How we got here Headcount, FTEs, butts-in-seats, whatever you choose to call it, the business model for government system integrators has been the same for as long as I have been involved with contracting (14 years). How we got here is a study of free market capitalism in action. Despite popular myths, defense and federal contracting is not a high profit business. Typically service contractors only have profit margins in the 5-8% range.
Migrating your legacy data center applications and services to commercial cloud providers is still all the rage in the government. There are plenty of great reasons to make this move; on demand services are relatively cheap, scaling is now a function of software not hardware procurement, you don’t have to maintain hardware, power redundancies etc.. Compute and storage are now commodities, you wouldn’t build your own power plant when you could just plug in to the wall…right?
Part 2 of my working with SPAWAR series But thats my work.. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard this phrase over the past 14 years I would be retired on a tropical island. While incumbency is a huge advantage in competition it is also a dangerous pitfall. Too often we get so enamored with our success and relationships, we begin to believe that our teams are the only teams capable of providing value.
Today’s development and productivity tools are all about integrations and APIs, the ability to connect tools together with zero custom code. The government spends a fortune on connecting programs through complex system integration contracts and projects. This is an area they could learn a lot from the commercial sector. This blog for example is written in markdown, static web files generated with Hugo, deployed to AWS S3 through their API, subscription requests sent to a Zaiper webhook, and the email addresses are passed to a MailChimp mailing list.
We will start by establishing what technical debt is. In programing it is the concept of creating extra work in the future by implementing good enough for now over the best solution. If this debt is left to build and not paid down, it will lead to catastrophic failures down the line which cost far more to fix after they are deployed. This concept holds when acquiring COTS systems and tools as well as custom development.
I have spent my last 14 years working with SPAWAR Atlantic as a defense contractor. I have worked for both large and small contractors and have seen the good times and the bad. This series is a collection of my lessons learned and strategies for being successful. One axiom is what worked yesterday will not always work tomorrow, SPAWAR is a moving target. If you have been in this market for more then a year you have met the types that do not subscribe to this axiom, they talk of better days when task orders were walked through in a week.