Page 48 - FCW, January/February 2020

FirstPerson
‘It’s a great place to be’
As she moves to NASA, Mary Davie looks back on her long career at the General Services Administration
48
January/February 2020
FCW.COM
BY MARK ROCKWELL
After over 30 years at the General Services Administration, Mary Davie is applying her IT and acqui- sition expertise to another agency’s mission.
The four-time FCW Federal 100 award winner and 2016 govern- ment Eagle winner is now deputy associate administrator for mission support transformation in NASA’s Mission Support Directorate. She started her new job on Feb. 3.
Over the course of her GSA career, Davie led the Federal Systems Inte- gration and Management (FedSIM) Center, oversaw the federal govern- ment’s IT acquisition workforce as assistant commissioner of the Fed- eral Acquisition Service’s Office of Integrated Technology Services and served as acting FAS commissioner.
Before heading to NASA, Davie talked with FCW’s Mark Rockwell about her career, how GSA has pro- gressed over the years and how it can focus on some of the work she’s leaving behind.
Since you joined GSA, IT
has advanced from desktop computers, floppy disks and copper-wire telecom services to cloud computing, software-as- a-service and robotics process automation. How has GSA
fared through those changes?
It’s worked out great. When I started at GSA, we were on typewriters and pagers. GSA has always been at the forefront of trying out and employing new technology and keeping up with what industry was doing.
We were going to do a federal tech- nology service acquisition platform back in the ’90s. That didn’t work out, but what that says is GSA is always willing to be forward-thinking and
try things. Sometimes they work out, like with our cloud implementation and Gmail and Google and being first in that space, and now with artificial intelligence and process automation. But it’s always been a culture of innovation and being a leader in government.
How has GSA’s role in IT acquisition changed since
you started there?
When I first started with FedSIM, it had been a small group within the Air Force in the ’80s. GSA acquired it. It had been the Federal Systems Com- puter Modeling and Simulation Cen- ter. These guys were highly technical people doing computer simulation. Demand from other agencies started to outgrow the staff we had on hand.
We launched the first \[government- wide acquisition contract\], but it couldn’t really be a GWAC because it wasn’t available for all agencies
to buy from. It was an \[indefinite- delivery, indefinite-quantity contract\] called 9500 and then 9600.
It was FedSIM trying to augment its own capability to do more in IT acquisition and technical computer modeling projects. We grew with what came after, with the Millennia contract \[GSA’s $25 billion IT contract in the early 2000s\] and Alliant.
The growth and complexity of what people were buying kept grow- ing. When I started at FedSIM, a lot of what I was doing to support the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency, Com- merce Department and the Army was relatively small IT hardware buys or small systems implementation. Things started to blossom, particularly with the Army. They were looking to build local-area networks for tactical use
in a box that could be taken into the field. We had to know what kind of companies could offer those kinds
of technologies and how GSA could partner with them.
We’ve really had to stay in tune with IT and the best way to buy those things and know who the providers are. Like cloud — it’s a consumption- based model. What does that mean to the traditional terms of acquisition and contracting?
There’s been a ton of change with a lot more to come.