The General Services Administration had a simple message for its first Technology Industry Day: We’re ready to do business.
Through a series of panel discussions and demonstrations at the Sept. 8 event, the agency continued to convey a desire to collaborate with the private sector, extending an olive branch of cooperation to industry that sounded much like the promise of a good second date.
“What we do believe, and what I firmly believe, is that from an industry perspective that there will be greater opportunity because we are going to be a better buyer and we’re going to be a better partner,” said GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth.
Agency officials repeatedly pointed to the innovations afoot within GSA to make it faster and technologically innovative, such as more flexible contracts, agile development, advances in 18F and the emergence of its new Technology Transformation Service.
“I think with the onset of ever-emerging technologies, with the onset of the American public using technology in a different way to manage their lives, that we are going to actually find new solutions for bringing government assistance, governmental programs that people relied on to those individuals in ways they actually work and live day-to-day,” Roth said.
“Right now, often the interface with government looks very different than anything else in their lives. I think we can change that. We have the expertise to change that industry-wide, government-wide; we have the technology to change that and we, at GSA, want to be an integral part of making that change.”
The agency sits at the crossroads of a major shift of the federal government toward more agile information technology and stronger cybersecurity systems, which requires GSA to be more nimble in both its approaches to acquisition and its role as a service provider to the executive branch.
Part of those efforts has been the TTS, which rolled out earlier this year as a multipurpose unit that encompasses the quick innovation of 18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows with the buying power of the federal government for technology solutions.
And the Technology Industry Day served as a way to showcase those efforts to the private sector.
David Shive, GSA’s chief technology officer and acting TTS commissioner, said acquisition instruments like agile blanket purchase agreements are one way the agency is trying to make buying easier for industry and federal agencies to find solutions.
“Building a 400-page statement of work that you guys respond to in the best way that you can isn’t the most efficient way to buy in the federal government,” he said. “Instead, we simplify our statement of work, we present a problem and ask you, our industry experts, on the best way to solution that problem.”
Shive said the industry partners then go out to build a solution based on GSA’s request, which the agency then determines whether it will use.
“You’ve told us that this is the way you feel very comfortable delivering,” he said. “It’s how you deliver to your commercial customers in a great number of places. It also speeds up not only the delivery of that thing to the agency that needs it, but provides a very real tangible jumping point into iterating from there and building that thing to be better.”
