Inside the Beltway, bashing the General Services Administration has become a popular sport. GSA unwittingly encourages it by repetitively responding to criticism with the same mantra: "We will attract/retain customers by providing good customer service and adding value."

Agency officials sigh and roll their eyes when they hear that credo because GSA has not defined customer service or explained how they will add value. If the idea is simply to work harder at doing the same thing, agencies aren't -- and won't be -- buying it.

Although GSA critics have plenty of material to work with, the agency still has successes to boast about -- and more importantly -- capitalize on. Perhaps we will hear a different response to criticism now that GSA has a nominee for administrator.

By all measures, the decline in GSA's assisted acquisition services will continue. In the past, those services were attractive to agency customers because GSA fulfilled needs quickly, provided customers a way to retain expiring information technology funds and offered the aid of a contracting officer or acquisition IT expertise for agencies that had none.

As a result of the well-publicized IT fund misuses and subsequent Get It Right program, the first two reasons are no longer in play. The only remaining customer draw for GSA's assisted acquisition shop is supplementing an agency's contracting officer or short-handed contracting officer technical representative workforce.

The fallacy in GSA's planned remedy is the unrealistic belief that it can attract already-lost customers to the same organization that now has only one of its previous three benefits. Outside GSA, no one thinks the agency will realize its dream. Unless the government dissolves GSA or remakes it into a mandatory acquisition source, only one option seems to remain: Find a way to capitalize on the one remaining asset by promoting it to customers through a different organization -- one that has a successful track record.

Within the former Federal Technology Service organization, only one success story remains -- FTS 2001. In hindsight, this contract can be viewed as the birth of the next generation of governmentwide acquisition contracts. The Networx contract has further refined the concept of an acquisition vehicle for dummies, as easy to use as an order-by-number menu. For users, a super-GWAC such as Networx provides competition compliance; a narrow selection of quality vendors; prenegotiated pricing, terms and conditions; and compliance with the federal enterprise architecture and federal IT security policy.