DoD Acquisition Chief Ellen Lord Elected to 2018 Wash100 for Contracting Agility, Acquisition & Sustainment Leadership
Executive Mosaic is honored to introduce Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, as an inductee into the 2018 edition of the Wash100 — Executive Mosaic’s annual selection of influential leaders in the government contracting arena–for her exemplary work on extending the Pentagon’s acquisition system.
President Donald Trump nominated Lord, then-CEO of Textron‘s systems business at the time, to lead the AT&L office in June 2017. As of Feb. 1, however, the Pentagon’s acquisition system split into two groups–the undersecretaries of defense for research and engineering (R&E), and acquisition and sustainment (A&S)–expecting no significant changes for the next three months as per changing Congressional requirements, Lord heading the latter A&S group.
Lord explained that there will be a 120-day working period between Feb. 1 and when the major changes to the structure will begin to hit.
“We are building a prototype and then are experimenting a little bit around the edges with this,” she told reporters from DefenseNews on Jan. 31.
At an Association of the U.S. Army event in October 2017, Lord said that the (former) AT&L group seeks to reduce the Defense Department‘s contract delivery time by 50 percent ahead of a reorganization effort that will split the acquisition office into two positions by February.
Lord also stated that she plans to move several major defense acquisition programs and personnel back to the military services to comply with previous National Defense Authorization Acts, which aim to shift acquisition authority to service branches.
The AT&L office works to cut contracting time by half through an electronic department-wide acquisition streamlining tool and incentives that will encourage contractors to submit proposals within 60 days, Lord told lawmakers during a Senate hearing in December 2017.
Lord added that she launched six pilot programs meant to “push the limits on our contracting agility,” and identify new contracting methods for the U.S. military.
The 30-year defense industry veteran also chaired DoD’s Cloud Executive Steering Group and was replaced in that role by Jay Gibson, deputy chief management officer, earlier this month.
As the head of the executive steering group, Lord led a project to transition the Pentagon’s systems to the cloud.
“A fundamental shift we’re making is to move the entire DoD to the cloud so our data can be shared and leveraged and we can do big-data analytics, we can do artificial intelligence,” Lord said in December.
Executive Mosaic congratulates Ellen Lord and the DoD AT&L/A&S team for their selection to receive this award.