When the General Services Administration released the $65 billion Alliant 2 governmentwide acquisition contract for IT services back in June 2016, it was one of the first major procurement efforts to put a premium on past performance.
Source: Why contractor past performance data is becoming both more, less valuable | Federal News Network
Many people see the beginning of a business as just having one good idea, but to actually reach success and draw investors, a lot more hard work is needed. To understand the best practices for actually building a business and drawing in a customer base, we spoke with Tony Surak, chief marketing officer and partner at DataTribe.
Source: The roadmap to small business success | Federal News Network
The General Services Administration wants to hear from industry on its plans to consolidate its 24 multiple award schedules, including its popular IT Schedule 70, into a single solicitation format by the start of fiscal year 2020.
The language in the unified schedule contract the General Services Administration is closing in on by the end of fiscal 2019 won’t hold any surprises for federal contract holders, the top manager of agency’s multiple awards schedule program said.
Source: As GSA consolidates buying schedules, special item numbers are due for cuts — FCW
Lawmakers want more insight into how the Defense Department uses rapid contracting authorities, specifically other transaction agreements or OTAs.
Here is another post vaguely related to analyst craft. And it is about a touchy subject – vendor perception of (industry | market | technology) analyst value. As an aside, I’ve always considered myself “a technology analyst” rather than a market one…
Facilities security clearances are a common requirement for Department of Defense procurements. While important for national security reasons, these solicitation requirements can also create confusion with respect to evaluation. A recent GAO decision demonstrates how confusion can arise when a contractor holds multiple CAGE codes, only one of which corresponds to a cleared facility.
SOURCE: CAGE-y Evaluation: Agency Unreasonably Failed to Consider CAGE Codes Provided in Proposal
GAO recently released a snapshot of 2018 fiscal year federal spending. Although it is a very high-level review, it provides some interesting information for government contractors. Among the highlights are the fact that federal discretionary spending has increased year over year and competitive contracts are becoming less common among defense agencies. GAO also identified four key high-risk acquisition areas that it is monitoring.
The Air Force issued a solicitation for someone to collect, analyze, synthesize and process scientific and technical information at its Homeland Defense and Security Information Analysis Center (essentially a publicly accessible website) . Information International Associates, Inc (IIA) was one of several unsuccessful bidders IIA challenged the award. IIA claimed that the Air Force unreasonably evaluated awardee’s proposal as containing a strength where the added benefit identified by the Air Force was not consistent with the terms of the solicitation while evaluating IIA’s proposal as containing a weakness when it was not materially different than the awardee’s proposal. (Well, as they say, one company’s strength is another company’s weakness.)
SOURCE: Similar Proposals – One Was Considered Weak – the Other Was Considered Strong
Multiple award contracts have been around for decades. Successful ones can be like annuities for award-holders and the cash generators for the agencies who operate them. And they’ve been growing in terms of dollars. For just how much, Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to Bloomberg Government senior data analyst Paul Murphy.