GSA unveils Millennia Lite draft

The General Services Administration last month released the draft of its midlevel information technology services contract, which will cover everything from IT investment planning to high-end IT and engineering services.

The contract, currently called Millennia Lite, will be a complement to the $25 billion Millennia IT services contract that GSA's Federal Technology Service awarded to 12 vendors in April. Millennia is intended for large-scale projects, while Millennia Lite, which does not yet have an estimated value, is designed for agencies' more standard IT services needs.

"Based on our past experience and what we found that customers were looking for, we tried to design something that would meet the needs of those that had been with us for a while.... But we also want to [meet the needs of] the people that we haven't been able to...in the past," said Greg Burel, chief of federal acquisition services for FTS' Region 4 in Atlanta and the member of the contracting team in charge of the technical requirements, analysis and design.

Region 4 and FTS' Region 7 office in Fort Worth, Texas, are jointly developing Millennia Lite. The two regions plan to become a Solutions Development Center under the new FTS structure, which has created Solutions Development Centers nationwide to develop contracts for all of GSA to use instead of each region developing its own contracts.

Under the draft statement of work, the program will offer services in four functional areas.

Area 1 (IT Planning, Studies and Assessment) is designed to help chief information officers comply with the Clinger-Cohen Act's requirements for IT capital planning and investment. It will include service such as business case analysis, performance measurements and measuring return on investment.

Area 2 (High-end IT services) is intended to provide systems development and support for complex projects, including systems engineering acquisition, implementation and integration; scientific and engineering applications development; and database application development for stand-alone and embedded systems.This represents a new service area for FTS. GSA wanted to release the draft request for proposals to vendors now so that GSA could receive comments as quickly as possible on this section, Burel said. "We are moving a bit away from what our vendors have seen before," he said.

GSA's Federal Supply Service is developing a similar multiple-award schedule for engineering services, but those contracts specifically exclude IT services.

Under Area 3 (Mission Support Services), FTS will offer a variety of operations and maintenance functions, including system development and software maintenance; local-, metropolitan- and wide-area network design, management and support; and orientation and training.

Under Area 4 (Legacy Systems Migration and New Enterprise Systems Development), vendors will modernize legacy systems and provide information and system security, knowledge management, and electronic commerce and electronic data exchange.

According to GSA, more than 60 vendors already have signed up to attend the vendor conference scheduled for July 16, at which vendors will be able to ask questions about the contract. The final RFP is expected to be issued by Aug. 2, and proposals will be due Sept. 2.