GSA deal will track acquisition worker skills

ACMIS solicitation

The General Services Administration plans to award a $1.3 million contract Sept. 17 for a new system that will track the education and training levels of the civilian acquisition workforce. The Acquisition Career Management Information System (ACMIS), modeled on a system of the same name at the Defense Department, is a joint project of the Federal Acquisition Institute and the Procurement Executives Council. When finished in July 2002, it will provide, through secure Web access to a single database, the first governmentwide view of which skills are in place throughout the acquisition workforce.

GSA officials could not be reached for comment, but the bidding documents provide examples of areas where agency analysts and managers must make decisions based on their acquisition workforce's skills. "However, there is no systematic collection of this data. Typically, this results in a cumbersome manual process that may be neither timely nor complete," according to the solicitation.

Initially, the system will be filled using information from the Office of Personnel Management's Central Personnel Data File and agency-specific databases. Members of the acquisition workforce and their supervisors will then be able to update their entries with the education, training, authorization and certification data that is often not included in standard personnel files.

Acquisition personnel have a set of education requirements, and that information will be part of the standard information for the system. But they are also encouraged to find supplemental training, such as a series of joint Federal Acquisition Institute and Defense Ac.quisition University lunchtime seminars.

The system will be able to generate Web-based or downloadable standard and ad hoc reports for the different levels of authorized users; accept or pull electronic records from agency data systems; and automatically get information from the FAI Knowledge Center when employees complete additional courses.

The system was to be completed by Sept. 30. However, "ACMIS has had some developmental problems principally associated with new requirements, like security plans, not identified at the time the project began, and we are working to bring ACMIS to fruition," David Drabkin, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Acquisition Policy in GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy, told Congress in May.

For the contract, spread over five years, GSA is using the Commerce Information Technology Solutions program, a governmentwide acquisition contract set up by the Commerce Department specifically for small businesses.