ARMY BUSINESS Marks, second from left, and James Lloyd, second from right, manager for Army service-disabled veteran- owned and HUBZone small business programs, meet with representatives from the U.S. General Services Administration at the Army OSBP booth during the Government Procurement Conference in April 2015 in Washington, DC. (Photo courtesy of Army OSBP)
part of Better Buying Power is that every senior executive has to have small business language in their performance evaluations. Somewhere, if you’re seeing an executive in the Army, you are potentially touching small business. And so those are types of things that Better Buying Power brought. It just pulled together those requirements that were already there, and we got that command emphasis.
Army AL&T: Tat command emphasis comes across in things like the annual reviews that you were just mentioning?
Marks: Exactly. For example, even for major weapon systems, I’ve got a seat at the table for small business. So as we’re going through acquisition strategies, small business is a part of that. Even though it was required, that wasn’t always the case. And so Ms. Shyu expects me or somebody from my office to be in the room when they’re talking about those strategies. Tat’s both on the weapon sys- tems side and the services side.
Tat has permeated throughout our Army to those commands I told you about, the
heads of contracting authorities. So our requiring activities, who actually have the mission, have the funding that is bud- geted for them and have to come up with the requirements to support their mission. Tat triad, if you will, works together to ensure that the field is diversified and that our industrial base is diversified in order to meet our mission needs.
Army AL&T: Partnerships are a big part of working in and with small businesses. For the businesses themselves, how is the Army fostering effective partnerships?
Marks: Better Buying Power says they want us to do more outreach, number one, with our industry partners. It used to be that we would be very secretive about upcoming requirements. Today, we hold advance planning briefs with industry throughout the Army with our commands. You’ve got industry in the room, you’ve got the government in the room, and we’re sharing that we might need X coming up in the next five years. So that helps them with their planning. And that’s shared with all of industry— small, mid-tier and large.
Tat’s how we try to formulate
those
partnerships. Our PEOs, our program executive offices, that work for Ms. Shyu, they’re all
into the outreach business.
Our main commands, too, hold these planning briefs that industry comes to. Inside the Army itself, it’s a total team effort, you know. And teams can get complicated at times, but everybody understands that it’s about mission sup- port to the warfighters, and we try to pull the best teams together to get there. Tat would include the small business capa- bilities that we can find that will assist us, both in services and weapon systems, to do that job that the secretary and the chief [Army chief of staff] direct our commanders to do.
Army AL&T: You have particular exper- tise in the government’s acquisition of services. Do small businesses have a par- ticular role to play in providing services to the government, as opposed to provid- ing a physical product?
Marks: Tere is not a thing that we do in the Army that a small business does not touch. Say we need a linguist to
ASC.ARMY.MIL 21
ACQUISITION
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