GSA Wants to Bring Agile Development to the Federal Acquisition Service
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The CAMEO recompete aims to move more to the cloud.
The General Services Administration is looking for vendors to accelerate its acquisition office’s application development process and move more services to the cloud.
In a request for information published Wednesday, the agency outlined its vision for the CIO Modernization and Enterprise Transformation initiative, or COMET, a sweeping effort to modernize IT at the Federal Acquisition Service.
The solicitation is a recompete of the agency’s CAMEO contract, which FAS used to meet its primary IT needs.
Under COMET, the administration will award a single task order to stand up IT architecture and programmatic services, and also issue a blanket purchase agreement for bringing on multiple vendors to build and maintain applications for FAS. Agile development strategy and cloud technology will be central to both facets of the effort, according to the solicitation.
“Our goal is not lift and shift,” officials wrote. “Ultimately, the journey to cloud must come with better performance and greater business value.”
They stressed the need for vendors to provide a “true digital transformation” instead of repackaging existing software on a new platform. Selected developers will be expected to build cloud-based, open-source tools and reduce the service’s reliance on “monolithic” applications, officials said.
Through the blanket purchase agreement, the CIO Office of Acquisition IT Services aims to create a “working relationship” with the tech industry to speed up its application development process, officials said in a draft performance work statement. Selected vendors would use agile techniques to support IT management and governance, business process analysis, user-centered design, data analytics and a slew of other tech processes.
Beyond general modernization, vendors would also help FAS define and roll out a data governance framework and create one-stop shop where the service can view all its data assets, according to the solicitation.
Responses to the RFI are due Dec. 10.