GSA loading up on new acquisition execs

This story has been updated to reflect the comments of Mary Davie on the promotion of Kay Ely.  

The General Services Administration has added former Social Security Administration CIO Bill Zieliniski to its team to run the agency’s IT category management acquisition.

Mary Davie, GSA’s assistant commissioner of the Office of Integrated Technology Services within the Federal Acquisition Service, first announced Zielinski’s hire on Twitter Monday.

In a brief interlude after his service at SSA, Zielinski has worked since September 2015 at the Office of Management and Budget as the head of Federal CIO Tony Scott’s Agency Oversight Team.

Category management is an acquisitions approach promoted by OMB and Chief Acquisition Officer Anne Rung to make the buying and managing of commoditized goods and services in the federal space more unified and strategic by grouping similar products into categories. In February, OMB announced 11 governmentwide category managers who will run the 10 main categories of government spend under the approach.

FedScoop is awaiting comment from GSA on Zielinski’s hire.

At the same time, GSA is looking tohire a new director of its IT schedule programs because Kay Ely, the former director, has been promoted.

Ely was promoted to be Davie’s deputy — a void Davie herself had been filling in the interim — leaving the need to fill IT schedules post. According to the USAJobs.gov listing, this hiring comes “during a period of tremendous change and incredible possibility.”

As her replacement, the new hire would be responsible for overseeing the entire scope of GSA’s IT schedule program on a nationwide basis — leading the team running the contract vehicles that do about $17 billion in acquisition business each year. GSA’s governmentwide IT schedules cover a wide variety of IT products, services and solutions offered by vendors to federal, state, local and tribal level government organizations.

Davie told FedScoop that Ely will serve in her former role in an acting capacity until her replacement is found.

The starting salary for the position is $123,175.

GSA is also looking to promote one of its employees to a supervisory contract specialist role to serve as the director of the Strategic Solutions Division and specifically handle the pre-award and post-award functions of the IT schedules’ procurement activities.

That position includes the duties of “the issuance of solicitations, awarding of contracts, contract modifications, negotiation of changes, exercise of options for contracts, investigation and resolution of contract delays, contractor performance appraisals, subcontractor surveillance, disposition of claims and the termination of contracts for the convenience of the government or for default by the contractor,” according to the job listing.

The starting salary for the hired supervisory contract specialist is $128,082. According to the listing, applicants must be GSA employees in the Washington, D.C., commuter area.