Page 40 - Federal Computer Week, July 2019

SEWP Contract Guide
Q: SEWP is 26 years old and in its fifth iteration. To what do you attribute its success and longevity?
A: Innovation and customer service. We always put the customers –
and we define it as not just our government customers, but industry – first. We have a really strong understanding of both. We just stood up a new team, the Industry Relations Team. We always had a contract holder team that worked with the companies that directly work with us, but now we’re pushing out beyond that even more than we have in the past to industry in general because my feeling is if you want to be a good resource
to the government, you have to understand what industry is doing and not just assume that you know.
I’ve always said that I think one of our key successes is we don’t look at ourselves as a contract. We look at ourselves as a program, and too many times people take these types of programs and say, “No, it’s a
contract. I’m going to manage the contract.” We manage a program that happens to have a contract as
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FCW | CUSTOM REPORT
Contract Pillar
Federal Procurement Has Become a Big Deal. One Woman Was There From the Get-Go.
Joanne Woytek is the program manager for NASA’s Solutions for Enterprisewide Procurement, the popular and successful program better known as SEWP. For more than a quarter century, the government-wide acquisition contract (GWAC) has given federal agencies access to the latest information technology solutions. Since the inception of SEWP in 1993,
Ms. Woytek has been a key figure in the program’s evolution, managing its strategic direction, planning and day-to-day operations.
make it really easy for agencies to ask for items and for companies
to add items and provide quotes
and manage everything that’s happening. One of the key items added a couple of years ago was a question-and-answer feature to our request-for-quote functionality. By adding the question-and-answer, it now provides a full capability to our government customers to receive questions, respond to them, edit
If you want to be a good resource to the government, you have to understand what industry is doing.
its focus. The other two concepts that are both opposite yet really make SEWP a success is we’re both flexible and very controlled. Because we know what’s going on, we can be flexible within what’s right, and control things to not be what’s wrong.
Q: You’ve put a lot of effort into SEWP’s ease of use. How do you ensure that?
A: We look at products that we provide from the program point
of view to both industry and government. We want to make sure that we have tools available that
them, track them and, in the end, have a full documentation.
If I had to point to two parts of SEWP that make us as strong as we are, one is we view ourselves as an information provider and we want to provide that information to both customers and industry, and then also a documentation provider, understanding that one of the big problems with acquisition is you have to document everything, so we want to make sure that what we do is documentable.
Q: I read that SEWP had $4.5 billion in sales last year and