9:00 - 9:10 am Welcome
David Sutton
Director Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization

9:10 - 9:40 am Keynote Speaker
Mr. Vance Hitch
Chief Information Officer

WELCOME! It is great to see so many small businesses interested in working with the federal government. We have a great many challenges, and we need your help.

THANK YOU to Dave Sutton, Director of Justice’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, for putting together session together.

THIS MORNING I will broadly outline some of the challenges and dynamics of the Federal IT landscape from my perspective as an agency CIO.

I will lay out a foundation upon which my colleagues from the Department of Justice’s major components (ATF, BOP, DEA, FBI, OJP, EOUSA, USMS, Interpol) will build upon later this morning.

 

USGovt faces numerous IT challenges in a challenging environment.

Similarly challenging are the obstacles that face small businesses that seek to work with the federal govt to address these challenges.

Many agencies are facing budget cuts, and IT spending is being carefully scrutinized.

Incumbent companies – those who already are doing work in the federal government or who are already on a designated contract vehicle – have distinct advantages.

Forging partnerships with these incumbent companies is often a highly effective way of getting in the door at federal agencies and establishing relationships directly with decision makers.

If you are familiar with the way Silicon Valley venture capitalists view investments, they often categorize the solutions a potential company offers into one of two camps: vitamin or aspirin.

Vitamin – a “nice to have” that enhances the status quo and improves performance.

Aspirin – addresses an immediate pain or operational gap.

Federal IT investments are focused on solving our immediate pains, which are many.

There are many excellent small businesses out there which offer helpful solutions. While many of these are interesting, the majority of USGovt spending and management attention will continue to focus on solving our biggest, most pressing problems.

Want to share with you what the IT landscape looks like from a CIO’s perspective.

These forces have a major impact on IT investment decisions. At the center of our focus is the U.S. taxpayer, whose resources we use to achieve our mission goals.

Pay special attention to:

Chairman Tom Davis, House Government Reform Committee
Rep. Davis really “gets IT” and his committee is very progressive

Clay Johnson, who leads the President’s Management Agenda
Now that the President won re-election, OMB is using the PMA to drive change and accountability into all agencies
Agencies are paying close attention to the scorecard (learn more at www.results.gov)

While small businesses mostly focus on time and material contracts, large USGovt awards are increasingly using performance based contracts.

Shared-in savings contracts are still very rare but may be the wave of the future for certain types of procurements.

(quote from OMB presentation)
“Since the passage of the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, all Federal Departments and Agencies have initiated procedures to record contractor performance on in process contracts and to use past contractor performance information in source selection.  We have learned from the experience of agencies and contractors that recording contractor current performance information periodically during contract performance and discussing the results with contractors is a powerful motivator for contractors to maintain high quality performance or improve inadequate performance before the next reporting cycle.  Current performance assessment is a basic “best practice” for good contract administration, and is one of the most important tools available for ensuring good contractor performance.”

Many agencies use GWACs for large procurements.

Take time to get familiar the list of companies on the GWAC contract vehicles. Many will be very familiar with you as they are well known federal contractors that do extensive business with the federal government. As you would expect from the size of our budget, the Dept of Justice works with a large number of large contractors at any given time.

SEWP (pronounced soup) is the Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement. This name reflects the history of SEWP which was started in 1990 to fulfill IT procurement needs of the NASA science and engineering community. While SEWP continues to emphasize cutting edge and high-end IT, all areas of IT products (from Palm Pilots to Supercomputers) are available on the SEWP contracts.