Acquisition: All About the People

Ken Krieg, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, met with reporters at the Pentagon yesterday. Here's the first thing he talked about in discussing reform efforts of the past year:

Goal 1: a high-performing, agile, ethical workforce, in particular dealing with those issues of -- you know, we've got about 134,000 -- one of the hard things in government, as you all know, is it depends on how you count -- but about 134,000 people in the acquisition workforce. About 85 percent of them are civilians; the remainder are military. Of the civilians, their average age is about 48 or 49, and so -- and we didn't hire many during the '90s.

So thinking through how one manages a workforce of that scale in a business that's inherently an intellectual property business -- we are; we manage the procurement of incredibly complex activities -- how do you get ready for that when you have the time to get ready for it? And so a lot of work we've been doing in Goal 1 is around that effort. We issued a strategic plan outline a year ago. We'll be issuing the second version of that with more data in it, with more specific initiatives.

And one of the challenges you have at this kind of scale is -- you know, most of the people who are hired into the Department of Defense are hired into the camps, posts and stations around America. In OSD, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics, we don't hire many people. And so how do you set a strategy that federates activity throughout the enterprise in a way that gets work done as you need it?