GSA Releases OASIS RFPs: On Wednesday, GSA released requests for proposals for the much-anticipated One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Service (OASIS) multi-award contract, one full and open and the other for small businesses. The IDIQ, which covers seven professional services areas such as management consulting, financial management, engineering and logistics does not have a ceiling value but is expected to be worth upwards of $60 billion over the life of the contract. GSA expects to make somewhere between 20 and 40 awards per functional area under OASIS. Questions are due August 20th and responses are due September 17th. See FBO for more.
White House Releases Details on Management Agenda: The White House released a memo earlier this week, adding additional detail about their plans for what is now being called the “Evidence and Innovation Agenda.” In short, the new initiative directs agencies to develop evidence-based practices that draw on data, analytics and experimentation with the hope of driving agency investment toward policies and programs that work effectively and away from those that don’t. Agencies are expected to incorporate aspects of the Evidence and Innovation Agenda in their 2015 budget requests. Not sure how this will actually work in practice or how human evaluation of program effectiveness will be matched with the data driven analysis, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Here’s the full memo.
Federal News Radio Releases Survey on Effects of Sequestration: Federal News Radio released a survey this week on the effects of sequestration on government contractors and the results are about what you’d expect – many contractors have stopped hiring, furloughed employees, reduced travel and training, and cut back on their marketing budgets. Contractors are also seeing fewer RFPs and greater competition for those that are put out to bid. Over 1,000 vendor personnel responded to the survey conducted in July 2013. See the raw data from the survey and more here.
GSA Considers Adding Plug-In IT to FSSI OS3: GSA is flirting with the idea of adding certain “plug-in” IT products to the next version of the FSSI Office Supply contract. The items being discussed include printers, monitors, keyboards and other hardware. GSA will be soliciting feedback on the idea at its next Industry Day on Aug 6th in New York. GSA has often discussed extending FSSI to include IT but the question has always been: For what IT items does it even make sense and where do you draw the line? Laptops, often thought of as “commodity IT,” could be the next logical place to go, but those as we know can be highly customized depending on different agency and personnel needs. See more here.
Government Shutdown Corner: With football season approaching, as well as the end of the government fiscal year I thought I’d steal a football term to talk about the potential for a government shutdown. There’s more and more talk this week about certain members of Congress planning to shut down the federal government in order to prevent funding for the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare. We will be watching closely and offering our thoughts along the way. Thought for this week is that there are many ways to prevent funding for Obamacare (not that we support or oppose that), or any other program for that matter, without shutting down the entire federal government. Politico has coverage.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.