Officials from the Section 508 Accessibility Program say that too few agencies are including the proper requirements in their new IT solicitations, so the office — which ensures that federal technology is accessible to people with disabilities — is working on new tools that will help ensure procurement requests are specific enough.
John Sullivan, program director for the General Services Administration (GSA) office, said this week that his team has been scanning procurement requests appearing on FedBizOpps to see if agencies are providing enough detail about what they need in the IT products they are buying. In many cases, there isn’t any such language at all.
“We have a tool that has been going out and looking at [whether] the requirements are being specified in the contract — not even asking are the right ones specified, but are there any requirements,” he said Tuesday during a webinar hosted by the Americans with Disabilities Act National Network. “Across the federal government, the rate is low, very low. So that is why we are here today, to say that across the board we have got to get these requirements into solicitations, and we need to see what the roadblocks are and the hurdles to doing so.”
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After two pilot efforts , USDS, along with the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, is launching a new certification program for digital services contracting for civilian agencies with an eye to reducing the cost and time it takes to procure digital services in government.
So far this month, the bureau already requested information on three different IT services to support efforts leading up to 2020 and extended an existing deal to secure its largest databases.
Cyberspace is a warfighting domain that is critical to ensuring the military’s capability to operate going forward. The concept of operations for defensive cyber is complex because capabilities are dispersed across the battlespace and must continually adapt to evolving threats. The capabilities must protect data, networks and net-centric operations as well as be interoperable with other IT and software-dependent systems, according to Lt. Col. Scott Helmore, director of the Army Defensive Cyber Operations office (DCO).
Specifically, DoD officials should abandon buying practices that date back as far as the 1970s and institute an iterative, agile approach to acquiring software, a new Defense Science Board report said.
