Defense Intelligence Worldwide Cancelled: Government Events Down, But Budget Savings Up

Orginally posted by by mattl on FedConnects

According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week, efforts to reduce travel and increase oversight in travel and conference spending have saved the federal government roughly $2 billion from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2012.

Earlier this year, a Market Connections poll showed 38% of government employees plan to attend fewer educational and trade events in FY2013 than last fiscal year.  The majority of poll respondents said budgetary and agency travel restrictions are the cause, and just over one-third of respondents reported that management would not allow them to attend events in 2013.

The silver lining is that government is already seeing savings due to these restrictions.

Yet while agencies are saving money, what happens to innovation and collaboration?

On the same day the sequestration hammer fell last week, it was quietly announced that Defense Intelligence Worldwide (formerly the DoDIIS Conference) was cancelled. Bob Gourley, the editor of CTOvision.com and former CTO of the DIA, had this to say about the cancellation:

For several years there were concerns over the cost of the conference. It was free to produce, but the cost was in terms of government time to attend. But for me those concerns were never really valid. The defense intelligence mission has thought leaders and collaborators and technologists serving the mission from all around the globe and it was incredibly productive to bring at least a slice of them together to collaborate and coordinate in person. It is also a great way to hold training and education events to get the word out.  And there is nothing like a demo on the expo floor to make the potential of a disruptive technology become more apparent, which means these events are important to innovation.

Defense Intelligence Worldwide is not the only casualty of today's austere environment.  Allan Rubin, Vice President of Marketing at immixGroup, published this blog post in early February, which highlighted how the DoD Cybercrime Conference, DON IT Conference, as well as DISA's "Expanded Forecast to Industry" conference have all been cancelled.

As Gourley highlighted in his blog post, there is nothing like a demo on the expo floor to make a potentially disruptive technology more apparent.

With all of these government-hosted events being cancelled, how will government address the need for civil servants and military and intelligence workers to stay abreast of new technologies, innovate and collaborate in order to increase efficiencies and ensure productivity?  As part of President Obama's Open Government Initiative, we are supposed to be operating under an open government mandate that encourages less siloing, more sharing of services and innovations.

How can true transparency and efficiency be achieved if government is restricting collaboration and opportunities for government leaders and industry to share ideas and work on problems?

Forward-thinking government agencies like NASA used to lead the world in innovations that translated into consumer technologies.  This trend is now reversed.  Innovation is developed by industry, sold to government and then adopted through slow and cumbersome processes - often siloed from agency to agency - that sometimes render the technology obsolete and inefficient by the time it gets implemented.

Bridging the gap between government and industry has always been a challenge.  Unfortunately, this gap is widening every day due to the fallout from the sequester, and we imagine more government-sponsored events will be cancelled.