GSA to award Alliant contracts by December

The General Services Administration announced on Wednesday that it plans to award its long-delayed $50 billion information technology services contract no later than December.

Comment on this article in The Forum.John Johnson, assistant commissioner for GSA's Integrated Technology Service, for the first time detailed how the agency will proceed with the Alliant contract after a judge ruled in March that GSA had followed an "arbitrary and capricious" process when awarding the contract to 29 companies in July 2007. Eight companies had argued GSA violated the law by using a third-party firm, Calyptus, to gather and evaluate past performance data, which they claimed was flawed. Francis Allegra, a judge for the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, ordered GSA to reevaluate all 62 proposals and to focus more on pricing when determining awards.

Johnson, speaking at a membership meeting of the Industry Advisory Council in Falls Church, Va., outlined the steps GSA would take to comply with the court's decision to reevaluate the 10-year IT services contract. "We'd love to have Alliant out there right now, but this is the circumstance we're in, and we're going to handle it with professionalism without compromising our principles," Johnson said.

Johnson added that Allegra was an "amateur" statistician, which worked against GSA during the lawsuit, but the agency wanted to comply with the judge's ruling.

Allegra ruled GSA must improve four areas in its evaluation process, including a more thorough evaluation of the bidders' past performance data to determine which companies had experience relevant to the Alliant contract, and take more time to assess how reasonable the companies' prices are. GSA also must document more clearly its trade-off analysis so anyone reading it can determine why the agency chose the companies it did.

Johnson also said GSA will spend more time ranking and reevaluating the basic contract plans to obtain consensus on the rankings for every proposal. He said, unlike the first evaluation of bids, GSA personnel, not an outside contractor, will evaluate all proposals.

GSA asked bidders to extend their proposals for the reevaluation period, meaning bidders could not change their pricing for the new awards, said Mary Powers-King, director of government wide acquisition contracts and IT schedules programs at the Integrated Technology Service. All companies agreed to extend the deadlines for their proposals.

Johnson said GSA will issue awards "no later than December. We want to have 100 percent certainty that there are no alleged flaws, and I use that word purposely."

He said GSA had started work on re-awarding the contract several weeks ago, but wanted to be sure of its course before announcing a timeline.

Alliant Small Business proposals also would be reevaluated at the same time to address similar concerns about past performance data and that the Small Business re-evaluation would happen "very soon," he said.

"Alliant is our flagship program," Johnson said in response to a question about the delayed time frame affecting the amount of sales on the contract. "I have high confidence in it serving as a highly viable vehicle for our customers' needs."

Johnson said GSA would extend the ANSWER IT contract for six months, allowing customers to place five-year task orders until June 30, 2009. GSA also plans to extend the Millennia IT contract to handle what would have been contracts awarded off the Alliant contract until GSA awards Alliant.