FCW Insider: Oct. 30

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Defense Department CIO Dana Deasy said he was "very confident" that White House influence didn't guide the JEDI award. He stated that the decision to award the $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft was made by a team of experts. Lauren C. Williams has the story.

Voting Village, a security exercise to demonstrate voting machine vulnerabilities, has captured the attention of some in Congress, but one Democratic chairman said "it's all for naught" if Republicans aren't on board. Derek B. Johnson has more from Capitol Hill.

According to a trade group forecast, the move to cloud is leading agencies away from shared services. Mark Rockwell reports on insights from the Professional Services Council.

Steve Kelman shares a half-dozen tips for looking and sounding more confident in front of a crowd. Read his latest blog post for practical advice on how to give a better presentation.

Quick Hits

*** Appropriations activity remains stalled in the U.S. Senate with under four weeks left in the current continuing resolution funding the government. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in an Oct. 29 letter to come to a bipartisan agreement with Senate Democrats on the 302(b) funding allocations needed to proceed with appropriations legislation.

In his letter Hoyer suggested that "some in the White House" are looking for a full-year continuing resolution rather than a slate of appropriations bills. "Another continuing resolution would be inadequate to meet current needs on either the defense or nondefense priorities," Hoyer wrote.

*** The U.S. Navy is establishing a commercial solution opening (CSO) to facilitate the acquisition of ideas and prototypes to add a data and analytics tool to the service's Distributed Common Ground intelligence system. The proposed Knowledge Base Capability is imagined as a "repository of encyclopedic data useful for enriching locational/track and entity data ranging from undersea to space platforms." The CSO will allow the Navy to buy solution ideas using other transaction authority rather than via competitive bidding.

*** Army Maj. Gen. Garrett Yee is now serving as assistant to the director of the Defense Information Systems Agency. DISA head Vice Adm. Nancy Norton made the announcement in her latest Drumbeat newsletter, just ahead of DISA's big forecast to industry next week in Baltimore.