ACQDEMO’S CAS2NET 2.0 ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN


COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP


ALTESS has evolved into an application modernization shop as well as the Army’s commercial cloud broker, helping application owners migrate to the commercial cloud and providing sustainment and cybersecurity services afterward. (Photo courtesy of ALTESS)


Always in search of ways to make the defense acquisition system better, Congress created the National Security Personnel System (NSPS), which DOD implemented in 2006.


Among the intended consequences of NSPS was that AcqDemo would go away. And it might have, had it not been for collective bargaining agreements between DOD and about 3,500 union- ized employees. To make AcqDemo go away, DOD would have had to renegotiate those labor agreements to move those employ- ees onto NSPS, said Sandy Brock, Army AcqDemo program director. DOD didn’t do that, but all other employees migrated to NSPS. Tat period saw the lowest enrollment of employees in AcqDemo—and improvements to CAS2Net were hardly a priority.


Ten, in October 2009, following criticism that NSPS was unfair, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010


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included a provision to unwind NSPS by 2012, returning partici- pants to their previous pay systems. So, while many former NSPS employees returned to AcqDemo, its survival still was not a fore- gone conclusion. Meanwhile, CAS2Net just kept getting older.


Today, even with NSPS gone, AcqDemo is not the only demon- stration contribution-based system. “Tere are 15 others that we track,” Brock said.


PROGRESS BEGINS BY COINCIDENCE Regardless of whether you identify AcqDemo’s birth year as 1996, when it was conceived, or 1999, when it was implemented, 20 or 24 years is an almost inconceivably long time for software to go without a significant upgrade. ALTESS may be an unlikely savior and software developer for CAS2Net, but that’s essen- tially the case.


Army AL&T Magazine


Spring 2019


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