Base replaces contract system
Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., recently became the first Air Force base where all contracting officers use the Standard Procurement System.
Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., recently became the first Air Force base where all contracting officers use the Standard Procurement System.
Contracting officers plan to replace the Air Force's Base Contracting Automation System with SPS Version 4.1B next month, said Col. Andrew Gilmore, director of Air Force information systems at Maxwell Air Force Base's Gunter Annex, Ala.
The 160 users at Peterson have used BCAS as a back-end interface to SPS, said Gilmore, who refused to comment on a recommendation by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense that fiscal 2000 funding for SPS deployments be halted.
Officials from SPS vendor American Management Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va., migrated BCAS data to SPS during a two-day checkout in which about 3 percent of the data had to be manually migrated, Gilmore said. 'We learned lessons about cleaning up legacy data' from the exercise, he said.
': Within three weeks, Air Force officials will issue their first Web-based quality-of-life survey.'' 'We're taking great lengths to protect anonymity,' said Capt. Scott Hopkins, survey team leader for the chief of staff at the Air Force Center for Quality and Management Innovation at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. Air Force officials will not track cookies, and the survey will not ask users for names or Social Security numbers, he said.
The survey, which will be posted at www.csafsurvey.aftc.randolph.af.mil from Sept. 15 to Oct. 29, asks more than 100 questions and lets respondents generate log-on names and passwords so they can exit and re-enter the survey, Hopkins said. As its main engine, the survey uses Interform and EZReports 1.0 from Raosoft Inc. of Seattle and Amos 3.6 and Server 9.0 from SPSS Inc. of Chicago.
A LAN and disk version of the survey will be mailed to 130 locations. Although the survey protects anonymity, it will let the service track responses to questions about organizational climate, quality of life and major commands down to individual duty locations, provided there are at least seven responses from each, Hopkins said.
' The Air Force prohibition against streaming Web technology still stands, the service's deputy chief information officer said.'
For streaming Cable News Network, stock quotes and other data through commercial providers, the answer is no, said Lt. Gen. William J. Donahue. 'We can't afford that,' he said of the network bandwidth such services would take up. 'We are interested in [applying] the technology for programs like Theater Battle Management System,' for which officials have evaluated a multicast system, he said.
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