Page 12 - FCW, March/April 2021

Teaming Up on Emerging Technologies
INDUSTRY ALLIANCES:
Greater than the sum of their parts
Strategic partnerships between well-established government contractors and leading-edge technology companies offer agencies the best of both worlds
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT buys more than $550 billion in goods
and services annually, making it
the largest single consumer in the world. So when its demands shift, suppliers respond.
In recent years, agencies’ growing need for
IT modernization has prompted their biggest suppliers — federal systems integrators (FSIs) — to look for innovative ways to meet that need.
In the most basic definition, systems integrators are large, well-established companies that bring together component subsystems into a whole and ensure that they function together. However, as the role of FSIs evolves to focus on solving increasingly complex challenges, their responsibilities are moving beyond resource management to encompass the user experience. Meanwhile, government procurement approaches are shifting away from supporting static, custom technology and toward adopting
commercial as-a-service models.
FSIs’ deep working knowledge of government
operations gives them a distinct advantage, but to provide all the expertise an agency needs on a contract, FSIs have always partnered with subcontractors. Now they are broadening their reach by seeking out cutting-edge companies that can help them develop solutions that incorporate the latest innovations in technology and strategy.
Those “greater than the sum of their parts” solutions have a profound impact on agencies’ ability to meet mission-critical demands in a wide range of areas.
The government’s reliance on FSIs can be traced to acquisition reform legislation passed in the 1990s, including the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, the Federal Acquisition Reform Act and the Clinger-Cohen Act. “One key assumption of these reforms was that
cost efficiency could be improved by using contractors more effectively — sometimes in more powerful roles than ever before,” wrote Kathlyn Hopkins Loudin, a former professor at Defense Acquisition University, in a 2010 study.
Since then, the explosion in technological advances and the government’s struggle to
keep pace are driving changes in agencies’ expectations of FSIs. In a recent survey of FCW readers, 75% of respondents said their agencies rely on FSIs for complex IT projects. Asked how easy it is for their agencies to find out about emerging technologies that could address government challenges, however, only 19% said they always know about the latest technologies, 10% said it’s tough for them to keep up, and the rest were somewhere in the middle.
Cybersecurity topped the list of areas in which FCW respondents were seeking strategic, comprehensive solutions at 69%, followed by
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