Adm. Karl Schultz, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, said that the service faces a more than $1.7 billion shore infrastructure backlog, USNI News reported Friday. Schultz noted during his “State of the Coast Guard” speech at USCG’s Los Angeles-Long Beach base that the service’s purchasing power has reduced by almost 10 percent, and that it’s working through the obstacles such as understaffing and outdated systems. 

He added that the Coast Guard needs a five percent increase in funding every year to address crucial requirements, including the purchase of assets such as offshore patrol cutters and polar security cutters. He outlined other USCG initiatives such as a Personnel Readiness Task Force and other inclusivity-related efforts. 

The Coast Guard plans to expand its fleet of Sentinel-class fast response cutters and acquire initial OPCs to be homeported at Los Angeles-Long Beach. The service intends to have around 25 OPCs which will represent 70 percent of its offshore presence.

The Office of Management and Budget released a memorandum directing federal agencies to implement a series of management actions and provide updates on such actions to advance category management. The memo seeks to “help the government buy as a coordinated enterprise and avoid the waste associated with duplicative contract actions,” Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at OMB, wrote in the document released Wednesday. 

The OMB guidance requires agencies to carry out five category management measures, including annually developing plans to reduce unaligned spending and increase the use of best-in-class contract platforms for common products and services in alignment with socioeconomic and small business responsibilities.

Agencies should come up with vendor management strategies to improve communications with vendors, implement demand management strategies and share data with other federal organizations to differentiate the value and quality of services and platforms when it comes to procurement decisions.

OMB calls on agencies to develop and train their personnel in category management practices and principles. 

The Army Materiel Command’s Logistics Support Activity has been renamed to the Logistics Data Analysis Center with a renewed focus. The revamped LDAC will boost Army readiness via materiel applications based on sustainment data analysis, AMC said Thursday.

“We are shifting our focus from logistics execution to data analytics and decision support,” said Col. Q. Noreiga, LDAC director. Operations will leverage descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analysis, she added. 

The reorganized center functions through five subunits: data management, strategic decision support, operational decision support, program management and life cycle support. Nate Godwin, deputy chief of staff at AMC, said that operations research/systems analysis professionals will help LDAC process data.

“Army Materiel Command is the keeper of logistics data, and it is LDAC that manages and analyzes it for the Army,” Godwin said.

LDAC will continue its predecessor’s 26 years of helping the Army meet logistics requirements.

The Defense Innovation Board issued a draft copy of its Software Acquisition and Practices study and the congressionally mandated SWAP study has three fundamental themes.

The first theme deals with the role of speed and cycle time as metrics for software management. Under this subject, the Department of Defense should buy, deploy and update software “at the speed of mission need, executing more quickly than our adversaries.” The second theme centers on the importance of digital talent and supporting the workforce to use modern practices, while the third concept focuses on the difference between hardware and software. DIB recommends four primary lines of effort for DoD to leverage the power of software.

The first line of effort calls for Congress and the Pentagon to refactor regulations, processes and statutes for software to accelerate software deployment. The office of the secretary of defense and services should develop and maintain cross-service digital infrastructure to facilitate software fielding, testing and optimization.

Military branches should come up with new paths for digital talent by “establishing software development as a high-visibility, high-priority career track and increasing the level of understanding of modern software within the acquisition workforce.”

The final line of effort urges DoD and industry to update software development and procurement processes through the adoption of modern approaches and integration of cybersecurity into the software lifecycle.

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate is failing to properly collect, integrate and share information on research and development performance across the agency, according to a government report. The Government Accountability Office released a report on Thursday highlighting the challenges associated with coordination of research and development information that make it difficult for DHS to monitor progress of projects and understand the customer  experience.

GAO found that the agency stores research project information in various sources, making it hard to identify and track data. One DHS component failed to use a team coordination mechanism to report $176 million in research funding during 2018, according to the report.

“Nonparticipation poses a risk to R&D coordination efforts across DHS, including R&D project information not being shared among components,” GAO said.

The report recommends that DHS develop a mechanism aligning research project tracking sources, improve collection of feedback from customers and ensure all components participate in the information sharing process.

“By developing a mechanism to address these challenges, S&T can further improve its efforts to report and analyze R&D project information and have improved visibility on R&D efforts across DHS,” the report stated.