GSA to Partner with NIH in Centers of Excellence Initiative

The General Services Administration announced Monday it will partner with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development through its Centers of Excellence initiative.

Through the CoE, NICHD—part of the National Institutes of Health—will adopt an IT modernization strategy that helps it researchers carry out its mission to “understand human development, improve reproductive health, enhance the lives of children and adolescents, and optimize abilities for all.”

The CoE team—a mix of federal experts supported by private sector teams—will focus specifically on cloud adoption, data and analytics, and organizational change management, using best practices from industry and the federal government.

“GSA is proud that the expertise of our Centers of Excellence will support the critical NICHD research,” GSA Administrator Emily Murphy said in a statement. “It is more important than ever to focus on cross-agency collaboration, and I look forward to seeing the fantastic results that will be achieved at NIH through this IT modernization partnership.”

This is the eighth CoE initiative undertaken by GSA in the past three years. The program first launched in 2017, embedding personnel within the Agriculture Department, followed by similar partnerships at Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Personnel Management and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Labor and Defense departments and, most recently, the Government Accountability Office.

CoE partnerships focus on specific areas, including customer experience, contact centers, data analytics, data center modernization, cloud adoption and artificial intelligence.