The Acquisition Improvement and Accountability Act, which will take effect May 27, stands to change some of the procurement landscape, according to panelists at a conference co-produced by 1105 Government Information Group and Topside Consulting Group.
“There’s never been a more clear need for high-level acquisition leadership,” said Greg Rothwell, president of EverMay Consulting Group and former chief procurement officer at the Homeland Security Department.
Among other measures, the bill requires agencies to justify using procedures that prevent full and open competition. It also forbids contracting officers from awarding task orders of more than $100 million to a single contractor without written justification and allows protests on task orders worth more than $10 million.
The protest rule is going to affect most major agencies, said Robert Sudhoff, supervisory contracting officer at the General Services Administration. “Quite a few of our task orders, if not the vast majority, are going to hit that threshold.”
— Michael Hardy
Agency officials are dealing with a multitude of network and information technology initiatives this year. Work continues on the transition to the year-old Networx network services contracts, and agencies are rushing to convert their Internet backbones to the latest IP version while simultaneously eliminating most of their external connections to the Internet under the IPv6 and Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiatives.
However, as daunting as the challenges look, they might seem more manageable if officials thought of them as pieces of a whole. A variety of agency and industry veterans shared success tips and lessons learned with a similarly mixed audience last week at “Networx, TIC and More: Connecting the Dots,” a daylong conference co-produced by 1105 Government Information Group and Topside Consulting Group. The conference’s goal was to show the connections between various IT and network initiatives and present useful information for agencies involved in those programs.
The General Services Administration awarded Networx, a multiple-award telecommunications and network services contract, more than a year ago, but agencies are only slowly moving services onto the new vehicles from the expiring FTS 2001 contracts.
Many people look back to the late 1990s, when the government was moving from FTS 2000 to FTS 2001, for inspiration and caution. John Johnson, assistant commissioner for integrated technology services at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said the parallels only go so far.
“This time is very different,” he said. “The world we live in is not the same world we lived in 10 years ago. The services being moved are significantly more complex than they were then.”
One reason for the sluggish pace is the complexity of the contract’s fair-opportunity requirements, said Lori DeVenoge, telecommunications manager at the Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau.
“One of our first shockers was when [agencies] started to learn about the whole fair-opportunity process,” she said. “Fair opportunity took people aback.”
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