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HHS is transforming acquisition with automation

The Health and Human Services Department is looking to improve its acquisition processes and redundancies in departmentwide contracting by putting emerging technologies behind its data and the $24 billion it spends in goods and services each year.

That’s according to Lori Ruderman, Buy Smarter initiative lead and senior adviser at the HHS Program Support Center. Buy Smarter is how HHS is reimagining and transforming purchasing by adopting tech like artificial intelligence and analyzing department requirements on spend data to achieve lower prices and consolidate contract vehicles and requirements with HHS and, eventually, across the government.

“Buy Smarter is an innovative opportunity for HHS to … look at our category management, break down some stovepipes and consolidate our requirements across the board,” Ruderman said at the Jan. 29 AFCEA Health IT Summit in Bethesda, Maryland. Because within HHS, all its different operational and staff divisions buy many of the same items on separate contracts, duplicating efforts.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.governmentciomedia.com/hhs-transforming-acquisition-automation

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FBI drops full and open competition for $5 billion IT recompete

The competitive pool for the FBI’s $5 billion IT commodity and services contract has been shrinking throughout the year and recently got even smaller.

Rather than hold a full and open competition for spots on the Information Technology Supplies and Support Services contract, also known as ITSSS or IT Triple-S, the bureau announced that spots will be awarded to vendors that already hold contracts on the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70.

Bureau contracting officials have been scaling back the contract as they’ve gathered market research through requests for information and industry days. After initial rumors the contract would be split into multiple parts for services like cloud computing and cybersecurity, the bureau announced in April that ITSSS would remain a single contract made up of multiple tracks.

The track structure remains in the latest revision, however, the blanket purchase agreement will now only include vendors with pre-vetted tools and services being offered on Schedule 70, further narrowing the competitive pool.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/10/fbi-drops-full-and-open-competition-5-billion-it-recompete/152031/

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Number of new U.S. government vendors drops to 10-year low

An 8 percent bounce in fiscal 2016 contract spending couldn’t keep the number of first-time federal vendors from falling to a 10-year low.

Despite a $34 billion, year-over-year spending jump to $475 billion in fiscal 2016, agencies signed contracts with only 15,925 first-time sellers in 2016, according to Bloomberg data. This was just 13 percent of the government’s 124,000-vendor pool, and the second-lowest new vendor share in at least a decade.

The dramatic decline in new vendors since fiscal 2007 raises concerns about the health of the federal government’s industrial base and its ability to fulfill critical national security, scientific, health and environmental missions that depend on a steady flow of private-sector innovation and competitiveness.

Keep reading this article at: https://about.bgov.com/blog/number-new-u-s-government-vendors-drops-10-year-low/

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