Skip to main content

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Share your experience with the FAS IT-Playbook by taking this brief survey

November 2020 Welcome

Letter from Sagar Samant to the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS)

Welcome to the FAS-IT Playbook.

Our organization is more than one year into its modernization and transformation journey. With ever-increasing momentum, we remain focused on continuous improvements and achieving our goals to transform critical IT services supporting FAS and the entire GSA organization. Through each milestone, FAS-IT has a renewed commitment to our customers - leveraging our diverse vendor community and strong partnerships to deliver excellent service while engaging high-performing teams.

Throughout our journey, we will continue to take necessary measures to ensure our success. Recently, we streamlined our organization to more effectively align our resources to achieve our transformation, business relationship management, and O&M support services. At the same time, we have accelerated our efforts to deliver shared services, such as cloud-driven modernization and integration offerings. Please see the FAS-IT FY20/21 Review for a look back at FY20 and a look toward FY21.

Foundational to this growth, the FAS-IT Playbook continually matures to serve as your go-to source for relevant guidance, standards, delivery models, and newly announced IT services. This living resource serves our customers as they realize efficiencies through adoption of streamlined guidance, purpose-driven templates, compliance to policies, and a solid understanding of business and IT alignment across FAS.

In my first welcome message on the FAS-IT Playbook site, I introduced my 3 R's: Reframe, Retool, and Reskill. I want to reiterate the fact that the 3 R's are dependent on People, Processes and Tools/Technologies to be fully realized. I encourage you to frequently visit the FAS-IT Playbook to see these elements reflected in areas such as Architecture, Data, DevSecOps, Pipeline Delivery, Security, and Shared Services with support from GSA.

The IT Playbook will support your strategy development and on-ramp to the FCS ecosystem of services and capabilities in both the operational and development spaces. This is the foundation to how FAS-IT provides structure to the systems that we are entrusted with in the form of sound design patterns, standard practices, re-use frameworks, and a tried-and-true set of common capabilities. For instance, if you are developing a transactional system, then we have the Playbook for a "Transactional Macro-pattern" to jumpstart your transformation effort. Collectively, we all will continue to innovate on the same pattern with the confidence that it will be supported in every aspect of the FCS ecosystem. If a particular pattern or practice is not yet defined for the FCS ecosystem and is developed by your team in a way that can deliver value to FAS-IT, then Cloud Enablement will propagate it through a new IT Playbook as part of our contribution model.

We must remain aware that the cloud is a developing and changing target, therefore we must recognize the need to change with it as it matures. It will be very common for you to participate in the Cloud Enablement process to develop "road-map" architectures as part of your cloud strategy that will anticipate changes over time, giving the business and IT a chance to plan for the future. We appreciate the trust that you exhibit by developing and running your systems within the FCS ecosystem. It is my goal to clear the way and make the cloud a great experience for everyone.

Finally, throughout FY21, stay tuned for our quarterly Technology Forums, where we will introduce new FAS-IT Playbook resources, share our success stories, and invite you to participate in focused discussions about business-driven services provided by FAS-IT.

All of our partners are encouraged to leverage the FAS-IT Playbook as each delivers value to our customers! I remind you to bring your experiences and suggestions for innovation and improvement going forward.

Best Regards,

Sagar Samant

Associate Chief Information Officer, FAS-IT