Army Tries to Solve Supply Chain Management Problems with Mobile

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• The federal government procurement process has followed the same formula for decades with little adapting to the face-paced, technological demands of today. What does this lack of change mean for the future of the procurement system? A major overhaul, minor tweaking, or staying with the status quo? We discuss a new approach to procurement with FedBid’s Joe Jordan.

The SEVEN stories that impact your life

1. The Washington Post: “Job Corps closing troubled center in Oklahoma”— Due to consistently low performance, the Treasure Lake Job Corps facility in Indiahoma, OK will be closing. The purpose of the site is to provide free “live-in education” on subjects such as cooking, construction or nursing. Job Corps was created to help these students begin new careers and find jobs, which the Oklahoma center has been struggling with for years. Recently, a little over half of students were placed in the fields they studied for. This may reflect the closing of other federal Job Corps outposts across the nation.

2. FCW: “Taming the wild west of cloud acquisition”— For people working in the acquisition field, purchasing cloud computing is as drastic of a shift as moving back in time to the Wild West. According to ASI Government, 64 percent of respondents polled at over 110 different federal organizations think they lack the technical knowledge needed for cloud computing. To ease federal employees into the idea of adapting to cloud computing, ASI Government has published two guides about the subject.

3. NationalJournal: “Washington is America’s Worst Economic Mirror. Its Best? Detroit.”— While Washington D.C. is experiencing an economic boom, Detroit is still struggling. Unfortunately, Detroit is much more representative of the national average. Almost a quarter of D.C. households have an income of $150,000 or more each year. Only 8.3 percent of Detroit households earn similar salaries, which runs in sync with the 9.1 percent average of all U.S. households with comparable incomes.

4. Federal News Radio: “Army tries to solve supply chain management problems with mobile apps”— For 24 years, the U.S. Army has used “proprietary handheld scanners” as part of their supply chain management process. These machines cost around $2,000 each, and by replacing them with several mobile apps, the Department of Defense will save anywhere from $3 billion to $5 billion. The new apps will feed data to the entire DoD system as well as the Army’s own readiness and logistics system called the Property Book Supply-Enhance (PBUSE). For the DoD-wide system, each piece of equipment is connected to its own barcode known as an Item Unique Identification (IUID), which is used to track the lifecycles of all military gear.

5. Nextgov: “Changing Memories to Treat PTSD”— Researchers have started exploring a possible, memory-altering treatment to address and treat U.S. military members suffering from PTSD. According to a paper recently published in Biological Psychiatry, “memory reconsolidation” could potentially help individuals overcome PTSD. This concept, which is still quite controversial in regards to human use, consists of calling old memories to the brain with the aid of behavioral or drug intervention and then replace it in combination with new memories and information. If successful, this and similar treatments can help the 7 to 8 percent of U.S. citizens suffering from PTSD today.

6. Federal Times: “CDC software helps fight Ebola”— A new toolset is available for health workers to help detect and ultimately halt the growth of infections diseases, such as Ebola. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team is adjusting this cutting-edge software to be used by health field employees and epidemiologists. As of late, CDC workers used the newest version of the Epi Info software—which dates as far back as the 1980s—to find populations at higher risk of contracting the Ebola virus in West Africa.

7. Defense News: “US. Military To Send Tanks To E. Europe for Drills”—Nearly 600 troops from the 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division are set to deploy to the Baltic States and Poland for training exercises. US commanders have designed a variety of training exercises and drills for NATO’s eastern border in response to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Additionally, the U.S. has sent F-16 fighter jets to Poland and the Baltic states as well. In a UN Security Council emergency meeting, NATO claimed that as many as 1,000 Russian troops were on the ground in Ukraine supporting the separatists.

DorobekINSIDER water-cooler fodder… yes, we’re trying to help you make your water-cooler time better too…

• Developing talent for large IT projects [McKinsey Quarterly] Good program managers are hard to find. Here’s how organizations can attract and develop their own senior IT program-management talent

• Survey: People Don’t Want to Talk Online About the NSA [The Wall Street Journal] According to a Pew survey of more than 1,800 U.S. adults, 86% were willing to have an in-person conversation about the NSA, while just 42% of Facebook and Twitter users said they were comfortable posting about it, reports the WSJ’s Elizabeth Dwoskin. People were more willing to talk about the NSA to strangers at a community meeting than they were discussing the story online. And those uncomfortable talking about the NSA story at all were even more hesitant to share their views online. It’s still not clear, though, whether the nature of the NSA story – about government surveillance of our digital lives – caused people to censor themselves more online than they would about other sensitive political topics.

• Fixes: Innovation Within Reach [The New York Times] In a world with microchip implants, car-to-car communication, and talk of drone delivery services, it can seem as if innovation is becoming increasingly high-tech. But what about the world’s poorest, for whom such gadgets are out of reach? What types of innovation would be most beneficial for them?

• E-mail… It isn’t going anywhere — Alexis C. Madrigal argues that attempts to move past email are shortsighted and faddish, as none of the alternatives give as much power to the user. “Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. [Slashdot]… but it is eating up more time than ever — Quartz reports that e-mail consumes an average of 13 hours per week, according to a McKinsey Global Institute paper, or 28% of the average workweek.

• It’s time to take artificial intelligence seriously [The Wall Street Journal] No longer an academic curiosity, artificial intelligence has been transformed into something that has a measurable impact on our lives, writes the WSJ’s Christopher Mims. Google Inc. is using it to improve the voice recognition accuracy of Android, and the Associated Press is printing business stories written by it. AI is beginning to find uses in novel areas such as advertising copywriting or scheduling meetings at the office.