GSA to monitor response to award management system

Dan Tangherlini, acting administrator of the General Services Administration, said Oct. 25 he will be watching in the coming months to see how other agencies react to his agency’s attempts to right a faulty acquisition management system. Those reactions will be his metric for success.

“The way I’m going to look at it is to see how our customers feel about it, and see how many complaints we’re getting from them and how easy it is to get their issues resolved,” Tangherlini said after a closed discussion session at the Coalition for Government Procurement’s Fall Conference.

Tangherlini recently moved responsibility for the System for Award Management (SAM) from GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy to Mary Davie, acting Federal Acquisition Service commissioner, and Casey Coleman, GSA’s CIO.

Tangherlini said Davie and Coleman’s first assignment in fixing SAM: set up metrics for success.

SAM is designed to integrate three acquisition data systems that store and make available information about contractors. The systems include the Central Contractor Registration, the Online Representations and Certifications Application, and the Excluded Parties List System. SAM is a part of the Integrated Acquisition Environment.

SAM went online in July and was taken off-line days later due to performance problems. GSA and IBM, the prime contractor in the project, have been working to fix the problems.