Before the policy, agencies and their contracting officials were limited to only data from their respective agencies, hampering data-driven decisions, according to a White House fact sheet. But the finalized circular (A-137) establishes that acquisition data is an asset to be used across the government and instructs agencies to be prepared to collect and share that information. 

The policy “marks a paradigm shift in the government’s acquisition data management practices,” the fact sheet said.  

Jason Miller, the deputy director for management in the Office of Management and Budget that houses OFPP, told reporters at a Tuesday roundtable the circular makes acquisition information a “government asset” rather than an agency asset.

“It’s just a huge step in us unlocking the business intelligence that allows those 40,000 contracting officials to operate smarter, better — both on delivering on mission and addressing costs and requirements in ways that result in better outcomes,” Miller said.

Christine Harada, senior adviser who leads the OFPP team in the absence of a Senate-confirmed director, told reporters the guidance changed slightly since a draft version was released for public comment last year. The final version incorporates other work the office has done on data and data-related strategies.

Harada also noted that the administration has created a tool called the Procurement Co-Pilot that “demonstrates the value and the power of having such an enterprise-wide access, and we’ve been rolling that out with our acquisition workforce.”

Better contracting

The data circular is one of the four elements of the Biden administration’s Better Contracting Initiative to improve efficiency and save money on federal spending. The others focus on enterprise-wide software license negotiation, improving contract requirements, and getting more value from sole source and high-risk contracts.

Those other elements of that initiative are also moving forward. On improving negotiation for enterprise-wide software, Miller said the administration has already taken the first step by bringing together agencies that are big buyers of those products to navigate where they have common requirements. He said he’s hopeful that the administration will have more to share on that progress “very soon.” 

Under that prong of the Better Contracting Initiative, the General Services Administration will “lead a government-wide IT software license agreement with a large software provider.”

Harada said in the workshop process, all 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies agreed on over 80% of the requirements, and the remaining ones can be tailored agency-by-agency. “There’s been a lot of really good buy-in from the agencies on this,” Harada said.

The Tuesday announcement came as OFPP marked half a century as an office. Harada and Miller remarked on the accomplishments of the office since then.

“When we were first established, the acquisition workforce had no training — no training whatsoever,” Harada said, noting they’ve since made progress on “investing in the acquisition workforce.” 

She also highlighted the establishment of things like the Chief Acquisition Officers Council and the Interagency Suspension and Debarment Committee, adding that the theme of the past 50 years has been the government getting “more organized and buying as one.”

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All civilian agencies will adopt the National Contract Management Association’s (NCMA) Contract Management Standard (CMS), which means the new Federal Acquisition Certification in Contracting (FAC-C) professional program will now match that of the Defense Department.

The CMS accreditation sets out clear definitions for every phase of a contract lifecycle, and is intended to improve the mobility of contracts between the Pentagon and civilian agencies.

“NCMA celebrates the increase in talent mobility in government that will come through adoption of our CMS,” said NCMA Chief Executive Officer Kraig Conrad in a statement. “Our members invested considerable resources to achieve American National Standard Institute approval of our standard and accreditation of our certifications. We are proud that the federal government recognizes their power.”

The NCMA, which was founded in 1959, is the largest association in the contract management field within the U.S. with more than 18,000 members.

Lesley Field, deputy administrator for federal procurement policy said the FAC-C (Professional) is designed to draw  more people into the federal contracting workforce from a variety of sources: universities, the industry, internal candidates, and state and local governments.

Contracting training is “critical to the success of important public priorities, such as advancing equity, promoting sustainability, increasing domestic sourcing, and ensuring our supply chains and cyber assets are secure,” Field said in a January 19 memo to chief acquisition officers and senior procurement executives in the government.

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If confirmed by the Senate, the former Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official would have led the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) within the Office of Management and Budget.

The OFPP sets overall policy direction for governmentwide procurement procedures and is focused on promoting efficiency and effectiveness. Previously, it was led by Michael Wooten, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump and confirmed to the role in 2019.

No further details about the nomination withdrawal were immediately available.

Gebre is currently senior managing director and management consulting lead at Accenture. While at HUD during the Obama administration, his work focused on access to credit for low-income families, the Federal Housing Administration’s financial health, and revamping public housing. He has previously also worked at consulting firms McKinsey & Co. and Oliver Wyman.

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If confirmed by the Senate, he will rejoin government from Accenture, where he is a senior managing director and head of management consulting for Accenture Federal Services.

The OFPP sets overall policy direction for governmentwide procurement procedures and is focused on promoting efficiency and effectiveness. Previously, it was led by Michael Wooten, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump and confirmed to the role in 2019.

Gebre has previously also worked at consulting firms Mckinsey & Co. and Oliver Wyman. He served in the Obama administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where his work focused on access to credit for low-income families, FHA’s financial health, and revamping public housing.

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The office supplies agencies with governmentwide procurement data, contracting experts and contracts to help them make informed technology purchases — especially where emerging technologies are concerned, said Michael Wooten.

Basic category management leverages existing contracts for categories of similar products and services, in this case, IT. The ITVMO builds on that structure.

“People are now going to need to understand how to purchase artificial intelligence, and the specific things I’m talking about are things like natural language processing and machine learning,” Wooten said during the second day of FedTalks presented by FedScoop. “How do we do that stuff? What might we need to change? Who has our expertise?”

The Office of Management and Budget‘s Office of Federal Procurement Policy created the ITVMO in collaboration with the General Services Administration, NASA and the National Institutes of Health.

Meanwhile, agencies like the Office of Personnel Management are trying to mimic what the ITVMO is doing across government at the micro-level, said Clare Martorana, chief information officer at OPM, during the same discussion.

OPM remains in the early stages of its IT modernization, but it has an “extraordinarily rich dataset” on federal employees it’s working to clean before its procurement team can make strategic AI investments, Martorana said.

“There are numerous places where AI and machine learning and natural language processing are really effectively being implemented in government,” she said. “And there are other places where we’re a little bit further behind.”

OPM has scoped several robotic process automation projects it’s hoping to launch, and more generally RPA use is on the rise across agencies. But many RPA use cases are duplicative, Wooten said.

RPA is often used to support contract closeout functions, but having five agencies create different automation tools for that purpose is wasted effort. Wooten wants different agencies using RPA for different repeatable processes and then sharing those tools with others that need them.

“Now I’m finding myself in the position of needing to orchestrate the use,” Wooten said.

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DHS‘s Procurement Innovation Lab recruited 10 agencies to contribute data and funds to further evaluate seven AI solutions improving contracting officials’ ability to find Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) data quickly.

The $50,000 phase 2 awards will allow a subset of the nine original companies that made AI prototypes to refine their solutions in areas like security accreditation for software-as-a-service (SaaS).

“This is not about using artificial intelligence to replace human intelligence but recognizing the challenge that some can face if it takes a long time to go into the system and figure out what records are relevant,” said Matthew Blum, associate administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, during an ACT-IAC event Tuesday. “So if we can use AI to shorten that timeframe and get this information much more rapidly, it saves the workforce a tremendous amount of time, but you still get all the value.”

Part of phase 2 will involve allowing agencies to weight past performance criteria depending on their needs in areas, like cost control or business relations, before the AI gathers such information.

One of the companies chosen to advance is CORMAC, which created a federally accredited SaaS solution called the CORMAC Envisioning and Prediction Enhancing System (CREPES). The tool uses machine learning and natural language processing to rapidly determine how relevant past projects were to current requirements when pulling information.

CORMAC has the opportunity to turn CREPES into a governmentwide solution, with phase three of DHS’s project consisting of a full pilot culminating in a multiple-award, governmentwide acquisition contract. DHS envisions a commercial, multi-vendor marketplace where the AI services are sold.

Because the AI solutions are only as good as the agency data provided, some have suggested requiring contractors to provide better information.

“Industry is very excited to hear about the AI pilots and their ability to pull relevant CPARS information more quickly from the existing data,” said Mike Smith, executive vice president of GovConRx. “But there’s a thought that if agencies would utilize the assistance of the contractor to provide relevant data, then it would be easier to put relevant data into the system — garbage in, garbage out.”

Contracting officials might not initially accept the idea of contractor past performance information coming to them via an AI filter, so training to familiarize them with the tools may be needed, said Melissa Starinsky, director of the Office of Acquisition & Grants Management within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“I think that’s a change we’ll have to get the workforce ready for,” Starinsky said.

OFPP Administrator Michael Wooten included past performance in the President’s Management Agenda Cross-Agency Priority Goal of frictionless acquisition.

The administration wants to use technology and data more effectively in acquisition, and CPARS is now a key part of that, Blum said.

“We want to make sure that our system is as responsive as possible,” Blum said.

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An OMB enterprise risk officer could spearhead efforts to quantify threats to data, information technology and intellectual property, according to the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council.

In its first report on critical issues ahead of the 2020 presidential election, ACT-IAC recommends the enterprise risk officer address threats nationwide, not just within federal agencies. In the private sector, the top risk-management official is sometimes called a chief risk officer or CRO.

“This strategy will provide risk management for a whole-of-nation perspective, looking at both physical and cyber risks to our government and critical infrastructure industries,” reads the report. “It will provide a mechanism for taking action to mitigate risks arising from overlap and duplication and uncoordinated silos, which create vulnerabilities and gaps, especially in the supply chain.”

Government has been too reliant on overseas suppliers for personal protection equipment (PPE) in responding to the pandemic, but an enterprise risk officer could coordinate the supply chain by inventorying supplies and medical devices, according to the report.

Outcome offices, acceleration strategy

Aside from making IT infrastructure more risk tolerant, ACT-IAC made three recommendations for making government more agile.

The report suggests that government make “outcome measure” data available by having agency deputy secretaries appoint temporary leaders to head up outcome offices that disband once their objectives are met. Outcome leaders would align resources, build partnerships, develop plans and reporting, and work together across agencies.

The government can make itself more agile by having the President’s Management Council create and oversee an acceleration strategy, according to ACT-IAC.

Such a strategy would outline the roles of chief information officers, chief technology officers, chief information security officers, chief experience officers, and business leaders. The strategy would also serve as an operational framework for U.S. Digital Service, the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services, agency innovation centers, the Office of Personnel Management Lab, and Office of Federal Procurement Policy, according to the report.

ACT-IAC recommends the government establish a new workforce and leadership model that focuses on attracting and retaining employees capable of identifying emerging technologies, acquiring them faster and using them to drive agency change.

The four recommendations were not only for unelected officials but Congress and advisors. OMB did not respond to a request for comment on whether legislation would be needed before it could act on ACT-IAC’s recommendations.

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Dale Cabaniss, who was a senior Republican aide on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over OPM when the breach happened, said she saw first-hand how important it is to work closely with officials who understand technology and can make independent assessments of it. Her confirmation process comes as the Trump administration is moving toward merging OPM with the General Services Administration — an idea that has been floated for years by Republican and Democratic officials in the interest in putting more administrative processes under one roof.

“I think there would just have to be a real partnership between me and the CIO, who I’ve met with, as well as the [Office of the Inspector General], and their folks who work on IT,” she told members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at a confirmation hearing. OPM’s CIO, Clare Martorana, and her deputy, David Nesting, were installed in February and both are veterans of the U.S. Digital Service.

The OIG in particular plays “a really, really important role to making sure that any kind of risk assessment is done, and that no changes are made until people are confident there’s not going to be a problem,” Cabaniss said. “Because the last thing that we need to do is make things more difficult for federal employees.”

Cabaniss noted that her own information was compromised in the 2015 breach, which she monitored closely as Republican staff director at the Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. She was upbeat about OPM’s work on improving its technology and cybersecurity.

“I am more positive about OPM’s IT improvement than I’ve been in the past,” Cabaniss said.

She said she met briefly with Martorana and Nesting after being nominated by President Trump.

“They came from [USDS], they’re part of the original group who came in during the Obama administration,” she said. “They’re just incredible technical people who really are here just because they want to serve.”

Cabaniss’ nomination appears to face few obstacles, as Democrats on the committee mostly asked her to offer assurances that once confirmed, she will be responsive to any of their requests for information related to oversight.

‘Bottom up’ process at USAJobs

Committee member Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., asked Cabaniss about the federal workforce site USAJobs.gov, which still faces criticism years after the government brought it in-house from private company Monster.com. “We get constant complaints from people that can’t find any of their listings on USAJobs, or if you don’t know the secret keywords to be able to get to it, you can’t actually navigate it. How do we fix this?” the senator asked.

Cabaniss said the site is due for a “bottom-up review,” as well as more work to ensure that agencies are improving how they communicate with applicants once they’ve actually gotten their paperwork through to the other side.

“It’s something that we’ve really got to take a look at, because when my kids can apply for a job on their phone and get an answer within … a matter of hours … I don’t know how we compete against that,” Cabaniss said.

Wooten nomination

The hearing also included consideration of Michael Wooten to be administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget. Many of his answers about improving federal acquisition processes pointed to the private sector — especially finding ways to leverage what industry is already doing. Like Cabaniss’ nomination, Wooten’s appeared to face little opposition from Democrats on the panel.

In the past, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology typically hasn’t been treated right in the federal government, said Wooten, whose long career in public service has included about a decade at the Defense Acquisition University, a Department of Defense agency that trains military personnel, civilian staff and contractors.

The government actively goes looking for those solutions, “but then we proceed to break the COTS solution and then try to retrofit it into the peculiar set of government policies or practices,” Wooten said. “That needs to end … we need to ask ourselves if we can retrofit the process instead of the product.”

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Joanie Newhart, associate administrator of acquisition workforce programs within OFPP, said Thursday at FedScoop’s 2019 IT Modernization Summit said that her office and the federal Chief Acquisition Officer Council are “focused on emerging technology and how can we use it in acquisition. We think it’s going to explode this year, so we want to get in front of it and use it wisely.”

While many federal agencies are still trying to grasp how they might use emerging technologies, like automation and artificial intelligence, to drive mission outcomes, many support offices, such as acquisition teams, are finding opportunities to automate burdensome and manual workloads with the novel tech.

“If you think about the acquisition space, it is ripe for emerging technology — robotics, artificial intelligence — because there is so many manual, repetitive, boring parts of the acquisitions process that this emerging technology can really help us with so that people who are highly trained…why use them for this repetitive manual stuff?” Newhart said. “Let’s use their talents where they can make more of an impact.”

She pointed to the Department of Health and Human Services as one agency leading the way in blockchain, AI and automating the contract writing process. “If a contracting officer is doing a contract and you know they’re very overloaded with their workload, and there’s so many rules and regulations,” Newhart said.

There are plenty more examples, she said, and OFPP — which is part of the Office of Management and Budget — is “just trying to find out where people are using it, how they’re using it and then helping other agencies who are not so forward-leaning dip their toe in it, just do something, try it.”

The same goes with helping contracting offices innovate around the acquisition process — really, though, it’s just a matter of identifying acquisition flexibilities and broadcasting them across the government to let contracting officers know they can use them.

“We’re trying to get them to understand there’s a lot of flexibility in the acquisition process,” Newhart said.

This plays into OFPP’s larger Acquisition Modernization Plan. “So our processes are complex and kind of outdated, I’ve got to say, so we’re trying to bring things from industry, good acquisition practices in industry, to government in a very thoughtful, transformative way,” she said. “And part of that whole effort, we’re also going to partner with Congress to try and have some … pilots of different flexibilities we can use as we buy this emerging technology, digital services … and see if we can speed up the acquisition process, how can we buy things better, how can we learn better.”

Ultimately, it signals a bit of a shift in how OFPP works with the federal acquisition community — driving change as a team, working hand in hand, rather than just issuing a directive.

“It used to be if we were trying to drive innovation, we would issue a policy. ‘You will innovate!'” Newhart said. “So now we’re more just trying to be helpful, to get agencies to try new things and also to share those ideas, the best practices, what worked, what didn’t work, across the enterprise so that more people will feel comfortable. It’s not a matter of just saying what the success is. People have to understand how to do it, what steps did people take to have an innovation outcome.”

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In heading the office, under the portfolio of the Office of Management and Budget, Wooten would essentially serve as the government’s chief acquisition officer. IT acquisition is a major element of the job, which is subject to Senate confirmation. Trump announced the nomination Wednesday.

Most recently, Wooten has served as senior adviser for acquisitions at the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office. Within Education, he also was acting assistant secretary and deputy assistant secretary for career, technical, and adult education. Prior to that, he was deputy chief procurement officer for the District of Columbia Government.

If Senate-confirmed, Wooten will be the first OFPP administrator to lead the office in an official capacity since the Obama administration. Anne Rung left the position in September 2016 to join Amazon, and since then, Lesley Field has filled the position in an acting capacity.

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