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Discussion participants
Brian Bridges
IT Specialist,Transportation Security Administration
Kevin Cox
CDM Program Manager, NPPD, DHS
Karen Grubbs
CDM Program Manager, Enterprise Business Management Office, DHS
Carlene Ileto
Executive Director, Enterprise Business Management Office, DHS
Dwayne King Sr.
IT Specialist, Office of Personnel Management
Shondrea Lyublanovits
IT Security Subcategory Manager, Office of IT Category, Federal Acquisition Service, GSA
Shalom Nevet
Senior IT Security Specialist, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Jim Piché
Homeland Sector Director, Federal Systems Integration and Management Center, GSA
Michael Ramsey
Cybersecurity Sales Manager, IBM
Helga Schoeman
IT Specialist,Treasury Department
Birgit Smeltzer
IT Specialist, GSA
Shue-Jane Thompson
Partner, Cyber and Biometric Services, IBM
Rod Turk
Deputy CIO and Chief Information Security Officer, Commerce Department
Robert Wuhrman
Enterprise Architect, Unified Shared Services Management, GSA
Note: IBM sponsored the roundtable gathering.The discussion was led by FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy K. Schneider and 1105 Public Sector Media Group Co-President and Chief Content Officer Anne A. Armstrong.The recap on these pages is strictly an editorial product; neither IBM nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their March 23 comments.
sary expertise, he added.
“I ditto that,” a third participant
said. “We have contractors who don’t really have the skill sets to do the job. And there are a lot of things in our current task order that the CDM vendor is not required to do but we as an agency are required to do.”
The group agreed that part of the problem is the thicket of stakehold- ers involved in the CDM contract.
“We have contractors coming on board, but the contractor’s not my agency’s contractor,” one executive said. “I have to convey, ‘Look, this is a DHS contract. It’s not our agency’s contract, and it has a GSA number on it.’” That creates confusion about expectations and problems in get- ting personnel cleared to work on an agency’s systems.
Several participants said agencies need more control over vendors. Although DHS and GSA have contrac- tual authority for CDM, one official said, “we have the responsibility and the accountability to get it delivered. That is a huge issue.”
A GSA participant said the tension is not imagined — it’s written into the CDM contract.
Agencies “want this CDM solu- tion,” he said. “They want it quick, they want it fast, they want the most aggressive technologies. But GSA, on behalf of DHS, has negotiated very tight cost controls with the integra- tors that are coming to us. The prices that the government is paying for the tools that they’re bringing to bear are unheard of across the federal space.”
In return for those prices, he added, the integrators have certain expectations about agency-provided resources and standardization.
“When an agency says, ‘No, we don’t do it that way. Here in our agen- cy, we have this federation, and you have to go through this change con- trol board,’ now you start increasing
their labor, which doesn’t jibe with the deal that they have,” the GSA offi- cial said. “The deal they have with the government is quick in/out, best prices available.”
Another GSA participant added, “That’s why we’re looking forward to a new type of contract solution than what you’ve got.”
What comes next?
GSA has started discussions about the acquisition vehicle that will power CDM after next summer and is stressing two goals: a stronger emphasis on services and a better way to blend funding streams.
“During Phase 1 and Phase 2, we were purchasing with a heavy tools focus,” a GSA participant said. “We were buying commodities and then an integration component to go along with them.”
Once those commodity tools are in place, the official said, “it’s a different approach to contracting. Rather than contracting for commodities, we’re going to be contracting for integra- tion services [and] labor, and we’re going to try to find the best integra- tors with which we can establish these longer-term relationships.”
And referring back to the question of whether DHS or customer agen- cies should control the CDM dollars, the GSA officials said their goal was to make that question moot. As one participant put it, “I’m trying to create a contract vehicle that, regardless of where the funding goes, you can get to the same contracting, get to the same integrators, that you have a consistent set of service providers and a consis- tent set of solutions to the agency.”
“If we do this acquisition one time this year and allow for multiple fund- ing streams and multiple solutions, it can be a provider that you can lever- age for years to come,” the official said. n
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