BlackBerrys, the Cloud, and Government Procurement

An article in the Technology section of the January 29th New York Times, “The BlackBerry, Trying to Avoid the Hall of Fallen Giants,” suggested that the formerly ubiquitous BlackBerry might go the way of the Sony Walkman, pagers, Palm Pilot, Polaroid Instant Cameras, and the Atari game console. BlackBerry producer Research in Motion (RIM) once owned more than half of the American smartphone market — it is now down to 10 percent and still dropping.

Just to put things in full context, the article, whose publication followed a meeting with the new RIM CEO (formerly its COO), also suggested that RIM could make "a triumphant comeback after a near-death experience" as Apple did with its iMac. Or, it could continue its “gradual decline and diminution as rivals like Apple, Google and Microsoft devour most of the market” while keeping “a small but dedicated following of corporate and government customers who want its proprietary messaging and security features.”

Regarding the latter scenario, I’m sure that a significant slice of that dedicated following would continue to be found at the Pentagon, whose residents have their BlackBerrys surgically attached so that they are never more than a fingertip away. The fact that they could then consider themselves part of a small group of elite users would even lend a certain cachet to their continued use.

Be that as it may, the possible impending demise of the BlackBerry underscores the astonishing speed of technology development — and the social, cultural, and business patterns that development spawns. It was only three years ago, after all, when journalists and pundits devoted much verbiage to the question of whether the new president would be forced to give up his “CrackBerry” — or would some way be found to make it secure enough for the POTUS (President of the United States) to keep it? (It was and he did. On the other hand, only ten people were given the authorization to ping his BlackBerry — and they have to be constantly aware that their messages might someday be subject to the presidential records act.) If he is reelected, President Obama may yet have to give up his BlackBerry — not for security reasons but because the company that supports them may have gone out of business.

So, in just three years we have gone from worrying whether the president will keep his BlackBerry to worrying about whether there will be a BlackBerry for him to keep. Yet, how can a government procurement system that often takes years to award contracts for technology acquisitions — even under existing contract vehicles — keep up with the speed of such change?

With that thought in mind, consider an article published in Federal Computer Week on January 27, entitled, “Is government procurement ready for the cloud?” Cloud computing has become a mantra for federal agencies, potentially offering unprecedented speed and agility, enabling agencies to "simply dial IT services up or down as needed to quickly support new mission plans or workload changes. As a bonus, agencies pay only for what they use instead of bankrolling the often idle, over-provisioned computing capacity common in most data centers."

However, as author Alan Joch points out, "IT procurement practices and contracting vehicles were designed to help managers provision hardware and software, not on-demand services." Although Joch presents the cases for and against — the current procurement system is seriously inadequate for the demands of acquisition in the cloud versus only minor changes are needed to make existing contract vehicles fully serviceable in the cloud market — those designed inadequacies are simply too significant to ignore or downplay.

The cloud may be a panacea to some but in order for the government to get its money’s worth it’s going to have to make the acquisition curve adhere a little more closely to the technology curve. Otherwise it’s going to be paying too much for cloud services that may already have become obsolete.