DOT Looks to a Consolidated Contract Vehicle

By Kevin Shaker, Consultant

You probably have heard about the General Services Administration’s schedule consolidation initiative to make a single uniform offering available to vendors and the government partner community. Detailed in Adam Hyman’s recent blog, the GSA will spend the next two years consolidating the agency’s 24 multiple schedule awards into a single schedule. This will allow vendors to broaden their offerings while only having to maintain a single contract.

Other civilian agencies are also looking at ways to update their contract methods through a consolidated-contract arrangement. For example, the Department of Transportation is now beginning to re-architect the way they contract with their service partners.

While the Federal Aviation Administration will likely keep their FAA specific service vehicles, including the FAA Telecommunications (FTI) program (turning into the FAA Enterprise Services (FENS)), eFAST and eTASS, the DOT’s OCIO office will be consolidating their services contracts in a single Enterprise IT Shared Services (EITSS) contract as part of the DestinationDIGITAL modernization program. When it is awarded, every sub-agency will have access to the contract and will eventually have staff to run it within each agency. However, after the initial awards, all task orders will need to be addressed to the departmental OCIO.

The program will have three parts: performance management and integration support, end-user operations and infrastructure operations. Infrastructure operations will receive the largest chunk of IT dollars and will be the contract that IT vendors that have data center or application hosting technologies will want to be on. Currently there is no ceiling value to the contract, considering it is still only in the RFI phase. Contract awardees will have a two-year base period with an additional five years of add-on options. If you would like to know more about the contract component specifics, read this NextGov article.

As a vendor you will want to make sure you are teamed up with a bidding systems integrator to make sure you will be able to access to these infrastructure modernization dollars. Keep in mind that the FAA, while having access to the EITSS contract, will continue to use mostly its own contracts, yet virtually every other agency is looking at EITSS to transform their contract processes and IT environment. The response deadline to the RFI is now due January 22, but it is not too late to reach out to systems integrators to see how your solutions can fit in.

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