Page 44 - FCW, May/June 2020

SEWP Contract Guide
Bigger, Faster, Smarter, More Secure and ... Cloudier?
SEWP continues to accommodate innovative technologies including, yes, the cloud.
Since 1993, NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise- Wide Procurement (SEWP) has provided federal agencies with access to
the latest information technology solutions. FCW recently sat with Joanne Woytek, program manager for SEWP, to find out what’s new with the long-running acquisition contract.
FCW: How has SEWP changed to accommodate the shifting federal
IT landscape?
Joanne: Our main goal initially was to have one scientist get a computer. That’s a humble start that led to a NASA-wide contract. We now have 7,300 companies with products and services on SEWP.
FCW: When we talked about a year ago, you had just set up the industry relations team for the purpose of better understanding what’s happening in private sector IT. How’s it going?
Joanne: It’s still evolving. We’ve facilitated our customers talking to industry and vice versa to understand better the problems that each has. They have gone well, nothing earth shattering, but to have people communicate can be earth shattering.
FCW: What’s happening with SEWP regarding ease of use and speed of delivery?
Joanne: Speed of delivery is whatever the supply chain allows. The question is does the government get in the way of that normal speed? We don’t. We help when there is
a problem. If a vendor doesn’t deliver on time, we take that seriously. Then you have situations like the coronavirus or the tornado in Tennessee that hit a factory, causing possible delays. We keep them informed.
FCW: You mentioned the coronavirus. What are you thinking in terms of contingency plans?
Joanne: All that we can do is provide information. We know there’s going to be delays, so it’s incumbent on our contract holders to not quote two weeks when
they know there’s no way they can do it with the current situation. It’s their job to understand what’s happening and where the supplies are going to be delayed and let the customer know.
FCW: You’ve said that SEWP is a program that provides information and facilitates smart IT acquisitions. What’s new that will help SEWP to advance that mission?
Joanne: We’re trying out new ways
to communicate. In the past year we’ve added more videos to our website, two- to four-minute videos that describe certain capabilities. We now have a strong process for dealing with RFQs that don’t get responded to. We’re trying to add more resources in areas that we think the customer might be getting stuck to nudge them along and through the process.
FCW: How is federal demand for products and services changing?
Joanne: Well, obviously, there’s cloud, whether it’s Microsoft 360 or ServiceNow and Salesforce and those types of companies with a lot of strong cloud products, such as AWS.
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