The General Services Administration announced a series of new agreements with vendors Tuesday aimed at providing the Centers of Excellence IT modernization initiative with a faster, more flexible pool of contractors.
Called the Centers of Excellence Discovery Blanket Purchase Agreement, GSA can now call on an additional 22 vendors across seven IT modernization focus areas.
The addition represents another tweak to the original CoE effort, which began as a two-phase initiative tackling IT modernization at the departments of Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development in late 2017. Last month, GSA announced the Office of Personnel Management would be the third agency to undergo CoE.
Initially, the CoEs focused on five focus areas—cloud adoption, contact centers, customer experience, data analytics and IT infrastructure optimization. Two additional areas, information security and change management, have since been added, and vendors under the new BPA address those new focus areas. Small businesses comprise approximately one-third of the agreements, a change based in part on engagement and feedback from industry.
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“So far, we’ve realized around $26 million in cost avoidance and savings and now we’re moving on to phase 2, which is the actual implementation of the plan we developed over the past six months,” said Agriculture Department Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky, speaking last week at the Imagine Nation conference in Philadelphia.
