MySQL Conference Opens its Call for Papers

MySQL Conference & Expo

Sun and O'Reilly Media are looking for great presenters for the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo, scheduled for April 20-23, in Santa Clara, California.

Deadline runs through midnight October 22, 2008.

Supporting Universal Business with Open Standards Meeting

NEXT Friday, April 25, 2008, 9 a.m. - 12 p.m.

As an opportunity to introduce Document Engineering Services, we would like to invite you to be our guest at a free seminar on "Supporting Universal Business with Open Standards". This is an opportunity to hear about exciting new developments as well as international projects that use open standards for e-government and electronic business. Specifically:

* the business aspects of open standards
* the European Government e-Procurement Interoperability project
* management and governance challenges in universal business applications
* the document exchange standards landscape

Speakers include:

* Tim McGrath,the Managing Director of Document Engineering Services and author of "Document Engineering: analysing and designing document for business informatics and web services"
* Jon Bosak, Distinguished Engineer,Corporate Standards Office of Global Government Strategy, Sun Microsystems and Chair of the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) Technical Committee. He organized and led the working group that created XML and served for two years as chair of the W3C XML Coordination Group.
* Michael P. Onder, USDOT-Federal Highway Administration.

Standards, open source vs. proprietary

Leadership by Numbers has two very illuminating posts:

Hope for Microsoft's OOXML Continues to Erode
Maybe ODF and OOXML is Not Black and White

It is important to concentrate on the merits of the case and not let it become a religious discussion.

Sun Microsystems and the GSA

Changes Spurred Buying, Abuses

In February 2005, an auditor at the General Services Administration presented evidence to agency leaders that one of the government's top technology contractors was overcharging taxpayers.

GSA auditor James M. Corcoran reported that Sun Microsystems had billed the government millions more for computer software and technical support than it charged its commercial customers.

If true, the allegation was grounds to terminate the contract and launch a fraud investigation. Instead, senior GSA officials pressed last summer to renew the contract.

This is every federal contractor’s nightmare, a high profile congressional investigation complete with a front-page story in the Washington Post. This is also one of the differences between the private sector and government contracting. If a business thinks you are ripping them off they will simply change suppliers. The last thing they want is a series of articles about how they permitted themselves to be ripped off. Governments are led by politicians who make their careers by exposing fraud, real and imagined. Every detail of your contract could be subject to public scrutiny.

For the civil servants caught up in this, it is a fearsome thing. It is very difficult to defend yourself against an angry committee chairman. The best thing I can suggest is to contact your public affairs officer and get the facts before the public. That is what the news room section of your website is for. Work with the government contracting press, who don’t have to be brought up to speed on the finer points of GSA rules and procedures.

Sun needs to get its story out. There is nothing on their website. I would recommend a straight forward explanation of their side of the negotiations along with a timeline. It would also be useful to document any differences between what they offer their commercial customers, and what they do for their federal customers, in a way that would allow the general public to understand why the federal government is paying a higher price.

There is one point on which I would like clarification:

As it negotiated with the GSA, Sun hired the Washington Management Group, a consulting firm that employs former senior GSA officials, the Waxman memo said. The firm operates the Coalition for Government Procurement, an association of GSA contractors that includes Sun.

I have never heard of trade association that was operated as a division of a private company. I would like to know more about this.

It would be useful if we had a time line beginning with the laws that changed the rules of government contracting. What are those laws and when did they go into effect? Are they just laws or are executive orders also involved? When did the cut backs in personnel overseeing the contracts occur? What areas were affected? We need some charts to show the rise of both the number of contracts and the dollars expended.

Rise in expenditure is not, in and of itself, an indicator of wrong doing. During the period in question every single government agency launched its website. They also completely changed the way they manage documents. These were success stories and should not be treated as suspect.

Sun Microsystems, Doan, and the Waxman Committee

The Washington Post

The five-hour hearing also focused on Doan's involvement last year in a contract dispute with Sun Microsystems, a technology firm that GSA auditors allege had overcharged the government.

Waxman's committee heard testimony from Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who has also been examining the Sun deal.

Grassley testified that his investigators found evidence that Doan and her senior aides urged the agency's contracting staff to renew the contract, despite questions about alleged fraud and overcharging.

By August last year, three contracting officers had balked at renewing Sun's contract with the GSA.

Grassley said that despite "repeated warnings" to senior GSA officials in 2006 about the contract, GSA renewed the contract with Doan's blessing and "with no conditions, strings, or precautions regarding the alleged fraud."

Doan said she had an obligation to keep a close eye on the Sun contract and did nothing wrong. She said she did not "even know" the contract officials involved in negotiations. She said she urged a solution to a negotiation impasse with an important government contractor but did not intervene.

So far Sun Microsystems has issued no statement on the controversy. This is typical of federal contractors in these sorts of disputes, keep your head down and let the politicians slug it out. I think they are well advised, it may not be edifying, but it works.