contracting and merit-based decision-making… Modular contracting is a proven strategy. IT projects that follow the strategy […]
An indictment of government acquisition
NASA is working on the constellation program, they’re trying to go back to the moon for example and eventually to Mars. Then you have SpaceX, […]
What the DoD doesn’t understand about markets
Most people in economics think of economics as being a largely positive, scientific approach to studying. More than that: It is a set of questions […]
Podcast: JADC2 and decision-centric warfare with Dan Patt and Bryan Clark
I was pleased to have Bryan Clark and Dan Patt join me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss a range of important subjects including […]
Acquisition headlines
Air Force moving project maven into advanced battle management system portfolio. That’s nearly doubling ABMS’s FY21 request, with Maven’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team at […]
DoD should control R&D programs incrementally, not through lifecycle controls predicted up-front
Policy is not made once and for all; it is made and re-made endlessly. Policy-making is a process of successive approximation to some desired objectives […]
Design thinking and how to think about agility
Agility is like healthy. Every time you hear that in your head, think someone is trying to understand how to become healthy. Scrum is like […]
Is AI/ML data too unique for the DoD to stick into one centralized data repository?
Not only is the data dirty, but it’s unique. The satellite derived data that NGA [National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency] is using is, while it might […]
More on the slowdown in science and technology
The number of transistors you can pack onto a chip has been roughly doubling every two years, and that was coined as Moore’s Law and […]
Special event: The Next Frontier of Acquisition Reform
Please join me in a special Mason GovCon webinar event on the future of budget reform on Wednesday, Aug. 19 at 2:30pm EST. Why the […]
Podcast: OTAs and everything else with Ben McMartin
In a special webinar event of the Acquisition Talk podcast, I spoke with the excellent Ben McMartin. He is a managing partner at the Public […]