Page 3 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

Trending 3.6% is the raise proposed by congressional Democrats for federal civilian employees in 2020
Education Department reboots multibillion-dollar procurement
The Education Department is relaunching a multibillion-dollar tech- nology and services offering almost a year after an initial solicitation in an effort to ward off a lawsuit from incumbent vendors.
government more transparency into lending data.
FSA issues more than $120 billion in loans, grants and work-study fund- ing annually to 13 million students. Its overall loan portfolio totals more than
$1.4 trillion and covers more than 42 million borrowers.
In its solicitation for the Next Generation Financial Services Envi- ronment, FSA notes that vendors “have built redundant tech- nical and operational solutions, creating inefficiencies resulting in a poor experience for customers” and that “across vendors, data management and
cybersecurity practices are inconsistent and siloed.”
The solicitation was created to replace a scrapped Obama-era plan to build a single platform to manage the agency’s vast loan portfolio. That effort was put out for bid in April 2016 and
cancelled in August 2017.
Education officials released a nine-
part solicitation for Phase I of the Next Generation Financial Services Environ- ment in February 2018. FSA planned to review vendors’ responses and select a smaller group to participate in Phase II to decide who would win the contracts.
Two pieces of the contract — a digital platform and a customer rela- tionship management system — were opened to bidders as part of a govern- mentwide acquisition vehicle managed outside the Education Department. The department issued solicitations for the remaining seven pieces, which were a mix of data processing, data manage- ment, identity management, cybersecu- rity, and the processing and servicing of borrower accounts. In September 2018, FSA announced it had winnowed the list of potential vendors for five of those requirements.
Not long after, Navient sued FSA, alleging that the scope of work in the solicitation had been altered during the course of the procurement. The com- pany manages $300 billion in student
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The government wants to modernize and streamline the technology it uses to process and service the loan portfolio guaranteed by the Education Depart- ment’s Federal Student Aid office, with the goal of providing borrowers with a consistent experience and giving the
FCW CALENDAR
The 30th annual Federal 100 Awards Gala takes place March 28 in Washington, D.C. For details and the full list of winners,goto FCW.com/fed100.
2/27 Digital services
SSA Associate Commissioner Kim Baldwin-Sparks,
DOD Chief Data Officer Michael Conlin and Justice Department CIO Joseph Klimavicz are among the speakers at FCW’s Citizen Engagement Summit. Washington, D.C.
FCW.com/citizen
3/21 IT modernization
Deputy U.S. CIO Margaret Graves, U.S. Marshals Service CIO Karl
Mathias and GSA Associate Administrator Jessica Salmoiraghi are among the speakers at this FCW event on “Modernizing for the Mission.”
Washington, D.C.
FCW.com/modernizing
January/February 2019 FCW.COM 3
MARK VAN SCYOC/SHUTTERSTOCK