Charles Lyons-Burt
The General Services Administration is the not-so-secret beating heart of the government contracting community. It plays an instrumental role in determining the cadence and structure of how contracts are awarded through aspects like the Federal Acquisition Service and the GSA Schedule. These long-term contract offerings are a major enabler of maintaining and accelerating the technology pipeline to the government from private sector providers.
This pipeline is powered, especially in recent years, by GSA offshoots like the IT Modernization Centers of Excellence, which is a function of the agency’s Technology Transformation Services. It works with other departments across the federal government to evolve their IT architecture and bring in new innovative solutions from the private sector. Since its inception in 2018, CoE has partnered with NASA, the Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among others.
CoE will be a discussion point at GovCon Wire’s 2023 Government Technology and Acquisition Forum, which is happening tomorrow, May 23. The event will be hosted virtually and feature CoE Executive Director Jennifer Rostami as part of a panel discussion alongside other notable GSA executives. Register here to witness this informative discussion.
“The CoE is growing fast thanks to the positive impact and amazing energy our partner agencies have brought to our work. Now solid, mature and thriving, the CoE has expertise we will bring to future work with agencies providing public-facing digital services,” commented Rostami at the beginning of 2022.
Rostami and her team shape their approach to each individual agency’s outlook, activities and plans. Their efforts over the last five years have helped agencies like the Department of Agriculture save a reported more than $50 million. The collaboration also resulted in the streamlining and compounding of 15 online communication services.
The office combats data duplication and the team specializes in artificial intelligence, cloud migration, data analytics and customer experience. AI in particular has become a major focus for the group and they published an AI Guide for Government last year so that interested public sector parties could have a thorough explanatory document for AI implementation. The guide is broken into nine chapters such as “Cultivating Data and Technology” and “Solving business challenges with AI.”
Furthering its promotion of AI literacy and adoption, this year, CoE held the Applied AI Healthcare Challenge, which offered four $25,000 cash prizes to commercial companies that were able to demonstrate usages of AI that would have a beneficial impact on studies in mental health, addiction and the opioid epidemic, equity, supply chain and safety and cancer. The competition put out a call that encouraged submissions from minority-owned, small disadvantaged and service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses. Winners of the competition were decided in early May.
“This partnership with Challenge.gov is an exciting opportunity for organizations, ranging from startups to nonprofits, to share their innovative AI technologies with the federal government,” Rostami said.
To learn more about CoE’s technology-forward mission and the connections it makes between the public and private sectors, tune in TOMORROW for GovCon Wire’s 2023 Government Technology and Acquisition Forum. CoE’s Jennifer Rostami will be a panel discussion participant and her boss, GSA Deputy Director of Technology Transformation Services Mukunda Penugonde, will be delivering the keynote address, in addition to many other riveting speakers. You don’t want to miss this! Register here today.
