ASSIST Cloud Journey

Introduction: AAS Business

Learn about the Office of Assisted Acquisition Services (AAS) and their role in managing Interagency Assisted Acquisitions for FAS.

FAS's Office of Assisted Acquisition Services (AAS) is a premiere client mission-focused value stream that provides integrated support for Interagency Agreements (IAs), Funds Management, Acquisition Management, and Project Management for agencies across the federal government.

FAS Assisted Acquisitions have had significant year-over-year growth at the rate of 151% in the past 5 years with phenomenal Net Promoter Scores and Customer Loyalty Scores. Client agencies continue to bring more of their critical, complex, and mission-support requirements to AAS, and the demand for FAS's assisted acquisitions continues to grow strong, projected to double in the next 5 years.

Assisted Services Shared Information SysTem (ASSIST) is the FAS solution for end-to-end custom-built capabilities for all things needed to manage Interagency Assisted Acquisitions. ASSIST manages over 95% of all FAS obligations and $16.5B worth of interagency assisted-acquisition obligations across 10,500 contract actions in FY22 alone.

Problem Statement: AAS Challenge

Problem Statement: AAS Challenge Explore the ways in which AAS has sought to address key business challenges through this modernization, including meeting unprecedented demand and delivering additional features and capabilities.

AAS focuses on opportunities for innovation, superior automation, reliability, performance, and time to market, which allows FAS business partners to focus on their business, and maximize efficiency; doing right by the taxpayer. For AAS, the rate of output growth (in $-obligated) significantly exceeds the rate of input growth (in FTE). Simply put, demand outpaced the ability of the ASSIST system to support that demand. To address this core challenge and cater to the unprecedented assisted acquisitions demand, AAS desired to optimize ASSIST at all layers to improve business outcomes and deliver additional features and capabilities with on-demand and frequent releases.

Solution Approach: ASSIST Optimization

An overview of the technical approach to the ASSIST modernization and the phases in which the releases occurred.

Over the last several years, ASSIST has iteratively evolved from a fragmented set of applications into a unified Assisted Acquisitions System built using a modern technology stack.

In May 2021, ASSIST achieved a monumental milestone with its Convergence release consolidating business processes, financial reconciliation, and providing enhanced user experience. Feedback from business partners was universally positive and their input continues to prioritize the backlog.

This Convergence release was a significant achievement providing a unified pre-award through closeout workflow management and an access controlled view for all stakeholders. The converged ASSIST application was hosted in a datacenter and provided very limited access to modern technologies. This posed a severe constraint in advancing towards the optimization goals stated above.

ASSIST is essentially a large, finance-oriented application consisting of complex business workflows and adheres to strict audit requirements. The implementation of optimization goals required use of modern services and products in a scalable, adaptable and flexible ecosystem. For ASSIST, the FCS MCaaS ecosystem was the automatic choice as it provided a secure, reliable infrastructure with pre-packaged capabilities and an effective on-boarding journey model.

The merits of being hosted on 'the cloud' were well understood by AAS and other stakeholders...but as a business line, they were wary of the transition risks of getting there. GSA IT understood these concerns and collaborated with AAS, FCS, and GSA Security to manage the risks, the schedule, and prioritize the 'assisted-acquisition' mission.

The ASSIST team leveraged FAS-IT Playbook standardized design patterns and plays to build out a scalable cloud architecture and an exhaustive migration strategy. The close coordination amongst all stakeholders resulted in a seamless migration from the datacenter to the MCaaS cloud ecosystem in roughly eight months.

This migration was a significant task given there are $80 billion in obligations migrated across awards (and associated modifications, invoices, accruals, credits, etc.) and 500,000 funding packages (and associated lines of accounting, amendments, bills, accruals, refunds, etc.).

The "promise of cloud" and the re-platformed ASSIST system was put to immediate test and rigor of the Financial Year End (FYE) activities. ASSIST on the cloud performed optimally and efficiently with 10,000+ awards and mods amounting to over $16B processed and obligated for FY22.

Value Add: Benefits Realized

The outcomes of the ASSIST modernization for the business line and FAS-IT, including higher productivity from the acquisition workforce and improved infrastructure management.

The successful migration to the FCS cloud resulted in the business partners realizing benefits in multiple areas including higher productivity from the acquisition workforce, based on overall improved system performance, better ease-of-use, more detailed resource reporting, and operational cost efficiencies.

Stability of the cloud ecosystem enabled ASSIST to automatically scale during the FYE activities and seamlessly support critical user actions and transactions. This resulted in increased user confidence and a validation of the strong technical foundation to achieve the ASSIST optimization goals.

Furthermore, the ASSIST program was able to decommission on-prem servers and adapt on-demand environments provisioning. This enabled the DevOps team with process efficiencies to focus solely on ASSIST release management and have the cloud ecosystem take care of the infrastructure management.

Migration to the cloud provides an overall increase in professionalism of the ASSIST group of applications and delivers a forward thrust towards supporting the huge demand of assisted acquisitions.

Next Steps: Future Potential

A summary of how ASSIST will continue to modernize and remain future-proof through adopting new and innovative technologies.

ASSIST implements core and complex acquisition functions including Task Order Management, IA and Funds Management, and Business Management. With the success of FYE activities, the AAS is now focused on faster time to market to deliver additional capabilities and optimization goals including G-Invoicing, FAS ID, centralized User Registration, modern Data Analytics, and the use of AI/ML technologies.

These capabilities - requested by our business partners - ensure their acquisitions become increasingly easier to manage by reducing the administrative load while increasing productivity.

One of the key technical priorities for ASSIST include architecture refactoring by leveraging microservices architecture to decouple acquisition functions and implementing API first strategy to expose critical ASSIST functions as Consumable Services.

AAS aspires to be federal agencies' first choice for their assisted acquisition requirements. As ASSIST moves towards accomplishing the optimization goals, AAS envisions an ecosystem of FAS level Shared Services and ASSIST Consumable APIs, providing high quality acquisition, project management, and financial management functions for agencies across the federal government. The ASSIST program is very well positioned to support this.