OASIS RFPs imminent

The General Services Administration is preparing to release two final requests for proposal for its anticipated One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS) contracts.

GSA's leaders have said the OASIS government-wide, multi-billion dollar contract vehicles would be issued in July. The contracts – one for full-and-open competition and another exclusively for small businesses – are aimed at helping agencies get professional services, such as engineering, IT and management consultant services for which GSA has already done the basic contract shopping and approvals legwork.

Jim Ghiloni, program executive officer at GSA's Federal Acquisition Service, promised in a July 26 post on the agency's OASIS community blog that his next post would be after the final RFPs are issued. He didn't say exactly when that would happen however. Agency officials have said July 31 or August 1 would be the most likely dates.

Ghiloni said the agency will "go silent for quite some time" after the RFPs come out, since the government can't talk about live contracts during the acquisition process. "At that point, the formal acquisition process kicks in and all dialog between GSA and Industry will be conducted in accordance with the rules laid out in the RFPs," he said. The agency will still monitor its email and comments on the blog, but the immediate back-and-forth dialog on the OASIS blog site, he said, "will have to go into hibernation." However once the contracts are up and running, he said he would resume blogging on the contract.

Ghiloni said his agency's interactivity with industry during development of the RFPS was "unprecedented" and that everything posted on the blog, including public statements, documents, answers to questions and speeches given in the community have been part of a market research operation.

"I can say without hesitation that it has been invaluable and has resulted in a far superior product. That being said, however, the final RFPs are just that... final. We've tossed around a lot of ideas here and elsewhere. The only thing that counts at the end of the day is what is in those final RFPs."