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How GSA does oversight on EIS
The General Services Administration is pushing agencies to meet a loom- ing March deadline to award their task orders under GSA’s $50 billion, 15-year, next-generation telecommunications contract.
March 31 is GSA’s target for agen- cies to issue telecom contracts under the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract vehicle. If they don’t, the agencies will have limited access to existing telecom contracts.
A spokesman told FCW that GSA requests weekly updates from agencies’ transition teams, including details on
$1.2B is the reported purchase price for Unisys Federal, which is being acquired by SAIC
OFPP wants to define procurement lead time
“GSA will continue to partner with agencies to do all that we can to help them transition.”
timeline, scope and status of activities for completing the acquisition phase and proceeding through the imple- mentation phase of EIS.
The Office of Federal Procurement Policy wants to nail down language on exactly when federal procurements begin and end to help eliminate delays.
OFPP is seeking comments on a pro- posed rule change to redefine the term “Procurement Administrative Lead Time.” It’s part of a plan for measuring and publicly reporting governmentwide data on PALT for
contracts and orders above the simplified acquisi- tion threshold.
The agency
wants to adopt
the definition
from Section
878 of the 2019
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). That legislation defines the term as “the time between the date on which an initial solicitation for a con- tract or order is issued by a federal department or agency and the date of the award of the contract or order.”
OFPP said establishing a common PALT definition and a plan to measure and report on it could help the govern- ment minimize delays in the procure- ment process. If agencies are equipped with a common definition, they can use common data to help them improve.
Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel at the Profes- sional Services Council, said he was pleased with OFPP’s proposed use of the NDAA definition.
Time is money for the federal agen- cies and contractors involved in an acquisition, he told FCW, adding that a revised PALT definition would help
measure both. Others would like to see the definition tweaked a bit. “I propose that PALT be defined as the cycle time between the solic- itation response and the date award,” said Dave Zve- nyach, former executive director of the General Services Administration’s 18F and former deputy commissioner of the agency’s Technology Transforma-
tion Services.
“PALT is the sort of topic that drives
procurement nerds to drink,” Zvenyach wrote in a blog post. Defining it has traditionally been hard to do because pinning down the “initial moment of requirement identification is notori- ously difficult.”
— Mark Rockwell
“Ultimately, the final steps of the transition are con- tingent upon agency budgets and over- sight from the agencies’ senior procure- ment executives and chief information officers,” the spokesperson said. “GSA will continue to partner with agencies to do all that we can to help them tran-
sition.”
GSA officials originally wanted agen-
cies to issue their EIS task orders by Sept. 30, 2019. However, some large agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, have yet to award task orders.
On March 31, GSA will limit use of existing Networx contracts and local services agreements for agencies that haven’t issued task orders. GSA had originally set March 2020 as the expi- ration for Networx but extended that deadline to May 31, 2023, because fed- eral agencies have been slow to issue their initial EIS solicitations.
Alan Chvotkin
Dave Zvenyach
Toni Townes-Whitley
@ToniTWhitley
It’s a privilege to work within the federal
IT community, where every day I have the
opportunity to help our government customers maximize
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FCWnow and congratulations to my fellow honorees! #Fed100 https://msft.it/6016TZvZ4
4:05 PM · Feb 3, 2020
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