Page 27 - FCW, August 2019

New contractors in government:
THE NEW NORMAL?
The use of tech demos and an emphasis on agile development are opening doors for nontraditional IT contractors
BY STEVE KELMAN
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently awarded a blanket purchase agreement for work on Medi- care Payment System Modernization (MPSM). According to a description on the U.S. Digital Service’s website, the initia- tive will replace a system that uses 10 million lines of Cobol and assembly language with a new cloud-based system to “scale and flex rapidly with how CMS processes claims and pays providers, transforming technology from a policy inhibitor to a multiplier.”
I was astonished to learn that all six awards on the BPA went to nontraditional contractors, which are loosely defined as small new firms and are often founded by people who had previously worked for large companies in the technology industry. Those firms are typically oriented to the missions of the agencies with which they work and have a core competence in engineering rath- er than business development or the ability to respond to proposals. They also tend to have agile software development in their DNA. Of the six, an astonishing five are members of the Digital Services Coalition, an organization that supports nontraditional contractors.
The awardees have a handful of federal prime contracts and employ 30 to 200 people; the sub-
contractors are even smaller. One company was founded a year ago and currently does only com- mercial work. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be interested in government work (I was told “too much red tape, labor rates don’t support their talent”), but the civic tech movement has attracted that firm to the space because its leaders want to support important agencies and missions, such as improv- ing health care. Another firm was started by an Air Force veteran who worked for Deloitte before starting his company. He believed he could help veterans in a more human-centered way that adds value for veterans and taxpayers than he could through a much larger company.
A willingness to experiment
It turns out that this was the second time CMS awarded a BPA to nontraditional contractors. In 2016, the agency awarded the Agile Delivery to Execute Legislative Endeavors for Quality-Related Initiatives (ADELE-QRI), whose scope includes using agile software development for quality- improvement work. That BPA was the brainchild of Dan Levenson, a CMS contracting officer who had recently graduated from the Digital IT Acquisi- tion Professional training program run by USDS and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy.
The procurement almost didn’t happen. At the
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