Page 14 - FCW, May/June 2018
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CIO-CS
 The plan was for CIO- Commodities and Solutions to be
a supportive vehicle for buying equipment for procurements generated from the more customizable, service-oriented CIO-Solutions and Partners 3 vehicles, according to Bridget Gauer, director of the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), which runs all three contracts.
That tactical description was probably true in 2015, Gauer says, because then most of the items being procured were commodities and, by definition, transactional activities. But now, CIO-CS itself has been designated a ‘best-in- class’ governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC) by the Office of Management and Budget for the benefits it provides to government agencies.
“In addition,” Gauer says, “it was selected as a Government-Wide Strategic Source (NITAAC-GSS) for laptops and desktops, allowing
CIO-CS
PRODUCED BY:
SPONSORED BY:
CDW•G DELIVERS
BEST-IN-CLASS STATUS PUSHES
EVOLUTION OF NIH CONTRACT CIO-CS Becomes Governmentwide Solution
HEN THE NATIONAL
Institute of Health’s CIO-
CS contract was awarded in April
2015, it was seen as a tactical partner for
the agency’s older and more established
services contracts, CIO- SP3 and CIO-SP3 Small Business.
Since then, however, it’s evolved to be much more.
agencies to address current and future needs at the lowest cost of ownership and lowest risk, while maximizing the federal government’s spending power.”
CIO-CS is a 10-year, $20 billion contract with 65 contract holders, 48 of which are small businesses. In its first year it booked just under $179 million worth of orders. That tripled to over $654 million in 2017 and 2018 is expected to meet or exceed that, according to Gauer.
to the broad IT modernization and cybersecurity efforts that agencies are involved with.
That “rebranding” by NITAAC, while a strength over the contract’s length, was at first a struggle in terms of bringing those users who had been familiar with ECSIII on board with CIO-CS, says Bill Robinson, CIO- CS program manager for contract holder CDW•G.
“In the beginning it was a bit of a struggle, because it’s not like version
BEST-IN-CLASS
DESIGNATION
OMB’s description of a Best-in-Class (BIC) contracting vehicle guarantees that CIO-CS meets rigorous management performance criteria, and makes it available to agencies as a preferred or mandatory governmentwide solution.
With BIC attached to it, CIO-CS can provide pre-vetted, mature and market- proven solutions agencies can use to modernize legacy IT or apply to regular technology refresh procurements.
CIO-CS is a mandatory BIC governmentwide solution for desktops and laptops.
As with the contract it supplanted, Electronics Commodities Store (ECS) III, agencies can order IT commodity technology for the enterprise, lab and office from CIO-CS. But that’s where the similarities end. The CIO- CS focus is much more on cloud and managed services, geared
one, two and its predecessor,” he says. “It took some persuasion to convince them that CIO-CS was still NITAAC, and that it basically was the next extension of ECSIII. There were a lot of benefits included
to the contract which customers needed to be convinced still existed with improvements.”




































































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