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ExecTech
Before the SINs, GSA was getting
pushback from agencies concerned about duplication of IT contracts and from industry partners who said keeping up with all the schedules was becoming difficult and expensive, Arrie- ta said.
Now “we can onboard companies in 36 days because of the SINs’ flexibility,” he added.
So far, GSA has established SINs for highly adaptive cybersecurity ser- vices and health IT services. The Earth observation SIN is under development, in conjunction with the National Geo- spatial-Intelligence Agency; it’s expected to debut in June.
SINs for CDM and cloud products and services are “in flight,” Arrieta said. According to GSA, there are already 65 approved vendors on the cloud SIN and several in the pipeline, which are being expedited for approval. The
Department of Homeland Security’s Enterprise Computing Services pro- gram plans to use the SIN to give DHS’ component agencies readier access to cloud services.
GSA issued a request for informa- tion on March 22 for the CDM SIN and convened an industry day on April 17 to solicit input on how to manage the effort. Although GSA is pushing forward on all the specialized SINs, there is some special urgency for CDM. About 169,000 tools and services are available through the dedicated contract that GSA man- ages for DHS, but the blanket purchase agreement expires in August 2018.
Jim Piché, a sector director at GSA’s Federal Systems Integration and Man- agement Center, told FCW in March that the SIN will play a big role as DHS and GSA gear up for the next phase of the CDM program. It will ensure that all the work done to approve and catalog prod-
ucts and services for the current BPA is not lost when that contract expires. The Earth observation SIN, mean- while, is an example of trying to harness
a galloping technology for agencies. “You can buy images” of Earth, Arrie- ta said, “but you can’t do it second by second.” New technologies are making that immediate access possible as more companies enter an increasingly com- mercial market for using those images in all sorts of applications.
Arrieta said ideas for new SINs come from a number of sources, including a single agency’s request or a group seek- ing help on a common problem. How- ever, GSA “doesn’t take the creation of SINs lightly,” he added.
The agency does its homework on markets, technology and other details, such as which niches or broad markets a SIN would serve, and creates a solid business case before moving ahead. n
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