Mary Mitchell, deputy assistant administrator in GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, said yesterday that the RFP for the Standard Transactions and Data will ask a vendor to bring all the Web sites and information together in one place for industry and agency contracting officers. “This will help the workflow processes,” Mitchell said at a conference sponsored by the Coalition for Government Procurement in Arlington, Va. “This will make the entire system more logical and let users go through it step by step.”
Mitchell said GSA will release the RFP after the Chief Acquisition Officer’s Council finishes reviewing it.
GSA also is awaiting comments from a request for information addressing how to proceed with a federal online purchasing capability for IAE.
Industry input is due June 25 on how they would provide a unified federal buying environment, including back-office systems, purchasing and finance tools, and how to acquire goods and services online.
Additionally, GSA’s Federal Supply Service is making some changes to its organization—starting first with its IT Center. Tina Burnette, FSS deputy assistant commissioner, said at the conference that FSS will set up a new pricing and technology division to improve the communication and the sharing of data between IT Center divisions.
The IT Center also has grown so big that Burnette said FSS is naming branch chiefs for each division to improve the overall management.
FSS also will absorb the Access Certificates for Electronic Services governmentwide acquisition contract in the next few months, Burnette said.
“We have proposed to develop a special item number for ACES to ensure we have a list of certified industry partners,” she said. “We also envision the state and local governments would have a lot of interest in using the contract and thanks to cooperative purchasing they would be able to.”
This is the first of what potentially could be many GWACs converted to FSS, said Roger Waldron, director of FSS’s Acquisition Management Center.
Quelle: Government Compiuter News, 09.06.2004
