We are in a period of change and disruption in the federal IT arena. Agencies are changing how they are consuming and investing in IT and growth in federal IT spending has flattened. I like to say that flat is the new “up.”
We are in a much more competitive environment of fewer new starts and/or new initiatives to compete for, so we need to hold onto business and take business away from other people. In terms of spending, agencies are addressing it in two ways. Overall spending is largely flat, but if you look underneath the overall trends, there are some departments and agencies experiencing considerable growth. Sectors like cyber security and cloud are experiencing great growth, so you have to look a little deeper into those arenas. You also have to compete in an environment in which agencies are moving away from full and open competitive contracts and increasingly using government-wide acquisition contracts (GWACs), multiple-award contracts (MACs) and GSA schedule vehicles to acquire technology products and services. Using GWACs and MACs, they can accelerate the acquisition cycle by buying off a pre-competed, pre-awarded list that has limited competition and a much smaller number of eligible vendors.
During the upcoming Comstor Federal Executive Summit, I will be addressing these topics along with the area of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) services and convergence. The confluence of these events could have a dramatic impact on the federal IT market. For example, convergence is a reality. In an environment of tightened spending, it takes on different models. Cloud is not only a technology, but it is a different business model that moves you away from owning your own infrastructure to letting others own it and letting an agency buy it “by the drink.”
Another huge disruptor that will profoundly affect agencies is the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) or Internet of Everything (IoE), as Cisco refers to it. There is a lot of hype around it, but the sector has not come to grips with privacy and security. If you are in financial or healthcare, privacy and security have been at the forefront for years, and companies in those industries have already taken steps to make sure they can protect privacy of customers, as well as heighten security and resilience. Once you start talking about IoE in terms of smart cars and smart appliances, however, none of those industries has had that same awareness and concerns.
We have found that if you cannot come to the table with a solution that includes how you plan to address security and privacy, you might as well not come to the table at all. Security and privacy are the first issues raised by government executives when it comes to IoE. They will tell you, “You want to connect everything up before you have privacy and security in place, and I am not willing to go down this path until there are solutions in place.”
At the 6th Annual Comstor Federal Executive Summit, I’ll be hosting a panel that delves into these disruptive technologies further and the impact they will have on the federal IT market. Joining me will be three of the top minds in the federal IT and acquisition arena:
• Dave McClure, Chief Strategist, Veris Group, LLC, who works closely with federal and state agencies and has served as Associate Administrator of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies at the U.S. General Services Administration, as Managing VP of Government Research at Gartner and as VP at the Council for Excellence in Government.
• David M. Wennergren, Senior VP, Technology, Professional Services Council, who has served in the private sector as a Vice President at CACI International Inc., and prior to that, across the Department of Defense (DoD) and federal government, including DoD Assistant Deputy Chief Management Officer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Information Management, Integration and Technology/Deputy Chief Information Officer, Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer and Vice Chair of the U.S. Government’s Federal CIO Council.
• Jim Williams, President, Williams-Schambach, who has worked as a senior executive for over 18 years in several government departments and agencies. He was the Acting Administrator of GSA, first Federal Acquisition Commissioner at GSA, first Director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT Program, and headed up IRS’ Procurement organization and Program Management for IRS’s Modernization Program.
Learn more about Comstor’s Federal Summit, here. Stay tuned for a future post based on the panel discussion.
