The current DCAA narrative is that the audit agency can focus on both quality and productivity, and catch back up to where it needs to be. Sarah Chacko recently wrote on Federal Times that DCAA has such a catch-up plan. She wrote—

DCAA officials say … DCAA has a plan to pick up speed and eliminate the backlog by October 2014. The agency will:

• Expand the auditing staff. It has already added 615 employees since 2008 and plans to add another 1,000 by 2015 to bring its auditor workforce to more than 5,000.

• Dedicate teams of auditors entirely to the backlog of incurred cost audits, which are audits of contracts that have already been paid.

• Conduct less stringent audits on low-risk contractors.

• Farm out some work to the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA). Specifically, it is asking DCMA to conduct more forward-pricing audits, which are audits performed on contractors' proposed prices and terms of service prior to the award of a contract. Doing this should free up more DCAA auditors to work on the backlog of incurred-cost audits.

But, as Ms. Chacko wrote, “Contract lawyers and former DCAA auditors say that won't be enough.”

Meanwhile, over at the POGO blog, self-identified current and former DCAA auditors continue to post comments regarding problems faced by the audit agency. We’ve quoted a few of those in a past article, but new posts keep coming. One of the new commenters, posting as “Bill Reed,” posted (perhaps with tongue in cheek?)—

I have copy/pasted several of the comments on this blog to the anonymous feedback page of the DCAA intranet site. Their silence has been deafening. So I assume that they think all this media buzz is not worth their attention. Fitzgerald told me personally that he could not manager an agency on the basis of blog comments. I'm note sure what the answer is, but I encourage all of you with an interest in this problem to continue commenting. I'm pretty sure the management elite is monitoring the POGO cimments. Maybe we can make a difference. Let's hear from you!!!

That comment got us thinking about the use of blog comments (anonymous or not) to guide organizational strategy.

At first glance it seems obvious that any organization’s leadership has to hold its course and thus cannot be swayed by anonymous blog comments—or even entire blog articles—that purport to point out problems and to proffer possible solutions. But then we thought—why not?

Why can’t Director Fitzgerald and his Senior Executives reach out to the rank-and-file auditors, or to academia, or to the contractors, or even to the public at large? Why can’t any organization’s leadership seek feedback and suggestions for course corrections from a wide group of opinion-holders? Why can’t it be done? What’s stopping it from happening?

We want to let you know that it’s already being done. Just not by DCAA or by DCMA or by any other DOD entity that we know of (with the possible exception of DARPA). It’s being done by companies in diverse industries in locations around the world.

Folks, it’s called “crowdsourcing.”

According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing “is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people.” The Wikipedia article continues—

In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—submit solutions. Solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer. The contributor of the solution is, in some cases, compensated either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Wondering whether the concept of crowdsourcing had ever been applied to management problems, we did a quick Google search and came up with this article at the Management Innovation EXchange (the MIX).

In an article entitled, “Should You Crowdsource Your Strategy?” MIX author Polly LaBarre wrote—

All too often, direction setting happens in an ivory tower—cut off from valuable in-the-trenches insight and expertise and out of tune with shifts in the broader environment. What’s more, when strategy is cooked up in an elite enclave, the process of ‘selling’ it to the very people expected to implement it becomes an arduous and uncertain chore.

Sounds like what we’ve been saying about Fort Belovoir for quite some time, doesn’t it? But there’s more.

Ms. LaBarre gives a positive review to an article at McKinsey Quarterly (registration required), and she even quoted from it. The article was called, “The Social Side of Strategy” and it discussed whether, and how, to crowdsource organizational strategy. It started as follows—

In 2009, Wikimedia launched a special wiki—one dedicated to the organization’s own strategy. Over the next two years, more than 1,000 volunteers generated some 900 proposals for the company’s future direction and then categorized, rationalized, and formed task forces to elaborate on them. The result was a coherent strategic plan detailing a set of beliefs, priorities, and related commitments that together engendered among participants a deep sense of dedication to Wikimedia’s future. Through the launch of several special projects and the continued work of self-organizing teams dedicated to specific proposals, the vision laid out in the strategic plan is now unfolding.

The article was rife with examples of how companies in diverse industries are experimenting with innovative ways of developing their organization’s strategy. It noted—

… executives at organizations that are experimenting with more participatory modes of strategy development cite two major benefits. One is improving the quality of strategy by pulling in diverse and detailed frontline perspectives that are typically overlooked but can make the resulting plans more insightful and actionable. The second is building enthusiasm and alignment behind a company’s strategic direction—a critical component of long-term organizational health, effective execution, and strong financial performance that is all too rare …

The article pointed out that making a break from the status quo requires a certain level of courage. It stated—

It takes courage to bring more people and ideas into strategic direction setting. Senior executives who launch such initiatives are essentially using their positional authority to distribute power. They’re also embracing the underlying principles—transparency, radical inclusion, egalitarianism, and peer review—of the Web-based social technologies that make it possible to open up direction setting.

Taking these principles to their logical conclusion suggests a shift in the strategic-leadership role of the CEO and other members of the C-suite: from ‘all-knowing decision makers,’ who are expected to know everything and tell others what to do, to ‘social architects,’ who spend a lot of time thinking about how to create the processes and incentives that unearth the best thinking and unleash the full potential of all who work at a company. Making this shift doesn’t imply an abdication of strategic leadership. The CEO and other top executives still have the right—indeed, the responsibility—to step in if things go awry, and of course they continue to be responsible for making the difficult trade-offs that are the essence of good strategy.

Doesn’t the above sound like how one might describe certain aspects of DCAA leaders? As others have pointed out, recent leadership position descriptions don’t require any in-depth knowledge of FAR or CAS. Instead, classic leadership “soft skills” have been emphasized. So why not keep going in that direction? Put in such a fashion, does it really seem like that large of a step to go from actively ignoring input to actively soliciting it?

The bottom-line is this: DOD and DCAA leadership have (allegedly) stated that they must ignore blog comments (such as those found at POGO) and steer their ship by the stars as they see them. That’s a great management philosophy from 30 or 40 years ago, but ignores the many benefits to be gained from a more participatory discussion of strategy and policy—one involving not only front-line auditors and audit supervisors, but also contractors, POGO, and other members of the public at large.

The thing is, we aren’t living in 1965: this is the twenty-first century. This is the golden age of information. This is the age of social networking. We have Facebook and LinkedIn and Plaxo and Twitter and Tumblr and Heaven knows what other social media to connect us to each other. We have Kickstarter and Survey Monkey and lots of other avenues that would let people with opinions connect with those who might benefit from those opinions. We already have the technology; it can be done, if the desire and will are there.

More fundamentally, what does DCAA leadership have to lose by opening the doors to the opinionated crowd? At worst, they create an opportunity for folks to vent and to let out their frustrations. At best, they might learn something new, something that sparks them to take action in a new direction.

Obviously, the only thing stopping DCAA (and DCMA) leadership from opening-up a participatory dialog with interested stakeholders is an unreasonably firm grasp on past management approaches and practices—and, perhaps, a fear of embracing twenty-first century networking modalities.