Big sales opportunities in lesser-known agencies: Decoding the Omnibus Bill

By Ryan Nelson, Market Intelligence Manager

The Omnibus Bill 2022 signed by the president about a month ago clocks in at nearly 2800 pages. It’s an annual free-for-all for vendors, with sales teams scouring the pages to compare appropriations to their product and service offerings.

While vendors’ typical targets are big-name agencies, there’s a strong argument to be made to dig a bit deeper below the surface, to the smaller sub-agencies. Big opportunities are often buried in small agency funding, and it’s worth having a closer read of the bill to find out just where those opportunities exist.

After all, you may be unlocking an opportunity that might not be obvious at first read, and therefore may not be as competitive as the larger agency requirements. Put enough of these smaller opportunities together, however, and suddenly you find yourself dealing with enough prospects to keep a team busy for some time.

That said, here are four interesting opportunities you might want to consider as you develop your prospect list from the newly signed budget bill:

1) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Some $38,486,000 is to remain available until expended, for Animal Health Technical Services. Similarly, $4,251,000 is to remain available for information technology infrastructure. That means even agencies that are focused on the health of wildlife, domesticated animals and farmable plants are still a lucrative target for big data, data analytics and network infrastructure components.

2) Farm Service Agency. Necessary expenses for this comparatively low-profile agency actually top $1.1 billion. Information technology represents a significant part of this funding. With programs ranging from aerial photography to financial management information, there are quite a number of opportunities in this agency alone. Most notable is the Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems (MIDAS) program. MIDAS is a web-based modernization initiative to simplify, integrate, and automate the delivery of Farm Programs across the United States.

3) National Surface Transportation and Innovative Finance Bureau. This agency has $39,400,000 to spend on cyber security initiatives. That broad category included necessary upgrades to network and information technology infrastructure, and improvement of identity management and authentication capabilities. Other requirements include securing and protecting data, implementation of Federal cyber security initiatives, and implementation of enhanced security controls on agency computers and mobile devices.

4) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. A sub-agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, this organization has $64,238,000 available in the form of grants, contracts and cooperative agreements for the development and advancement of interoperable health information technology.

That’s just scratching the surface, and it doesn’t even take into account some of the less obvious opportunities at the large agency level. To take just one example, the Department of State will see up to $50,000,000 transferred to and merged with their ‘‘Capital Investment Fund’’ for cybersecurity and related information technology investments.

Large or small, agency requirements cover several common themes for FY22. Among those is consolidation in the number of legacy platforms. In addition to transitioning from legacy platforms, systems modernization and more widespread use of the cloud remain top priorities for the foreseeable future. (This emphasis seems to go hand-in-hand with FITARA compliance, which is currently at the top of agencies’ to-do lists. The annual FITARA self-assessment happens each April, with scorecarding from OMB typically expected in May or shortly thereafter.)

The goal of these major IT investments can be summed up in two words: Cost avoidance. All agencies are looking for IT solutions which will simplify access to data and improve the user experience, while also saving money over the status quo.

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immixGroup’s Market Intelligence FY22 briefings are now available on demand. View them here:
Federal Civilian FY22 Budget Briefing
DoD FY 2022 Budget Briefing

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