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Comment for Anonymous: DoD was the largest GSA customer for awhile. Then service degraded, leading to the famous "Get It Right" quality improvement program; GSA contracting experts were retrained. Some concerns over policies, including competition, fees for service, and the interminable reorganization of the Federal Acquisition Service drove customers away in droves. These things are cyclical. Army may improve things for itself (regardless of cost), but then it, too, will suffer a relapse--and maybe come back to GSA. Meanwhile, let's hope that GSA, even with leadership that holds spotty customer confidence, gets better. Finally, centralization of something like contracting reaches a point of diminishing returns--excessive process, time, and personnel costs, with no improvement in quality or prices. But that's not the reason every agency wants its own contracting; you have it right--it's just the bureaucracy--in the absence of top management leadership.
Posted by Michael Lent on December 10, 2007 - 08:32 PM
GSA's "Get it Right" was an overkill attempt to react to a few anecdotal press stories about rare exceptions rather than the rule. GSA customers left because of a sudden and clumsy reinterpretation of how long they could park money with GSA. GSA service was always better than the rest, in general by a long shot. Centralization is more possible today than ever before because of Intranets. GSA should manage the Acquisition line of business and DoD should get out of it.
Posted by Federal Enterprise Architect on December 11, 2007 - 07:24 AM
For FEA: "Get It Right" was also based on hearings and audit reports, both of which drew on customer experience. "GSA service was always better than the rest, in general by a long shot" could be viewed as being a little in denial. If the service is good, customers don't leave in droves. The LOB concept is a good one, but it is an ideal. And an unreachable, presumptive part of that is that GSA could earn the confidence to be the czar that buys everything for everyone. It's too hard to get there from where the government is today. It's a big bang approach, and those don't work.
Posted by Michael Lent on December 11, 2007 - 12:57 PM
Now we are seeing the results of Rumsfeld's disaisterous policy of cutting off the use of GSA by DoD. His goal was to always punish the commands by taking away funding that had already been committed to GSA and bring it back to OSD. A weak GSA leadership team put up no real reistence to this at the time and instead they followed the lead of their IG to ferret out imaginary problems. The result of all this is that more money was dumped into DoD where a much smaller Acquisition work force was already underwater thanks to the cuts made much earliler. Any wonder why there are so many bad procurements from DoD? The good news is all that has changed. A new Secretary is trying to correct the problems and the GSA Administraor, Lorita Doan is tough as nails, making it impossible to push them around anymore. In fact, the opposite is happening. GSA is a lot tougher and more determined and is pushing DoD to get on board with GSA VETs contract.
Posted by DoDer on December 11, 2007 - 03:44 PM
Thank you DODer. If GSA can remember that it had a lot right before the Get IT Right fiasco - and that the FEDSIM model is not right for the Regions, then all will be well.
Posted by Federal Enterprise Architect on December 11, 2007 - 04:20 PM
It is what it is.
GSAs woes have little to do with the irregularities that they self-reported. The real foe of GSA is their own CFO. She unilaterally took a more narrow position with regards to funds in the IT fund, and ended the careers of a cadre of DOD employees when they had to return their funds as expired to their finance offices. There was no good reason to take this position. There was plenty of precent and political cover.
Napoleon was have right.....I have met the enemy and he is me!
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