GSA will pilot awarding and managing Small Business Innovation Research Phase III contracts, hoping to broaden the program.

The Small Business Administration runs the SBIR program and offers three tiers of R&D funding for new technologies, the third tier of which focuses on helping bring viable solutions to market.

Federal agencies like the Department of Defense and others provide contract awards through the SBIR program to support potential technological solutions through phases of research & development. In Phase III, the program tests the commerciality of solutions and solicits funding from the private sector and the agency that offered the initial SBIR contract.

GSA believes by managing the Phase III awards, it can broaden the reach of those commercialized solutions through its wide range on contract vehicles.

The pilot will be managed by GSA’s Office of Assisted Acquisition Services and operated in its Great Lakes Region in collaboration with teams from the Federal Systems Integration and Management, or FEDSIM, program.

“Awarding SBIR Phase III contracts allows GSA to bring these cutting-edge solutions directly to our partner agencies,” said GSA Administrator Emily Murphy in a statement. “This is a great example of how GSA is improving the way federal agencies access and use technology to address complex problems.”

SBA Administrator Linda McMahon said in a statement that the collaboration would help both the public and private sectors by providing the government with insights to new innovative solutions and supporting competition in the market.

“The SBA looks forward to working with GSA to encourage the entrepreneurship and innovation associated with the SBIR program and continuing SBA’s efforts to impact the growth of our nation’s small businesses,” she said.

Murphy first teased the pilot program in March, saying that by leveraging GSA’s acquisition vehicles and experience, the SBIR Phase III awardees could have greater market access.

“Because by the time the product is in Phase 3 of the [SBIR] program, it’s hit a commercialization point,” she said. “So, it’s something that GSA has had experience with and gives us a pipeline to bring innovative technologies into our contract vehicles, as well as assisting agencies in getting their products and services quickly.”

The pilot is expected to run through September 2019.

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SBA hopes to make up to three awards to 8(a) small businesses on the multiple-award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract “to provide the SBA’s OCIO with technical professional services to support the Chief Information Officer (CIO)’s strategic planning and engineering efforts for FY 2018-2022, architecture and engineering expertise in the implementation of CIO initiatives and technologies, and other support as may be required for mission accomplishment.”

While the contract would give the SBA OCIO — currently led by Maria Roat — broad help to achieve the objectives laid out for it in the agency’s strategic five-year plan, the request for proposals specifically keys in on things like architecture and engineering services for cloud, cybersecurity and mobility, as well as program management, enterprise data management and business intelligence services, among others.

SBA already has its first task order ready, which it plans to award at the same time as the IDIQ contract spots, for cloud migration and data center closures.

“The Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) is seeking Professional Services and support to the CIO’s strategic initiatives in evaluating, assessing, architecting, engineering and providing operational support for the continued development and implementation of SBA’s cloud environments (Azure and Amazon Web Services),” the task order says. “The services will also include providing technical support to the SBA’s Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) to close existing physical data centers and migrating those locations to the SBA cloud.”

SBA will consider responses to that first task order as part of its evaluation process for spots on the greater IDIQ contract.

The contract will have one base year and four one-year options. Proposals are due July 31.

SBA Administrator Linda McMahon tasked the OCIO in her 2018-22 strategic plan with implementing enterprisewide IT modernization and “cost-effective technology” to strengthen SBA’s ability to serve small businesses.

As the plan says: “The SBA will take an enterprise approach to modernize, innovate, and test new capabilities to optimize meeting the business needs of its customers. SBA’s information technology infrastructure is the foundation that enables SBA programs and operations. Delivering a consistent, reliable, and secure infrastructure is imperative to achieving this mission. The SBA will upgrade its core infrastructure to become current with existing technologies, and will improve the reliability and availability of services that will help improve the Agency’s security posture.”

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All things considered, the National Small Business Week hackathon, a partnership between the Small Business Administration and the credit card company Visa, “worked out really well,” G. Nagesh Rao, of SBA, told FedScoop.

Top ideas that stood out from the April 27-29 event included an integration for the popular office messaging software Slack that manages small businesses’ invoices and payments (this one won the $10,000 grand prize); a business intelligence solution that drew on a whole host of Visa and SBA APIs; an app that would allow small businesses to connect with social media influencers for marketing purposes; and a chatbot project that would allow users to get pertinent small business support information from the SBA via the Amazon Alexa.

SBA CIO Maria Roat served as a judge, and agency Administrator Linda McMahon even showed up to give out the prizes. “She was like ‘Wow… this is really ingenious. We need to be doing more of this,'” Rao said, of McMahon’s experience.

The event was a first “in a long time” for SBA, Rao said. But it left a positive mark — the agency is “very interested” in building off the momentum and being part of similar hackathons moving forward.

BeMyApp, the company that facilitated the event, has run “hundreds” of hackathons over its eight years in business but few, if any, with a U.S. government partner. “It was really cool,” project manager Patrick Medina told FedScoop. “This event helped people kind of re-think the way that the government is trying to help small businesses.”

“There’s real substance here,” Rao reflected. “Let’s build off this. Let’s not just do it because it looks cool — yeah, that’s an added benefit it’s cool and fun — but there’s actual tangible benefit here to crowdsource better ideas and better data solutions and help us convey the information better. This is all part of the demystification and democratization of information from the federal government.”

One key element of the weekend’s value to SBA, Rao said, was seeing which available agency open datasets interest developers and, on the flip side, what data developers would like but perhaps can’t get. This will help inform the agency’s data management decisions moving forward, he suggested.

And the SBA wasn’t the only federal data owner present — members of the code.gov and data.gov teams also showed up to mentor hackathon participants and introduce them to the available federal open datasets. Medina told FedScoop that the federal teams took a “very involved approach” in helping out.

“It was just a lot of fun,” Rao said. “It was a nice way to kick off National Small Business Week.”

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