Letter from the ACIO, Sagar Samant

COMET II Gaining Speed

FAS IT Stakeholders,

COMET, our FAS and FAS IT acquisition strategy that includes an independent Architecture, Engineering, and Advisory (AEA) contract along with our multiple award BPA for IT support, will be expiring a year from now. As we begin planning for what the next iteration of COMET looks like, we must thoughtfully consider where we were four years ago, in terms of both business and IT, compared to where we are today, and do our best to look toward where we want to be in another five to ten years.

FAS Sets New Business Strategy

In early FY19, FAS established the Federal Marketplace (FMP) Business Strategy and kicked off multiple business transformation initiatives. Contract Lifecycle Management, Catalog Management, and MAS Consolidation served as FMP cornerstone initiatives focused on improving the User Experience (UX) of the Acquisition Workforce (AWF), Suppliers, and Buyers. Several other business transformation initiatives - Personal Property Management, GSA Fleet, Transportation Management, Global Supply, and Assisted Acquisition - were also embarking on multi-year systems’ modernizations and transformations. In parallel, FAS IT was creating a robust IT Strategy, aligned to the FAS business strategy, that would enable current and future business needs.

Formulating the Right Technical Strategy

A significant component of our technology strategy was to have an ecosystem where cloud, data, and security could converge to act as an accelerator for systems’ modernization. When we awarded the FAS Cloud Services (FCS) call order, we were just starting our journey to the cloud. FCS was being developed to create that secure, data-centric ecosystem that could better enable composable architectures driven by APIs and microservices. It was designed to serve as the modernization platform for the multiple system transformation initiatives that were getting underway. Since FY20, we have aggressively expanded the FAS Cloud service offerings creating a mature and evergreening ecosystem.

Growing the Ecosystem

Over the past three years, FCS has:

Expanded from 17 to 38 cloud tenants and from 7 to 36 curated data sets accelerating the IT modernization efforts across GSA
Launched five new consumable services including Multi-Container as a Service, an Enterprise Data Architecture for centralized data governance, AWS EMR for advanced analytics, AWS Workspaces to support GSA data scientists, and a new enterprise API Framework service
Grown the ecosystem by 10 new ancillary services to support various tenant needs and a data environment with over 96 terabytes and over 21 million data objects
Through our partnership with GSA IT Security, the FCS has baked in roughly 20 cyber security products and capabilities delivering a mature DevSecOps ecosystem.

Making the Plays

To complement the technology, FAS IT created the FAS IT Playbook. We have been able to create a sense of community and collaboration across our pool of vendors by encouraging them to use and contribute content to the FAS IT Playbook. As a result, our collection of case studies and cloud plays is ever growing and teams are able to learn from each other. We also established the Quarterly Tech Exchange as a forum for us, along with our FAS business partners, to showcase upcoming call orders. We regularly update them about our growing set of FCS offerings and share how we leverage FCS to achieve specific business outcomes.

Putting It All Together

Within six months of the COMET BPA award, we awarded the PPMS Modernization call order, followed shortly thereafter by the Fleet Modernization call order. In early FY21, the FALCON call order was awarded to modernize the Global Supply Supply Chain and NSN functions within the legacy FSS-19. These three large mainframe systems continue making progress with their multi-year transformations that will help lead toward decommissioning the mainframe. The only mainframe functionality remaining without a concrete plan of action is the FAS Acquisition Functions (FSSonline, CMF, etc.), but that plan is starting to take shape as FAS reframes the CALM initiative as the Supplier Portal (including the FAS Acquisition Functions residing on the mainframe).

I believe COMET has been a successful part of being able to deliver on our technology and business strategies. FAS and FAS IT created a streamlined acquisition process that still included robust competition at the call order level across a high quality set of tech savvy vendors. We established a thriving community of vendor partners that grew from 13 to 20 through the addition of eight (8) new small businesses. Twenty (20) call orders have been issued under the COMET BPA for an awarded value of over $700M to support the FAS digital transformation.

Forward Thinking, Forward Planning

Looking into the future, FAS remains dedicated to improving the overall experience that Buyers and Suppliers have when working with FAS, as well as providing the FAS AWF with the right systems to make their job more efficient so they can focus on higher value activities. FAS is also committed to greatly improving their data quality and standards to facilitate better data-driven decisions across government acquisitions. Lastly, the transformation of the mainframe systems will continue to be a focus in order to achieve the outcome of decommissioning the mainframe. FAS IT shares in all of these goals as FAS’s implementation partner, and in our role we are committed to making sure our technology strategy continues to evolve alongside FAS’s business needs.

As we begin developing our acquisition strategy for COMET II we will look to build on the successes of COMET and use feedback from FAS stakeholders and vendor partners to improve upon the approach to ultimately design a solution that will provide highly capable vendors to support us in the delivery of the most modern, intuitive IT solutions built in FCS.

- Sagar