Commodity Clout
Air Force Commodity Council weighs IT strategies
while saving money through bulk purchasing.
by Tom Marlowe
Along with a full agenda covering such diverse topics as wireless phone plans, printing and imaging products, and energy efficiency, the Air Force Information Technology Commodity Council (AFITCC) is looking ahead to its first meeting of 2009 with a different leader for the first time in its six-year history.
The council will receive a new director and deputy director following the retirement this past summer of Kenneth Heitkamp, who had served as council director since its creation in 2003, according to Acting Director Dorothy Priest.
The panel, whose members include a core team of managers as well as representatives of roughly a score of Air Force commands, covers a range of issues that go well beyond its basic mission of developing IT commodity strategies to leverage Air Force buying power, Priest emphasized.
“It is important to note that we deal more with consolidated purchasing,” she said. “It’s cradle to grave, with key emphasis being placed on reduced life cycle costs. So these strategies could take the form of policy that would be put out to change the way the Air Force is doing something.”
The core council members take a look at Air Force needs, developing a list of things that must be done. Priest, for example, is the long-time desktop and laptop program manager, so her focus was often on ways to implement efficient and beneficial initiatives for workstations. She will return to that role when the new director and deputy director come onboard.
“We look at common issues across the Air Force that are problematic to the Air Force. In these times of budget cuts, it is critical to do so,” Priest described. “One of our key principles and responsibilities is to be aware of changes in the marketplace so that we can make sure that the Air Force is positioned to take advantage of those changes and so that they don’t sneak up on us.”
Several of the key initiatives undertaken by the AFITCC in the past year highlight those changes well—in ways relating to both products and services. In the area of products for instance, the Air Force has teamed up with the Army on a new wireless phone strategy. The Army initiated a new policy for its phones and the Air Force joined up to take advantage of the plan. In 2007, the AFITCC helped transition all Air Force users to the new blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) for the plan.
“This year we are going to be optimizing the rate,” Priest said. “With wireless phones as a commercial practice, you buy some large number of minutes and pay a monthly fee for that. The Air Force has implemented a strategy wherein our lowuse phones are on a flat rate. That’s about 80 percent of the Air Force. If you are using less than 300 minutes a month, you should be on our flat-rate plan.”
The Army issued the contracts, but the Air Force has requested modifications in places where it would benefit its users more. The two services collaborate frequently on developing approved product lists for cellular phones and other equipment in the rapidly changing wireless environment.
“We do request that the Army modify their contracts to meet our needs from time to time. There are some minor differences between how the Air Force is implementing the program and how the Army is implementing the program,” Priest elaborated. “There are components of the contract that only apply to the Air Force, and there are components of the contract that only apply to the Army. The Army’s contracting officer is our contracting officer for that effort. We do phone up their contracting officer and let them know what problems we are encountering or changes that need to be made. They do a marvelous job of taking care of it. They are very responsive.”
Meanwhile, the Air Force has scored significant savings in its wireless phones. Many Air Force phones simply sit idle, waiting to be used in the event of an emergency, Priest noted. Months can pass before anyone calls one of them, so it makes sense to have them on a plan that pays for minutes as needed rather than a flat monthly rate of $40 to $50 per phone.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
A major item on the AFITCC agenda for the coming year is to implement an energy efficiency plan, referred to as Power Management. The council is working on an energy management solution to be fielded across its networks, with the goal of saving the Air Force money in its energy usage.
“In order to reduce PC energy use and costs by at least 20 percent on more than 500,000 PCs, Power Management will implement 24/7 sleep modes on PCs after 60 minutes of inactivity, and monitors after 20 minutes, in a two-phased approach,” Priest described.
The first phase implements a PC waking program with a scheduled wake-up time. The second phase adds a PC wake on its LAN, which wakes up computers as needed and then puts them back into sleep mode when they are done.
The AFITCC is instituting the Power Management program to boost compliance with Executive Order 13423, which directs federal agencies to maintain capabilities to detect security vulnerabilities through applying security patches with minimal impact on user experience. As such, the Air Force will wake computers up on nights or weekends to run updates and maintenance when most users are not on their networks, Priest said.
In addition, the Power Management initiative should save the Air Force $10 million to $15 million annually, she said.
Federal agencies promulgated Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC)standards to comply with White House mandates for efficient and streamlined computing. Department of Defense FDCCAir Force 1.6 first included the initiative for Power Management, which also carries through all later versions of the standards.
The same FDCC standards move desktop images into upgrades for major applications and operating systems, and so the Air Force has recently completed an upgrade to Microsoft Windows Vista as per the latest standard.
“We just transitioned to Vista during the last quarter,” Priest commented. “That was a little on the challenging side, but overall it went well. Over the life of the program, we have sold 730,000 PCs, all standardized. We saved $215 million, while maintaining a small-business percentage of 12.7 percent.”
The standard configurations for Air Force desktops and laptops become part of the specifications for Air Force quarterly enterprise buys (QEBs). First instituted with the introduction of the commodity council in 2003, QEB purchases group Air Force desktops and laptops into a consolidated purchase.
“This year, we sold 262,000 PCs and saved the Air Force about $57 million,” Priest remarked. “We also have implemented a new strategy for digital printing and imaging (DPI) products. We have sold some $16 million worth of DPI equipment in the past few months, saving around 12 percent for the Air Force.”
As much as the council has done for PCs, it is getting to work on developing standards for printing equipment to standardize Air Force acquisition. The council will then implement a semi-annual buy for digital printing and imaging products, with the anticipation of significant cost avoidance from the digital printing and imaging policy, Priest noted.
The most recent Air Force QEB included about 150,000 new PCs, which included an upgrade to 24-inch MPC monitors, in July. The computers, from HP, Dell and Emtec, are the first to meet new FDCC 2.1 standards, which include Vista and Internet Explorer 7.
HP announced in July that the Air Force had purchased more than 110,000 desktops from the company in the QEB, along with 31,000 laptops, making HP the top computer vendor for the service. The computers included HP Compaq dc5850 Small Form Factor and Microtower PCs, HP Compaq 8510p Notebook PCs, and HP Compaq 8710w Mobile Workstations.
The purchase of the mobile workstations was a first for the Air Force. The mobile workstations offer high-end graphics with a larger screen and greater processing power than most other laptops.
HP received a five-year BPA from the Air Force to enable the company to bid on AF QEBs, which has led HP to provide more than $185 million in products to the Air Force through QEBs, including more than 430,000 desktops and more than 42,000 notebooks, since October 2004.
In addition to digital printing and imaging products, the Air Force is examining standards for servers and has been testing server configurations for Microsoft Server 2008. The configuration would include file and print servers, domain controllers, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and other services, according to AF files.
The service is building server configurations jointly with the Defense Information Systems Agency, National Security Agency, Army, Navy and Coast Guard. Final server configurations could be complete by the end of fiscal year 2009.
SERVICE STRATEGIES
Speaking of the other services, the Air Force recently participated in a meeting with the Army and Navy, sponsored by the Navy, to discuss PC strategies across the services. The goal of such meetings is to share lessons learned and to assist with the development of acquisition plans. Such exchanges could eventually lead to even greater collaboration in desktop and laptop acquisitions.
On occasion, Army and Navy personnel participate in AFITCC sessions as a learning exercise or to keep abreast of developments in the Air Force. The AFITCC is an Air Force-level council reporting directly to Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, Priest stressed, and as such carries significant weight across the Air Force enterprise.
Although the AFITCC is based at Maxwell- Gunter Air Force Base, Ala., it reports directly to the Air Force chief information officer (CIO). All decisions are made at the CIO level after the AFITCC details its plans in writing and meets to discuss them. Plans receive a co-endorsement from the Air Force Acquisition Office.
Each of the major agencies of the Air Force has a representative on the AFITCC, and anyone can submit a suggestion to the council at any time, Priest explained. The council meets as necessary, but at least annually, to discuss all concerns for Air Force IT commodities, which include all IT products and services.
While the AFITCC has wide-ranging influence over policy and procurements, it generally does not respond rapidly to immediate needs, such as those that may arise from battlefield conditions. Critical needs such as those in wartime tend to be instantaneous and short-term, Priest noted, so the relevant contracting office would deal directly with such matters.
However, should such a need point the way to a long-term concern, it could become a matter for the attention of the AFITCC. “We would address that if it came to our attention,” Priest reflected. “Somebody could indeed approach us and say in time of war we are having these problems consistently and they need to be fixed this way. We would certainly do what we could to vet that across the Air Force and sponsor a change to the regulation.”
The council is aided in such decisions and its overall mission by the stability of its membership, which gives it a long institutional memory. The council’s membership has changed little since its creation. “It really is amazing to see the commonality of the problems across the Air Force,” Priest concluded. “When we first started the commodity council, we thought it might be rather difficult to get the Air Force to agree and act as one body. It really has been not without its challenges but still fairly easy to get agreement.” ♦
