SEWP to pilot 'CIO Portal' for purchasing data

NASA's Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) is planning a "CIO Portal" to make its burgeoning sales data more available for agency CIOs, according to the contract's program manager.

Data on what an agency buys through the governmentwide acquisition contract is becoming more important as oversight rules in FITARA and category management and federal efficiency efforts like the Office of Management and Budget's centralized computer workstation and software licensing mandate take hold, according to SEWP Program Manager Joanne Woytek.

Woytek told FCW that SEWP has long focused on compiling detailed buying data, and is finding ever more value in those datasets as it sees record buying activity from agencies.

SEWP broke fiscal 2015's $3 billion in new orders with a $3.1 billion total for 2016, according to Woytek. The usual flurry of end-of-year spending this past September, she said, turned into a deluge that saw the program process 550 orders and $175 million in a single day at the end of the month. In the last three days of September, she said, SEWP processed $475 million in orders.

As the dust settled in early October, Woytek said SEWP had processed 29,000 orders in fiscal 2016, 16 percent more than fiscal 2015.

FITARA and the OMB's IT efficiency guidance for computers and software should get some of the credit for these results, according to Woytek. Those initiatives have driven a greater awareness of IT across agency management, who then look for ways to maximize their IT investments overall.

SEWP is hoping to help not only agency IT managers, but other top-level agency managers as well.  Woytek said her program's purchasing data can inform overall agency budgeting and mission decisions in the coming months.

"They realize they need to know some of this and we're trying to help them," she said. SEWP wants to provide a detailed weekly spreadsheet of agency spending through SEWP. It's beginning with a pilot program on its web site in the next couple of months that will be a "CIO Portal" for reporting data.