NITAAC's Coen headed to GSA

The director of one of the biggest federal government-wide acquisition contracts will start a new job at the General Services Administration at the end of the summer.

Rob Coen, the director of the National Institutes of Health's IT Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), will join GSA's Federal Systems Integration and Management Center (FedSIM) at the end of August, a GSA spokeswoman confirmed to FCW.

Coen's move, first reported by Federal News Radio, follows over seven years of service at NITAAC. Prior to going to NITAAC in 2009, Coen had been deputy director at the Small Business Administration for 14 years.

NITAAC recorded near-record annual orders in 2015, just under $5 billion, under Coen's direction. It also rolled out a new vehicle just over a year ago, the Chief Information Officer-Commodity Solutions (CIO-CS) contracting vehicle, which replaced ECS III, one of the three GWACs NITAAC manages.

Coen also worked with his peers at NASA and GSA GWACs last year to develop common laptop and desktop baseline configurations for the Office of Management and Budget's Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative. That effort sought to end uncoordinated, localized laptop and desktop acquisition practices that were blunting the buying power of the federal government.

Coen told FCW on Aug. 3 that NITAAC has gone through a major reinvention over the past seven years.  During that time, he said, both awareness and use of NITAAC's three big GWAC contracts expanded significantly.  And he voiced particular satisfaction with the customer-focused culture that NITAAC developed during his tenure.

Coen said his first day at FedSIM will be Aug. 22.