FAA’s Shared Services Organization

by Stephanie Sullivan, Consultant

Steve Cooper, FAA’s Deputy CIO spoke at an ACT IAC FAA Federal Executive Session on December 10th,  highlighting FAA’s  new shared services organization headed by Victoria Wassmer. The component organizations that roll up to create the shared service organization include:

• Finance
• Procurement
• Acquisition
• Regions and Center Operations
• IT

Each of the component organizations except for the IT arm has fully transitioned into the new organization.

Cooper discussed areas of opportunity for vendors within FAA, and called out infrastructure being a prime target because of the budget pressure to reduce costs. He also explained that people and IT services contracts make up the two largest buckets of expenses in the operating budget, and even though there is a need to reduce costs there will be no impact on the National Airspace System (NAS) budget. Other areas of opportunity for vendors include big data, data storage architecture, mobility and cloud solutions. Cooper wants to understand how data can be stored and retrieved in an actionable, useful, timely and accurate manner.