GSA announces Phase II contract winners for USDA’s Centers of Excellence
The General Services Administration has chosen the contractors that will take on Phase II of the Centers of Excellence initiative at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The awards apply to the same five focus areas as Phase I— IT Infrastructure Optimization, Cloud Adoption, Customer Experience, Data Analytics and Contact Center — with the addition of a contract for support services for a “Business Modernization Office,” the office that oversees all five areas.
GSA has awarded the latter contract to Summit Consulting LLC. Accenture Federal Services LLC won for the OneUSDA Contact Center work; NIC Federal LLC will build out a voice of the customer tool; SAIC will work on both data analytics and visualization as well as data analytics capacity building; and Booz Allen Hamilton will provide digital support services in customer experience.
Finally, GSA has awarded multiple-award blanket purchase agreements for infrastructure optimization and cloud adoption to Booz Allen Hamilton; TechFlow, Inc.; Smartronix; SAIC; TechTrend, Inc.; OM Group, Inc.; Ace Info Solutions, Inc.; Accenture Federal Services LLC; Deloitte Consulting LLP; and T-Rex Solutions LLC.
During Phase II of the CoE effort, USDA and GSA employees, along with these chosen contractor teams, will focus on operationalizing the research done during Phase I.
“USDA is extremely excited about transitioning to Phase II of our Centers of Excellence initiatives with GSA,” agency CIO Gary Washington said in a statement. “Since beginning in March of 2018, USDA has benefited from its engagement with GSA. The CoEs have helped USDA accelerate its modernization efforts across our mission areas during the first six months of our partnership.”
GSA held an industry day on Phase II in June, and RFQs for this round of awards were posted in August.
Ultimately, however, the CoE initiative is about more than USDA. GSA officials and White House tech leaders hope lessons learned at this first “lighthouse” agency will be transferable to additional agencies down the line. Last week GSA got started on this, with the announcement that it will be bringing the CoE initiative (starting with a “discovery sprint”) to the Department of Housing and Urban Development next.
