Name: Luis Barés
Title: Enterprise Collaboration Services Lead
Agency/Company: NASA
Putting purchasing power into practice. All 70,000 NASA employees are IT users, but when it comes to the procurement of IT and collaboration tools, each center has traditionally made purchases separately, resulting in duplication and inefficient purchasing. Barés set out to define requirements for NASA’s collaboration tools and rejected traditional procurement methodology in order to reduce duplication and get the right tools at an affordable price. That coordination and combined purchasing power facilitated the agency’s move to a commercial cloud provider. Impressed by Barés’ success, the General Services Administration tapped him to lead an interagency IT optimization team.